Who I Am

ConnectDots

With the large increase in socialization using computer mediated communication tools, people are now making use of the "connectedness" that tools like email, text messaging, and online socially networked spaces afford them to stay in contact and interact with friends, family, co-workers, and everyone else in between. But although we have these opportunities to interact more often , we still lose touch with friends, suffer heartache from break-ups, and lose job opportunities from mismanaged interactions with professional contacts. This project is an effort to investigate whether the use of visual tools and what we know from social psychology can give people insight into how they make decisions around relationship communication and interaction.

What I Study

I have chosen to focus my current research effort on the phenomena of social decision making and the types of information navigation strategies that increase a person’s awareness of their decision making patterns and how these decisions affect the composition of their social network. Through a visualization tool that will display the interaction history gathered from online and offline data resources (email, IM, telephone, mail) I will display the interaction history of a person with the others within their data defined social network over a period of time. Through this visualization a person would be able to see, within this vast amount of interaction information, the types of media they have a tendency to focus their communication through, the degree of social distance that they have between network contacts of differing subgroups, and how their interaction with network contacts compares to the inter-network interaction between those that are in the network.

Through the investigation of their interaction patterns, I will analyze the differences between a person’s perceived interaction practices and their actual data defined practices. From this analysis I hope to gain insight into whether this awareness would change a person’s decision making practices in reference to the management and growth of one’s social network and that the continuation of the monitoring of such information increases a person’s ability to understand their choices and be more satisfied with them and the outcome of their networks.



What I've done

EDUCATION

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, Evanston, IL
McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science
Ph.D. in Computer Science 2005 - 2010
Advisor: Bruce Gooch

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, Evanston, IL
McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science
M.S. in Computer Science 2002 – 2005
Advisor: Brian Dennis

SPELMAN COLLEGE, Atlanta, GA
B.S. in Computer Science 1998 – 2002
Advisor: Andrea Lawrence

RESEARCH EXPERIENCE

NSF CIFellow Post-Doctoral Researcher (9/2009 – Present)
Clemson University School of Computing (HCC Division), Clemson, SC
Graduate Research Assistant (9/2002 – 8/2009)
Northwestern University Computer Science Department Evanston, IL
Graduate Assistant (9/2005 – 9/2006)
Northwestern University AGEP Graduate Program Evanston, IL
Research Intern (6/2005 – 9/2005)
International Business Machines Corporation San Jose, CA
Research Intern (6/2004 – 9/2004)
International Business Machines Corporation San Jose, CA
Research Intern (6/2001 - 8/2001)
Boston University Computational Sciences Boston, MA

PUBLICATIONS

Morrison, D., Alnizami, H., Dawkins, S., Eugene, W., Martin, A., Moses, M. and Gilbert, J.E. (2010)
Supporting License Plate Queries for First Responders Using the VoiceLETS System.
ACM Southeast Conference, Oxford, MS, April 15-17, 2010.
Yolanda Rankin, Deidra Morrison, McKenzie McNeal, Bruce Gooch and Marcus Shute.
Time Will Tell: In-Game Social Interactions That Facilitate Second Language Acquisition.
Conference proceedings for the 4th the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. April 2009
Deidra Morrison, Bruce Gooch.
ConnectDots: Visualizing Social Network Interaction for Improved Social Decision Making.
Online Communities and Social Computing , Second International Conference , OCSC 2007, Held as Part of HCI International 2007, Beijing , China , July 22- 27 , 2007, Proceedings . Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4564 Springer 2007, ISBN 978-3-540-73256-3
Deidra Morrison, Brian M. Dennis.
MetaLab: supporting social grounding and group task management in CSCL environments through social translucence.
Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference 2 00 5: 20 -2 2

PRESENTATIONS, SERVICE, and PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS

Co-Presenter at the 2009 Foundations of Digital Games Conference (Games and Learning Track)
Presenter at the 2007 HCI International Conference (Online Communities and INFORMATION - Social Computing Track)
Peer Reviewer for 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences Minitrack (Media Literacy: Reading and Writing Digital Forms)
Presenter at 2005 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing
Volunteer for the 2004 Grace Hopper Women in Computing Conference
Black Graduate Student Association – Webmaster (2004 - 2005)
Black Graduate Student Association – Administrative Coordinator (2003 -2004)
McCormick Meeting of Minority Graduate Students - Recruiter (2004 –Present)
Association of Computing Machinery of Women – ACMW Member
Attendee of the 2002 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing
Presenter at 2002 Tuskegee Undergraduate Science and Engineering Conference (USEC)
Poster Presenter at 2002 Association of Departments of Computer Information Sciences and Engineering at Minority Institutions (ADMI) Symposium

what i like that you might like

Vis Stuff

VisualComplexity
IEEE Visualization and Graphics Community
Many Eyes

Conferences

IDEA
VisWeek
CHI

Where you are

Welcome to my web identity... Well my University web identity. I don't think there's much difference between the two.... but I digress. I'm a computer nerd, a mom, and a wife. I'm an admitted fan of Spongebob Squarepants, any shoe with a heel higher than 3 inches, The Dresden Files, my Nikon D40, the teachers at my son's day care, almost any performance of Shakespear's MacBeth, and those G-Men (I became a fan by marriage).

I survived the gauntlet of Spelman College's Computer Science department in Atlanta, GA, and completed my Ph.D in the EECS department at Northwestern University. I am currently working as a Post-Doc in the Clemson University School of Computing in the HCC Division. I am a member of the Human Centered Computing Lab there.

I'm very into understanding people, and what motivates them to be social. How they socialize, what inspires the social behaviors found on facebook, or why people spread bread crumbs of their personal activity around the web in communities like twitter, or what personality traits make a person a great mafia don but a less than a stellar vampire coven leader. I am currently researching how people make decisions about how they maintain their social network relationships, and if what we've learned from social psychology research can help us to find the connections between the how's, where's and why's of our online social experiences.