My name is Alan Clark. I’m a Ph.D. Student in the Media, Technology & Society program in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. I am advised by Dr. Darren Gergle. I am a member of the CollabLab.
Broadly speaking, I study collaboration and technology with a focus on the factors that support interpersonal coordination at both micro- and group-levels. I try to approach my research from a perspective combining Communication theory and HCI. Right now, I’m primarily working on two projects.
With my advisor Darren Gergle in the CollabLab and as part of my NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, I’m using a dual mobile eye-tracking system to study how gaze coordination, positioning, and other conversational dynamics affect and how they coordinate their attention and language use – specifically, how they refer to objects in their shared space. Importantly, we’ve found that the language use and gaze coordination of mobile pairs should is quite different than that of stationary/seated pairs, and that collaborative systems or AI that take language into account needs to treat these spatial interaction contexts differently. I’m currently working on ways to use real-time gaze towards objects in space (as opposed to on a computer screen) as a useful form of input in collaborative communication technology.
With my Northwestern colleagues William Barley and Paul Leonardi, I’m working on a project focusing on theory about why individuals adopting a new technology might adopt highly varied initial uses, and how communication processes can explain why initially divergent communication processes might converge toward common understanding and practices over time and repeated use. Going forward, I plan to do both field observations and “live lab” experiments to look at how communication processes that can lead to common technology practices are affected by the affordances and design of a newly introduced technology.
My other research interests include social dimensions and communicative uses of augmented reality, developing experimental methods for studying language and conversation in naturalistic interactions, and studying the role of shared visual contexts in communication.
