I’m Dana Rotman, a PhD candidate at the College of Information Studies, University of Maryland’s iSchool and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. I am mentored and advised by Prof. Jennifer Preece.
My research interests lie within the scope of human-computer interaction, and specifically at the intersection of social media, design and motivation. In my work I examine how interaction patterns are affected by users’ motivations, and the social tools that they are offered. I situate my current research in the developing practice of crowdsourcing scientific explorations through collaboration between scientists and citizen scientists. My research takes a mixed method approach (using ethnography. structural analysis and quantitative assessments), which allows me to uncover implicit motivational factors and align them with reported interaction patterns and with the products of collaborative work.
I take part in the Biotracker project, which incorporates online games, mobile missions and team and individual collections to to encourage science enthusiasts to gather biological data and help document a wide variety of species. Check out our project at www.biotrackers.net.
You can also see the slides for some of the talks I gave on SlideShare.
I have a Masters degree in Library and Information Science from Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and a Bachelor’s Law degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. In my previous life I was a litigation attorney and an information analyst.
You can email me at drotman [at] umd [dot] edu, or find me on Twitter at danarotman.