NONPROFIT ORGUS POSTAGE PAIDPERMIT No. 10COLLEGE PARK, MDOffice of the Vice President for Research

2133 Lee BuildingUniversity of MarylandCollege Park, MD 20742-5121Evaluating Trust Online

People are communicating as easily through social media as with

their cell phone, but how do the messaging nuances heard in

someone’s voice transfer to a status update on Facebook?

Jennifer Golbeck, an assistant professor in the iSchool and one of the

first researchers in the United States to analyze online social networks, is

seeking to answer that question. Trained in computer science, Golbeck builds

algorithms that can estimate levels of trust relationships in social media.

“Trusted information is a powerful source of information,” says

Golbeck. “If you can determine the level of user trust, it allows indi-

viduals—or government agencies and private organizations—to make

specific choices based on that data.”

This can help validate consumer-driven choices like a positive movie

review or product recommendations, and might also be used to assess

the level of user trust in secure communications between members of

the U.S. intelligence community, Golbeck says.

Golbeck is also researching how trust in social networks might

support decision makers in military combat situations. She is building

computational models that determine how much trust a commander

could have in battlefield reports that are contradictory or uncertain,

and how these reports can be annotated and sorted to help the

military better process the information. m

impact profiles

LESLIE WALKER

UM Fellows Use New Media Tools to Define New Voters

Exploring new media Preserving electronic art Mining online dataMaryland researchers are shaping the digital future

research & education spotlight

Doug Reside uses the same care and

meticulous scholarship to preserve dig-

itally created art as other scholars do in

archiving handwritten drafts of literary,

artistic or musical masterpieces.

The assistant director of the

Maryland Institute for Technology

in the Humanities, or MITH, Reside

researches how digital technologies

are changing the creation of American

musical theater.

He is working with the Library of

Congress to preserve the digital files

of the Tony Award-winning musical

“Rent,” which the family of late com-

poser and playwright Jonathan Larson

willed to the federal institution.

In addition to hard-copy drafts of

“Rent,” Reside is reviewing the almost

150 floppy disks that contained earlier

versions of the musical before its 1996

Broadway premiere. Also included

in the archived material are specific

sound effects that Larson created us-

ing now-obsolete technologies.

“We feel it important that the

original files need to be preserved in

the way they were conceived,” says

Reside, who has degrees in English

and computer science. m

Timeless Art, No Matter the Medium

Impact is published by the Office of the Vice President for Research and is mailed to members of the mid-Atlantic research community and others who have an inter-est in the latest research at the University of Maryland.

Your comments and feedback are welcome; please e-mail your comments to vpr@umd.edu or fax them to Anne Geroni-mo, executive editor, at 301.314.9569.

If for any reason you would not like to receive this publication, contact us using the same information above.

PUBLISHER

Mel BernsteinVice President for Research

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Anne GeronimoDirector for Research Development

MANAGING EDITOR

Tom Ventsias

CREATIVE DIRECTOR AND PHOTOGRAPHER

John T. Consoli

ART DIRECTOR

Jeanette J. Nelson

Cover and feature art include the following digital works:

Paradise City by Martin Muir; The End, Way Back and

Fall by Airi Pung; Between this year and next, by Paul

S. Dixon; Lego Marmelade2 by Johannes Wessmark;

Daydream Believer by Shanina Conway; and Cloud Chair

by Richard Hutten.

The 2008 presidential election was historic in

many ways, not the least of which was the surge

of interest and involvement from young and

minority voters. A team of 12 journalism fellows

(pictured above) spent this summer studying

these emerging political voices to gain insight

into how they are influencing American voting

behavior and attitudes.

The fellowships were part of News21, a

national journalism program sponsored in part

by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

A key part of the project was incorporating new

technologies—including a talking bar chart and

a video player that blends linear and nonlinear

storytelling—into the reporting process, says

adviser Leslie Walker, the Knight Visiting Pro-

fessor in Digital Innovation.

“In the face of the Internet and disruptive

change, the news media must innovate if they

are to survive,” Walker says. “And I believe

the change agents who will reinvent news and

preserve the values of journalism are young

journalists like our News21 fellows.”

Before joining the Merrill College, Walker was

a longtime reporter and columnist who spent

more than a decade covering the digital media

for The Washington Post. To view the project, go

to www.thenewvoters.com. m

IMPACT Vol. 4 No. 2 | Fall 2009

impactoverview

LOCATIONThe university’s location just outside of Washington, D.C., offers a trove of resources for Maryland fac-ulty, students and visiting scholars. These include the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the National Press Club and the National Science Foundation, as well as scores of other agencies, think tanks and nonprofits that assess and develop the nation’s digital future. m

KNIGHT HALLThe $30 million John S. and James L. Knight Hall, the new home for the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, is set to open in January 2010. The building (shown below in an artist’s rendering) will be transparent and open—reflecting the goals of good journalism—and a high-tech training ground for a new era in the industry. It will feature several multimedia labs, including one that will allow graduate students to explore, design and test new-media concepts for reporting and delivering news. “Innova-tion in journalism must include developing, testing and using new storytelling techniques that keep audiences engaged,” says Assistant Professor Ronald Yaros, who helped design the lab.

In its classrooms, faculty like Associate Professor Ira Chinoy will help students learn to seek and use public records that exist in digital form, but are unavailable on the Internet. Though the law deems government records “public” unless they are subject to specific exemptions, students approaching state, county or local agencies often meet resistance when requesting records in database form, says Chinoy. “We spend a lot of time trying to understand the motivations for denial of access. These can include all sorts of fears, some of which stem from a lack of understanding of the ease with which these databases might be copied in digital form,” he says. “Understanding this resistance is a big step in changing the dynamics.” m

CLOUD COMPUTING CENTERThe Cloud Computing Center is an interdisciplinary project with faculty researchers from the iSchool, computer science and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. With funding from Google, IBM, Amazon and the National Science Foundation, the research focuses on interconnecting banks of computers worldwide that can process and search through very large volumes of data.

One project is developing technologies for building a scalable and reliable infrastructure for the long-term access and preservation of digital assets. Another project tackles the problem of

making information available on a global scale across the world’s languages, using the richly linked structure of Wikipedia to help improve automatic language translation.

“Cloud computing represents a potential paradigm shift, and the center hopes to cement the university’s leadership position in this emerging field,” says Jimmy

Lin, associate professor in the iSchool and director of the center. m

impactoverview research, scholarship

& the digital future01011001 ou needn’t look far to catch a glimpse of

America’s digital future: The New York Times is transmitting breaking news via

140-character “tweets,” President Obama

is using Facebook to inform the nation of his health-

care agenda, and the Smithsonian Institution plans to

put its entire 137 million-object collection online.

Technology, through online media, wireless Internet,

social networking and the creation of digital art and

literature, is changing who we are and how we live.

Faculty and students at the University of Maryland

are exploring these new media tools, examining how

people interact online and fostering digital creativ-

ity to address the most relevant questions regarding

information and society.

In the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, the topic

is not only timely, but urgent, as people increasingly

get their news online and traditional media have had

to rethink how they do business. New media tools

empower news consumers as well as journalists, says

Dean Kevin Klose. His school is putting a new emphasis

on the burgeoning, Web-centered fields of “entrepre-

neurial journalism,” in which journalists focus on their

passion and independently market their work to fill a

niche, as well as “participatory journalism,” in which

the public actively collects, reports, analyzes and

disseminates news and information.

Highly skilled journalists will remain in demand,

as a free society depends upon an informed popu-

lace, Klose says. “We’ll see the workforce at many

newspapers dispersed from a centralized location,”

he says. “We need to train students what that means

for them—they’re going to have to be much more

self-sufficient.”

Humans and TechnologyIn the College of Information Studies, Maryland’s

iSchool, faculty aren’t just teaching students how to

interact in a changing digital world. They’re study-

ing that interaction, even as technology evolves

at a dizzying pace. “It’s always been the case that

technology runs far ahead of the research analyzing

the social implications of that technology,” says Dean

Jenny Preece.

Professor John Bertot is principal investigator on

a project to determine the role that public libraries

might play in a national emergency. The iSchool’s

Center for Library and Information Innovation, which

Bertot directs, has received $1 million from the

American Library Association and the Bill & Melinda

Gates Foundation for a national survey of public

library Internet connectivity.

The research expands upon data collection by

Bertot and Assistant Professor Paul Jaeger in 2005

after Hurricane Katrina delivered a devastating blow

to New Orleans. “We found that when people have lost

their homes, Internet access and personal computers,

they go to a public library to access trusted information

and services from government agencies like FEMA,”

Bertot says. “How people search for information in

an emergency, how they access services and how the

federal government can streamline e-government is

what we’re interested in.”

The iSchool offers training for information

specialists through graduate programs and profes-

sional development courses designed specifically for

government information experts. Maryland faculty

are also conducting groundbreaking research in data

management, storage, retrieval and analysis as well

as information policy, children’s use of technology,

online communities and social networks.

“The key issues we want to address are accessibil-

ity, usability and sociability. We want to learn how to

design technology to support people better and how

these new technologies impact and change society,”

says Preece.

MITHThe Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humani-

ties, or MITH, is the university’s primary intellectual

hub for scholars and practitioners of digital humani-

ties. Based in the College of Arts and Humanities,

MITH innovates with technology across creative,

scholarly and pedagogical disciplines, and recently

hosted an international conference on topics such as

how to preserve art, culture and records that were

created in a digital format. “We don’t yet know what

will become the lasting art forms of our time, but we

do know if we can’t save any of it, that nothing is going

to be there for the future,” says Director Neil Fraistat.

MITH will launch a two-year living and learn-

ing program in the digital humanities for Maryland

undergraduates next fall. Students will get involved in

activities including digital music and video production,

digital art, creative electronic writing, virtual worlds

and the development of software and online com-

munities. “There is a new generation of young people

today—we call them ‘digital natives’—who are writing

and designing new pieces in the humanities in an

entirely digital format,” says Matthew Kirschenbaum,

associate director of MITH, who will lead the new

program. “Up till now they didn’t have a specific

home. Now they will.”

To view the latest research

in Maryland’s iSchool, visit

www.ischool.umd.edu. For

more on journalism, go to

www.journalism.umd.edu;

for MITH, go to www.mith.

umd.edu.

impactoverview

LOCATIONThe university’s location just outside of Washington, D.C., offers a trove of resources for Maryland fac-ulty, students and visiting scholars. These include the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the National Press Club and the National Science Foundation, as well as scores of other agencies, think tanks and nonprofits that assess and develop the nation’s digital future. m

KNIGHT HALLThe $30 million John S. and James L. Knight Hall, the new home for the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, is set to open in January 2010. The building (shown below in an artist’s rendering) will be transparent and open—reflecting the goals of good journalism—and a high-tech training ground for a new era in the industry. It will feature several multimedia labs, including one that will allow graduate students to explore, design and test new-media concepts for reporting and delivering news. “Innova-tion in journalism must include developing, testing and using new storytelling techniques that keep audiences engaged,” says Assistant Professor Ronald Yaros, who helped design the lab.

In its classrooms, faculty like Associate Professor Ira Chinoy will help students learn to seek and use public records that exist in digital form, but are unavailable on the Internet. Though the law deems government records “public” unless they are subject to specific exemptions, students approaching state, county or local agencies often meet resistance when requesting records in database form, says Chinoy. “We spend a lot of time trying to understand the motivations for denial of access. These can include all sorts of fears, some of which stem from a lack of understanding of the ease with which these databases might be copied in digital form,” he says. “Understanding this resistance is a big step in changing the dynamics.” m

CLOUD COMPUTING CENTERThe Cloud Computing Center is an interdisciplinary project with faculty researchers from the iSchool, computer science and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. With funding from Google, IBM, Amazon and the National Science Foundation, the research focuses on interconnecting banks of computers worldwide that can process and search through very large volumes of data.

One project is developing technologies for building a scalable and reliable infrastructure for the long-term access and preservation of digital assets. Another project tackles the problem of

making information available on a global scale across the world’s languages, using the richly linked structure of Wikipedia to help improve automatic language translation.

“Cloud computing represents a potential paradigm shift, and the center hopes to cement the university’s leadership position in this emerging field,” says Jimmy

Lin, associate professor in the iSchool and director of the center. m

impactoverview research, scholarship

& the digital future01011001 ou needn’t look far to catch a glimpse of

America’s digital future: The New York Times is transmitting breaking news via

140-character “tweets,” President Obama

is using Facebook to inform the nation of his health-

care agenda, and the Smithsonian Institution plans to

put its entire 137 million-object collection online.

Technology, through online media, wireless Internet,

social networking and the creation of digital art and

literature, is changing who we are and how we live.

Faculty and students at the University of Maryland

are exploring these new media tools, examining how

people interact online and fostering digital creativ-

ity to address the most relevant questions regarding

information and society.

In the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, the topic

is not only timely, but urgent, as people increasingly

get their news online and traditional media have had

to rethink how they do business. New media tools

empower news consumers as well as journalists, says

Dean Kevin Klose. His school is putting a new emphasis

on the burgeoning, Web-centered fields of “entrepre-

neurial journalism,” in which journalists focus on their

passion and independently market their work to fill a

niche, as well as “participatory journalism,” in which

the public actively collects, reports, analyzes and

disseminates news and information.

Highly skilled journalists will remain in demand,

as a free society depends upon an informed popu-

lace, Klose says. “We’ll see the workforce at many

newspapers dispersed from a centralized location,”

he says. “We need to train students what that means

for them—they’re going to have to be much more

self-sufficient.”

Humans and TechnologyIn the College of Information Studies, Maryland’s

iSchool, faculty aren’t just teaching students how to

interact in a changing digital world. They’re study-

ing that interaction, even as technology evolves

at a dizzying pace. “It’s always been the case that

technology runs far ahead of the research analyzing

the social implications of that technology,” says Dean

Jenny Preece.

Professor John Bertot is principal investigator on

a project to determine the role that public libraries

might play in a national emergency. The iSchool’s

Center for Library and Information Innovation, which

Bertot directs, has received $1 million from the

American Library Association and the Bill & Melinda

Gates Foundation for a national survey of public

library Internet connectivity.

The research expands upon data collection by

Bertot and Assistant Professor Paul Jaeger in 2005

after Hurricane Katrina delivered a devastating blow

to New Orleans. “We found that when people have lost

their homes, Internet access and personal computers,

they go to a public library to access trusted information

and services from government agencies like FEMA,”

Bertot says. “How people search for information in

an emergency, how they access services and how the

federal government can streamline e-government is

what we’re interested in.”

The iSchool offers training for information

specialists through graduate programs and profes-

sional development courses designed specifically for

government information experts. Maryland faculty

are also conducting groundbreaking research in data

management, storage, retrieval and analysis as well

as information policy, children’s use of technology,

online communities and social networks.

“The key issues we want to address are accessibil-

ity, usability and sociability. We want to learn how to

design technology to support people better and how

these new technologies impact and change society,”

says Preece.

MITHThe Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humani-

ties, or MITH, is the university’s primary intellectual

hub for scholars and practitioners of digital humani-

ties. Based in the College of Arts and Humanities,

MITH innovates with technology across creative,

scholarly and pedagogical disciplines, and recently

hosted an international conference on topics such as

how to preserve art, culture and records that were

created in a digital format. “We don’t yet know what

will become the lasting art forms of our time, but we

do know if we can’t save any of it, that nothing is going

to be there for the future,” says Director Neil Fraistat.

MITH will launch a two-year living and learn-

ing program in the digital humanities for Maryland

undergraduates next fall. Students will get involved in

activities including digital music and video production,

digital art, creative electronic writing, virtual worlds

and the development of software and online com-

munities. “There is a new generation of young people

today—we call them ‘digital natives’—who are writing

and designing new pieces in the humanities in an

entirely digital format,” says Matthew Kirschenbaum,

associate director of MITH, who will lead the new

program. “Up till now they didn’t have a specific

home. Now they will.”

To view the latest research

in Maryland’s iSchool, visit

www.ischool.umd.edu. For

more on journalism, go to

www.journalism.umd.edu;

for MITH, go to www.mith.

umd.edu.

impactoverview

LOCATIONThe university’s location just outside of Washington, D.C., offers a trove of resources for Maryland fac-ulty, students and visiting scholars. These include the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the National Press Club and the National Science Foundation, as well as scores of other agencies, think tanks and nonprofits that assess and develop the nation’s digital future. m

KNIGHT HALLThe $30 million John S. and James L. Knight Hall, the new home for the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, is set to open in January 2010. The building (shown below in an artist’s rendering) will be transparent and open—reflecting the goals of good journalism—and a high-tech training ground for a new era in the industry. It will feature several multimedia labs, including one that will allow graduate students to explore, design and test new-media concepts for reporting and delivering news. “Innova-tion in journalism must include developing, testing and using new storytelling techniques that keep audiences engaged,” says Assistant Professor Ronald Yaros, who helped design the lab.

In its classrooms, faculty like Associate Professor Ira Chinoy will help students learn to seek and use public records that exist in digital form, but are unavailable on the Internet. Though the law deems government records “public” unless they are subject to specific exemptions, students approaching state, county or local agencies often meet resistance when requesting records in database form, says Chinoy. “We spend a lot of time trying to understand the motivations for denial of access. These can include all sorts of fears, some of which stem from a lack of understanding of the ease with which these databases might be copied in digital form,” he says. “Understanding this resistance is a big step in changing the dynamics.” m

CLOUD COMPUTING CENTERThe Cloud Computing Center is an interdisciplinary project with faculty researchers from the iSchool, computer science and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. With funding from Google, IBM, Amazon and the National Science Foundation, the research focuses on interconnecting banks of computers worldwide that can process and search through very large volumes of data.

One project is developing technologies for building a scalable and reliable infrastructure for the long-term access and preservation of digital assets. Another project tackles the problem of

making information available on a global scale across the world’s languages, using the richly linked structure of Wikipedia to help improve automatic language translation.

“Cloud computing represents a potential paradigm shift, and the center hopes to cement the university’s leadership position in this emerging field,” says Jimmy

Lin, associate professor in the iSchool and director of the center. m

impactoverview research, scholarship

& the digital future01011001 ou needn’t look far to catch a glimpse of

America’s digital future: The New York Times is transmitting breaking news via

140-character “tweets,” President Obama

is using Facebook to inform the nation of his health-

care agenda, and the Smithsonian Institution plans to

put its entire 137 million-object collection online.

Technology, through online media, wireless Internet,

social networking and the creation of digital art and

literature, is changing who we are and how we live.

Faculty and students at the University of Maryland

are exploring these new media tools, examining how

people interact online and fostering digital creativ-

ity to address the most relevant questions regarding

information and society.

In the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, the topic

is not only timely, but urgent, as people increasingly

get their news online and traditional media have had

to rethink how they do business. New media tools

empower news consumers as well as journalists, says

Dean Kevin Klose. His school is putting a new emphasis

on the burgeoning, Web-centered fields of “entrepre-

neurial journalism,” in which journalists focus on their

passion and independently market their work to fill a

niche, as well as “participatory journalism,” in which

the public actively collects, reports, analyzes and

disseminates news and information.

Highly skilled journalists will remain in demand,

as a free society depends upon an informed popu-

lace, Klose says. “We’ll see the workforce at many

newspapers dispersed from a centralized location,”

he says. “We need to train students what that means

for them—they’re going to have to be much more

self-sufficient.”

Humans and TechnologyIn the College of Information Studies, Maryland’s

iSchool, faculty aren’t just teaching students how to

interact in a changing digital world. They’re study-

ing that interaction, even as technology evolves

at a dizzying pace. “It’s always been the case that

technology runs far ahead of the research analyzing

the social implications of that technology,” says Dean

Jenny Preece.

Professor John Bertot is principal investigator on

a project to determine the role that public libraries

might play in a national emergency. The iSchool’s

Center for Library and Information Innovation, which

Bertot directs, has received $1 million from the

American Library Association and the Bill & Melinda

Gates Foundation for a national survey of public

library Internet connectivity.

The research expands upon data collection by

Bertot and Assistant Professor Paul Jaeger in 2005

after Hurricane Katrina delivered a devastating blow

to New Orleans. “We found that when people have lost

their homes, Internet access and personal computers,

they go to a public library to access trusted information

and services from government agencies like FEMA,”

Bertot says. “How people search for information in

an emergency, how they access services and how the

federal government can streamline e-government is

what we’re interested in.”

The iSchool offers training for information

specialists through graduate programs and profes-

sional development courses designed specifically for

government information experts. Maryland faculty

are also conducting groundbreaking research in data

management, storage, retrieval and analysis as well

as information policy, children’s use of technology,

online communities and social networks.

“The key issues we want to address are accessibil-

ity, usability and sociability. We want to learn how to

design technology to support people better and how

these new technologies impact and change society,”

says Preece.

MITHThe Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humani-

ties, or MITH, is the university’s primary intellectual

hub for scholars and practitioners of digital humani-

ties. Based in the College of Arts and Humanities,

MITH innovates with technology across creative,

scholarly and pedagogical disciplines, and recently

hosted an international conference on topics such as

how to preserve art, culture and records that were

created in a digital format. “We don’t yet know what

will become the lasting art forms of our time, but we

do know if we can’t save any of it, that nothing is going

to be there for the future,” says Director Neil Fraistat.

MITH will launch a two-year living and learn-

ing program in the digital humanities for Maryland

undergraduates next fall. Students will get involved in

activities including digital music and video production,

digital art, creative electronic writing, virtual worlds

and the development of software and online com-

munities. “There is a new generation of young people

today—we call them ‘digital natives’—who are writing

and designing new pieces in the humanities in an

entirely digital format,” says Matthew Kirschenbaum,

associate director of MITH, who will lead the new

program. “Up till now they didn’t have a specific

home. Now they will.”

To view the latest research

in Maryland’s iSchool, visit

www.ischool.umd.edu. For

more on journalism, go to

www.journalism.umd.edu;

for MITH, go to www.mith.

umd.edu.

NONPROFIT ORGUS POSTAGE PAIDPERMIT No. 10COLLEGE PARK, MDOffice of the Vice President for Research

2133 Lee BuildingUniversity of MarylandCollege Park, MD 20742-5121Evaluating Trust Online

People are communicating as easily through social media as with

their cell phone, but how do the messaging nuances heard in

someone’s voice transfer to a status update on Facebook?

Jennifer Golbeck, an assistant professor in the iSchool and one of the

first researchers in the United States to analyze online social networks, is

seeking to answer that question. Trained in computer science, Golbeck builds

algorithms that can estimate levels of trust relationships in social media.

“Trusted information is a powerful source of information,” says

Golbeck. “If you can determine the level of user trust, it allows indi-

viduals—or government agencies and private organizations—to make

specific choices based on that data.”

This can help validate consumer-driven choices like a positive movie

review or product recommendations, and might also be used to assess

the level of user trust in secure communications between members of

the U.S. intelligence community, Golbeck says.

Golbeck is also researching how trust in social networks might

support decision makers in military combat situations. She is building

computational models that determine how much trust a commander

could have in battlefield reports that are contradictory or uncertain,

and how these reports can be annotated and sorted to help the

military better process the information. m

impact profiles

LESLIE WALKER

UM Fellows Use New Media Tools to Define New Voters

Exploring new media Preserving electronic art Mining online dataMaryland researchers are shaping the digital future

research & education spotlight

Doug Reside uses the same care and

meticulous scholarship to preserve dig-

itally created art as other scholars do in

archiving handwritten drafts of literary,

artistic or musical masterpieces.

The assistant director of the

Maryland Institute for Technology

in the Humanities, or MITH, Reside

researches how digital technologies

are changing the creation of American

musical theater.

He is working with the Library of

Congress to preserve the digital files

of the Tony Award-winning musical

“Rent,” which the family of late com-

poser and playwright Jonathan Larson

willed to the federal institution.

In addition to hard-copy drafts of

“Rent,” Reside is reviewing the almost

150 floppy disks that contained earlier

versions of the musical before its 1996

Broadway premiere. Also included

in the archived material are specific

sound effects that Larson created us-

ing now-obsolete technologies.

“We feel it important that the

original files need to be preserved in

the way they were conceived,” says

Reside, who has degrees in English

and computer science. m

Timeless Art, No Matter the Medium

Impact is published by the Office of the Vice President for Research and is mailed to members of the mid-Atlantic research community and others who have an inter-est in the latest research at the University of Maryland.

Your comments and feedback are welcome; please e-mail your comments to vpr@umd.edu or fax them to Anne Geroni-mo, executive editor, at 301.314.9569.

If for any reason you would not like to receive this publication, contact us using the same information above.

PUBLISHER

Mel BernsteinVice President for Research

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Anne GeronimoDirector for Research Development

MANAGING EDITOR

Tom Ventsias

CREATIVE DIRECTOR AND PHOTOGRAPHER

John T. Consoli

ART DIRECTOR

Jeanette J. Nelson

Cover and feature art include the following digital works:

Paradise City by Martin Muir; The End, Way Back and

Fall by Airi Pung; Between this year and next, by Paul

S. Dixon; Lego Marmelade2 by Johannes Wessmark;

Daydream Believer by Shanina Conway; and Cloud Chair

by Richard Hutten.

The 2008 presidential election was historic in

many ways, not the least of which was the surge

of interest and involvement from young and

minority voters. A team of 12 journalism fellows

(pictured above) spent this summer studying

these emerging political voices to gain insight

into how they are influencing American voting

behavior and attitudes.

The fellowships were part of News21, a

national journalism program sponsored in part

by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

A key part of the project was incorporating new

technologies—including a talking bar chart and

a video player that blends linear and nonlinear

storytelling—into the reporting process, says

adviser Leslie Walker, the Knight Visiting Pro-

fessor in Digital Innovation.

“In the face of the Internet and disruptive

change, the news media must innovate if they

are to survive,” Walker says. “And I believe

the change agents who will reinvent news and

preserve the values of journalism are young

journalists like our News21 fellows.”

Before joining the Merrill College, Walker was

a longtime reporter and columnist who spent

more than a decade covering the digital media

for The Washington Post. To view the project, go

to www.thenewvoters.com. m

IMPACT Vol. 4 No. 2 | Fall 2009

NONPROFIT ORGUS POSTAGE PAIDPERMIT No. 10COLLEGE PARK, MDOffice of the Vice President for Research

2133 Lee BuildingUniversity of MarylandCollege Park, MD 20742-5121Evaluating Trust Online

People are communicating as easily through social media as with

their cell phone, but how do the messaging nuances heard in

someone’s voice transfer to a status update on Facebook?

Jennifer Golbeck, an assistant professor in the iSchool and one of the

first researchers in the United States to analyze online social networks, is

seeking to answer that question. Trained in computer science, Golbeck builds

algorithms that can estimate levels of trust relationships in social media.

“Trusted information is a powerful source of information,” says

Golbeck. “If you can determine the level of user trust, it allows indi-

viduals—or government agencies and private organizations—to make

specific choices based on that data.”

This can help validate consumer-driven choices like a positive movie

review or product recommendations, and might also be used to assess

the level of user trust in secure communications between members of

the U.S. intelligence community, Golbeck says.

Golbeck is also researching how trust in social networks might

support decision makers in military combat situations. She is building

computational models that determine how much trust a commander

could have in battlefield reports that are contradictory or uncertain,

and how these reports can be annotated and sorted to help the

military better process the information. m

impact profiles

LESLIE WALKER

UM Fellows Use New Media Tools to Define New Voters

Exploring new media Preserving electronic art Mining online dataMaryland researchers are shaping the digital future

research & education spotlight

Doug Reside uses the same care and

meticulous scholarship to preserve dig-

itally created art as other scholars do in

archiving handwritten drafts of literary,

artistic or musical masterpieces.

The assistant director of the

Maryland Institute for Technology

in the Humanities, or MITH, Reside

researches how digital technologies

are changing the creation of American

musical theater.

He is working with the Library of

Congress to preserve the digital files

of the Tony Award-winning musical

“Rent,” which the family of late com-

poser and playwright Jonathan Larson

willed to the federal institution.

In addition to hard-copy drafts of

“Rent,” Reside is reviewing the almost

150 floppy disks that contained earlier

versions of the musical before its 1996

Broadway premiere. Also included

in the archived material are specific

sound effects that Larson created us-

ing now-obsolete technologies.

“We feel it important that the

original files need to be preserved in

the way they were conceived,” says

Reside, who has degrees in English

and computer science. m

Timeless Art, No Matter the Medium

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PUBLISHER

Mel BernsteinVice President for Research

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Anne GeronimoDirector for Research Development

MANAGING EDITOR

Tom Ventsias

CREATIVE DIRECTOR AND PHOTOGRAPHER

John T. Consoli

ART DIRECTOR

Jeanette J. Nelson

Cover and feature art include the following digital works:

Paradise City by Martin Muir; The End, Way Back and

Fall by Airi Pung; Between this year and next, by Paul

S. Dixon; Lego Marmelade2 by Johannes Wessmark;

Daydream Believer by Shanina Conway; and Cloud Chair

by Richard Hutten.

The 2008 presidential election was historic in

many ways, not the least of which was the surge

of interest and involvement from young and

minority voters. A team of 12 journalism fellows

(pictured above) spent this summer studying

these emerging political voices to gain insight

into how they are influencing American voting

behavior and attitudes.

The fellowships were part of News21, a

national journalism program sponsored in part

by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

A key part of the project was incorporating new

technologies—including a talking bar chart and

a video player that blends linear and nonlinear

storytelling—into the reporting process, says

adviser Leslie Walker, the Knight Visiting Pro-

fessor in Digital Innovation.

“In the face of the Internet and disruptive

change, the news media must innovate if they

are to survive,” Walker says. “And I believe

the change agents who will reinvent news and

preserve the values of journalism are young

journalists like our News21 fellows.”

Before joining the Merrill College, Walker was

a longtime reporter and columnist who spent

more than a decade covering the digital media

for The Washington Post. To view the project, go

to www.thenewvoters.com. m

IMPACT Vol. 4 No. 2 | Fall 2009