Research Nexus

As thoroughly explained in the About Section the Facebook Project is an on-going expansive research project dedicated to documenting, understanding, and utilizing the Social Network Service (SNS) Facebook.com. Our work here is primarily academic - an endeavor to understand an important social forces in operation behind what many would allege is a potential paradigm shift in the internet. Beyond this we do examine and discover ways Facebook might be applied as a tool - towards education, activism, librarianship or other worthy ends. Our methodology aspires to be both multi-method as well as multi-disciplinary.

One should be careful to note that this project is not a critique of the rather famous SNS website. In fact, too much attention has been given to the site regarding privacy and fear and very little to the full array of social aspects and impacts. Indeed Facebook deserves praise for its rather revolutionary role in the shaping of modern communication and internet use.

Read more about the project

Current Collaborative Projects

Right now we have a few collaborative wiki projects underway. Read about them below:

Facebook Features Index

Since Facebook is in continual flux and now has a whole throng of applications it would be great to keep track of and catalog them. We've started off this section with the basics and everyone can go from there. Explanations of the features should involve more than just the mechanics and parameters of the item, but also the different uses people have found for it!

Facebook Reference Pool

The reference pool has been opened up once again to wiki format, allowing for a better spread of sources. Please feel free to add to the list!

Quick Facts on Facebook

This page includes a gathering of remarkable facts and information you might have never known about Facebook.com! Please take a look and pitch in to ensure the information presented is both accurate and up to date.

Primary Contributors and Reseachers

The Facebook Project has several primary contibuters. Find out more about who they are and what they do below:

Jeff Ginger

Jeff Ginger is a second year graduate student studying sociology and library & information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He attended UIUC for his undergraduate career as well where he fostered his love for sociology and hatred for computer science. He comes from a Science and Technology Studies (STS) disciplinary background (the insurgents of soc really), a hefty helping of race/ethnicity studies (with intergroup dialogue too!), and is perhaps most famous for his research on Facebook.com. His current studies revolve around social & community informatics, battling the digital divide, and human-computer interactions (HCI) and his ultimate PhD work will be some blend of the three.

Jenny Ryan

Jenny recently completed her MA in anthropology at Wesleyan University, where she conducted ethnographic research on the online social networking sites MySpace, Facebook, and Tribe.net. Currently, she is interning as a research assistant for danah boyd / the Digital Natives Project through the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, investigating the issue of pro-self harm websites [eg; pro-eating disorder, pro-cutting, pro-suicide]. Other current projects include research on the way members of the psytrance subculture utilize Tribe.net to facilitate local scenes and a global underground web, as well as exploring new ways of storycrafting at the dawn of the cyberculture.

Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch

Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch is a 3rd year Ph.D. student in Mass Communications at Penn State University, in the area of Media Effects. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Portland State University in 2005, and now applies this psychology background to her media studies. Her area of research is in what can be tentatively called "new" media, or more appropriately "interactive" media, such as the Internet, video games, mediated collaborative spaces, and virtual reality. Her focus is on the social and psychological factors of these media in which users are also creators (e.g. on sites such as Youtube, Digg, Flickr). Recent work with colleagues has explored how Facebook can be used (or misused) for social support and how other website users affect e-commerce decisions.

Eric Gilbert

Eric Gilbert is a Computer Science Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois. He works in Human-Computer Interaction because, in general, he likes people more than he likes computers. Eric recently completed a project examining differences between rural and urban MySpace users. He took a quantitative approach and found the following: rural users have much smaller networks much closer to home, rural users value privacy more and women represent a much greater proportion of rural users.

Research Abroad

Many individuals are looking into the impacts of SNS in different countries abroad. Check out the following:

TBA, awaiting material from two researchers.

Undergraduate Paper Collection

Since Facebook is relatively new (and is a topic of great interest to many undergradutes) some of the most cutting-edge research is being conducted by young people who've grown up with it. This section contains papers writen by undergraduates on the subject of Facebook and/or SNS.

See what the youth have to say

Ethics

As researchers at the University of Illinois and other reputable universities we of course abide by the ethics and appropriate principles of research set down by Institutional Review Boards (like this one) and have received approval for all formal human subjects research. The works posted conducted by undergraduate students should not be considered formal publications or aspects of the Facebook project itself. They are instead offered as a resources and idea-accumulation ground.