University of Southern California

USC Network Culture Project

USC Annenberg School for Communication

Susana Smith Bautista   |  more Research Assistant

Susana Smith Bautista is an art historian with a specialization in modern and contemporary Latin American art. Currently a Ph.D. student and Provost Fellow at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California (USC), she received her Masters degree in Art History/ Museum Studies with honors also from USC, and her Bachelors degree from Pomona College. Her current research focuses on the role of museums in the digital age, how new technologies affect traditional museum practices, how museums incorporate narratives, and the global interplay between museums, private arts institutions and governmental bodies.

Susana has over fifteen years experience in the art world in Los Angeles, New York, and Europe. This includes working with museums, commercial galleries and non-profit art spaces, curating art exhibitions, writing books, art criticism and articles for magazines and catalogs, and presenting at conferences and symposia. She was Executive Director of the Mexican Cultural Institute of Los Angeles, Editorial Director of www.LatinArt.com, and Associate with the Daniel Saxon Gallery in West Hollywood. Susana also served the city of Pasadena as Arts and Culture Commissioner for six years, and is fluent in Spanish and Modern Greek.

Preeti Bhatevara  |  more Website Manager

Preeti Bhatevara is pursuing her Masters in Computer Science at Viterbi School of Engineering,USC.She earned her Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering from North Maharashtra University Jalgaon, India in 2006. Preeti has worked on different projects in the field of web technology .She has good tecnical base and ability to analyze things.Preeti is involved in managing the budget related stuff of the virtual world project as well as the Network Culture Project Website.

John Cheney  |  more Research Assistant

John Cheney graduated from American University with a B.A. in both Political Science and International Relations. John is interested in the social and political uses of communication technologies within crisis and post-crisis environments. He is also interested in the intersection of commerce and new media, focusing on Web 2.0 and other forms of user-generated content as they relate to the political economy of information.

Jae Eun Chung  |  more

Jae Eun is a doctoral student at the USC Annenberg School. Before coming to USC, she studied at Indiana University with a focus on Media Economics and worked for IBM. She is interested in the interaction between economic, social, legal, political and technological aspects of new communication technology.

Deborah Fields  |  more Research Assistant

Deborah Fields is a doctoral student at UCLA in Psychological Studies in Education. She has studied and worked in many areas of informal learning: science camps, after school technology clubs, religious communities, and virtual worlds. A theme across her work is an interest in identity – who people are in different situations and the resources they draw on to become recognized in certain ways. Over the past two years she has spent innumerable hours in Whyville, a virtual world for tweens, studying avatar design, race, collaboration across spaces, cheat sites, and tweens’ minute-by-minute activities and changing participation in the virtual world. In the process she has become and established, wealthy citizen on Whyville and paid off her loan for an exclusive Whyville car.

Michael Giang  |  more Research Assistant

Michael T. Giang is a doctoral student in the Psychological Studies in Education program at UCLA. His research focuses on adolescent acculturation, peer harassment, and identifying Internet characteristics related to ethnic identity development.

Shawna Kelly  |  more Research Assistant

Shawna Kelly has studied communication, linguistics, and history and her professional experience includes implementing information-sharing technologies in small businesses, and exploring the software-development process with a one-product software company. This background ties in well with her research interests which center on the interactions between new technologies, communication and culture. Shawna is currently studying at the USC Annenberg School for Communication where some of her projects include exploring the potential for philanthropy in virtual worlds, the meaning of citizenship in these worlds, and the social impacts of relationships developed through new media, with a focus on video games. She is currently the Managing Editor of Games & Culture.

Maura Klosterman  |  more Research Assistant

Maura Klosterman is a doctoral student in Communication at Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on intersections between technologies and music-based cultures. She has been conducting a participant observation and interview project about amateur beat-makers and is beginning work on a dissertation on college radio and independent music distribution in the 1990s. Maura has been part of the research team for the MacArthur funded project "Inspiring the Technological Imagination: The Future of Museums and Libraries in a Digital Age" (2008-2009). Prior to beginning the doctoral program, Maura worked for Los Angeles public radio stations KXLU and KPCC as well as educational institutions like the Culver City Unified School District and the French National Ministry of Education. She has been on staff at USC’s student run radio station KSCR since her arrival at USC and hosts a weekly radio program, “Tuesdays with Maura”.

Matthew Lee  |  more Virtual World Island Manager

Matthew Lee Honors in Multimedia Scholarship Institute for Multimedia Literacy Matthew Lee's work includes a multimedia investigation on the history of music technology, audio work on "Cante Florezca!" (a game in which a player nurtures a flowering plant to create a musical score), and various documentaries as part of the IML Honors program. His interest in virtual worlds and game spaces stem from their liminal aspect as places both of fantasy and reality, singularity and liminality. Indeed, if "all the world's a stage", then what is a virtual world? This prompted Lee's expansion into Second Life (an Internet based virtual world), exploring the possibilities for combining traditional design with new elements in the online social platform. As the avatar Saliant Infinity, Lee has worked on projects including SL Relay to Life, Gone Gitmo, and a spacial visualization of Shakespeare's "The Tempest", in addition to serving as an in-world designer for the Virtual Worlds project, responsible for building interactive environments and assisting with in-world event logistics.

Victoria Moran  |  more Virtual World Researcher

Victoria Moran is a USC MFA graduate from the School of Cinema Television's Interactive Media Division. Victoria is interested in MMORPGs and the effect that online gaming has on relationships and culture. Victoria is currently researching social virtual worlds and is building the virtual world database. Victoria has also been the project's machinima expert, capturing and editing video of all of the virtual USC PD events.

Yujung Nam  |  more Research Assistant

Yujung is an Annenberg fellow at USC communication doctoral program. Building on her previous training in new media and performance studies particularly in the context of new communication technologies and global diaspora she continues her study of the impact of the transformation of media environment on communication and culture. Current projects include; building a sustainable community through online journalism and exploring media portrayal of Black and Latino relationship in the wake of surge in Los Angeles gang violence. She is also part of a research project that takes a mobile social networking approach to a cancer survivorship intervention for young adults from the low-income, non-English speaking populations.

As a research assistant at USC Institute for Network Culture, Yujung is also investigating new metrics for analyzing and assessing virtual interactions, community building and identity negotiation in new media culture in conjunction with concepts of philanthropy, social and political activism and civic engagement. In her recent study of visual representation of user-produced avatar and its interactions in Second Life, she examined active negotiation of the meaning of gender and racial identity through identity performance. She also investigates how online players in Whyville approach issues of reproductive health in their virtual interactions and community activities. Before joining the graduate program, she worked as a knowledge management system programmer at Samsung SDS.

Nina O’Brien   |  more Research Assistant

Nina O’Brien graduated from Syracuse University with a Bachelors in Communications and Textual Studies, and received her Masters Degree in Media Ecology from New York University’s Department of Culture and Communication. She is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa and Golden Key National honor societies. Nina’s current research focuses on labor networks and relations in communication and entertainment industries. Before beginning graduate work at USC’s Annenberg School, Nina worked in independent film production, as a full-time substitute instructor in the Department of Media Culture at the CUNY College of Staten Island, and as an adjunct professor in the Department of Communication Arts at Marymount Manhattan College, both in New York

Robby Ratan  |  more

Robby Ratan came to USC Annenberg after six years at Stanford University, where he received a B.A. with honors in Science, Technology and Society and an M.A. in Communication with a focus in Human Computer Interaction, and worked as a research assistant at Stanford's Communication between Humans and Interactive Media (CHIMe) Lab and the Toyota Info Technology Center in Palo Alto. His research interests are primarily focused on the psychology of advanced media interfaces and virtual worlds. He has designed and run numerous experimental studies to test the psychological implications of various technologies, including the Nintendo Wii, immersive virtual reality environments, driving simulators, and automated voice interfaces. At Annenberg, Robby is continuing this type of research while also exploring related areas, such as the sociological implications of online communities, especially virtual worlds such as MMORPGS and Second Life. He is interested in developing theories relating to virtual self-presentation, identity management, social and self-presence, choice, and attention/multi-tasking.

Kristin Searle  |  more Research Assistant

Kristin Searle is a dual-degree doctoral student in the Teaching, Learning, and Curriculum program at the Graduate School of Education and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She has studied and worked in a number of formal and informal learning contexts, including the American Indian Teacher Training Program and the Upward Bound Bridge/Jumpstart program, both at the University of Utah. More recently, she has begun to explore the use of digital video as both a medium of teaching and learning and as a tool of educational research.During the summer of 2007, Kristin co-produced a documentary about the Freedom School program operating at Shaw Middle School in Southwest Philadelphia and she is currently involved in the production of several documentary film pieces in conjunction with the Center for Native American Studies and the “Living Lenape” exhibit scheduled to open at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in September 2008. Throughout her work, Kristin is interested in how identities are produced and negotiated in educational contexts and beyond. Her master’s thesis research focused on the role ontological and epistemological tensions in American Indian graduate students’ constructions of self within the context of a school counseling program.

Cara Wallis  |  more Research Assistant

Cara Wallis recently completed her Ph.D. at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include the social and cultural implications of new communication technologies, particularly among youth populations often considered left out of the “network society.” Cara spent the 2006-07 academic year as a visiting scholar in the Institute for Journalism and Communication at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. While in Beijing she conducted fieldwork for her dissertation, “Technomobility in the Margins: Mobile Phones and Young Rural Women in Beijing,” which explores how young rural-to-urban migrant women working in the low-level service sector in Beijing use mobile phones for identity construction, social networking, and individual agency. Her work for the DMLstudio involves a literature review of various uses of new media in China.

Matthew Weber  |  more Research Assistant

Matthew Weber is focused on the evolution of organizational structures and the interplay between structuration and technology. His primary interest within this area is the emergence, growth and eventual decline of individual online communities, as well as the changing business practices that result from the collision of brands and communities. Methodologically, Matthew is working to advance network theory in the area of graph modeling and to develop techniques for managing large-scale data analysis. He has recently given lectures and presentations on the evolution of the newspaper industry and the business of media. He is a member of the Phi Beta Tau Journalism Honors Society, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Institute of Industrial Engineers. Previously, he worked as a media strategist for Starcom Worldwide and as an assistant brand manager for Tribune Corp., where he launched multiple new media initiatives. Matthew earned a B.S . in Industrial Engineering and Economics from Northwestern University, and received an M.S. in Journalism and Media Management at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.