Faculty Research

Health information and Technology encompasses both human and technical factors that influence collection and use of health information. This theme seeks to develop solutions to identify barriers to, and promote facilitation of, health information exchange primarily by applying insights from social, clinical, and behavioral sciences. This dynamic field is evolving quickly and includes issues which span individuals interacting with tools that enable the collection and use of personal health information to specialized knowledge and skills required to support development, adoption, and use of health information systems (e.g. electronic health records, patient portals). This broad area covers information science, health education, communication, and clinical care delivery for inpatient and ambulatory care settings. Multiple LIS faculty members undertake research in related areas, including, but not limited to:

• Theory and methodology supporting investigations concerning the generation, storage, retrieval, and use of health data, information and knowledge
• Health IT adoption and use
• Health IT evaluation
• Data Science in Health
• Decision Science

Affiliated faculty:

• Kaitlin Costello
• Sunyoung Kim
• Charles Senteio

Human Information Behavior concerns all aspects of human interactions with information. This theme offers students the opportunity to study all aspects of interacting with information and information technologies. These interactions are studied in a wide variety of contexts, such as interaction in web search engines, collaborating with others in knowledge work, sharing in social networks, information seeking in everyday life, organizing personal or work information, designing technologies and tools for information seeking, and evaluating information technologies to support people’s information interactions. Multiple LIS faculty members undertake research in related areas, encompassing people’s interactions with information at personal, social, institutional and cultural levels; including, but not limited to:

• Information seeking and retrieval
• Information sharing
• Information use
• Information organization and archiving
• Information curating
• Information policy

Affiliated Faculty:

• Kaitlin Costello
• Marija Dalbello
• E. E. Lawrence
• Britt Paris
• Rebecca Reynolds
• Charles Senteio

The Human-Computer Interaction theme encompasses a wide range of computing technology and its use, as every aspect of modern life requires interacting with computers in some way.  This field offers students the opportunity to study all aspects of living, working, and building in a digital world, including developing an understanding of human needs through ethnographic field studies; designing new technology; evaluating the use of technology both in laboratory experiments and through field deployment, and devising theories about information technology and its role in society. Multiple LIS faculty members undertake research in related areas, including, but not limited to:

• Human factors & Ergonomics
• Computer-Supported Collaborative Work
• Environmental sustainability
• Game design and development
• Information visualization
• Mobile computing & Ubiquitous computing

Affiliated faculty:

• Shagun Jhaver
• Sunyoung Kim
• Vivek Singh
• Anselm Spoerri

The Information Institutions, Artifacts and Documents theme involves the study of socio-technical and socio-material dimensions of information systems, infrastructures, and institutions in an emergent and evolving political, legal, economic, social, and cultural framework that draws on sociological, historical, and technological approaches. Faculty recognize that these phenomena are complex and constructed through processes that require critical positions and reliance on a wide range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies to study their lifecycles in the micro, medium, and macro-levels of society. Multiple LIS faculty members undertake research in related areas, including, but not limited to:

• Forms and document and media ecologies (artifacts) including the studies of institutions, knowledge production, transmission, and knowledge domains
• History and cultures of the book, reading experience, and reading communities, material texts
• Preservation and circulation of information
• Theory of knowledge and social epistemology
• Development of libraries and information agencies and their collections, and associated services
• Intellectual property and information rights
• Integrity, authority, and authenticity

Affiliated faculty:

• Marc Aronson
• Kaitlin Costello
• Marija Dalbello
• E.E. Lawrence
• Britt Paris
• Rebecca Reynolds
• Charles Senteio

Information seeking can inherently be seen as a human learning process that involves human inquiry. In the Information, Learning, and Technology theme, those researching and teaching in this domain at SC&I aim to foster a deeper understanding of the cognitive, affective and social processes that facilitate inquiry, learning, and knowledge co-construction, often through learners’ uses of e-learning and information technologies. Our work advances theories of learning, inquiry, and information seeking, as well as design of learning systems, environments and instructional models. Multiple LIS faculty members undertake research in related areas, including, but not limited to:

• Design and use of learning systems
• Learning by the full diversity of youth, adults, elders and specialized populations
• Information, communication, and technology (ICT) issues in computer supported collaborative learning
• School librarianship pedagogy and praxis
• Digital divide, literacies, access, and learning systems

Affiliated faculty:

• Marc Aronson
• Lilia Pavlovsky
• Rebecca Reynolds

The Information Retrieval and Language Analysis theme focuses on research that examines information retrieval in its broadest sense. This field encompasses the development and assessment of automatic systems that support user retrieval of text, audio and visual documents from large collections, and improved understanding of how real people interact with information retrieval systems. One goal is to use this understanding to develop systems that meet the needs of different user communities. By extension, research on information retrieval has come to include data mining, computational linguistics, and corpus linguistics, all of which can be viewed as techniques for improving information retrieval. Multiple LIS faculty members undertake research in related areas, including, but not limited to:

• Individual, collaborative, social, and organizational information retrieval
• Interactive information retrieval
• Natural language processing, information extraction, information organization

Affiliated faculty:

• Vivek Singh

Social Computing refers to the design, development, deployment, validation, and refinement of various technologies as they aid and in turn impact human processes on individual, community, and societal scales. Studying such phenomena in a data-driven manner requires the creation of methodological and conceptual advancements at the intersection of advanced analytics and social behavior. Multiple LIS faculty members undertake research in related areas, including, but not limited to:

• Computational Social Science
• Collaborative Gaming, Health, and Education
• Data Science for Social Good
• Social Network Analysis
• Social Media

Affiliated faculty:

• Kaitlin Costello
• Shagun Jhaver
• Sunyoung Kim
• Britt Paris
• Rebecca Reynolds
• Vivek Singh

The Behavioral Informatics Lab looks at multiple problems at the intersection of Big Data Analytics, Computational Social Science, and Multimedia Information Systems. The field of Behavioral Informatics focuses on sensing, understanding, and shaping human behavior in a data-driven manner. 

The Center for International Scholarship in School Libraries (CISSL) is dedicated to research, scholarship, education, and consultancy for school library professionals. It focuses on how learning in an information age school is enabled and demonstrated by school library programs, and how inquiry-based learning and teaching processes can contribute to educational success and workplace readiness for learners.

Through Community Design for Health and Wellness, the CDHW-IRG seeks to catalyze community-engaged, interdisciplinary, cross-campus research that creates solutions to the gaps, risks, and opportunities for health and wellness that lie at the intersections of population health, personalized medicine, and the evolving communication and information context in New Jersey and beyond.

SALTS, the Laboratory for the Study of Applied Language Technology and Society at the School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University, brings together researchers interested in developing and/or using next-generation natural language processing technology that supports communication across cultural and social boundaries in areas such as digital libraries, education, public health, humanities, linguistics, and communication.

Power and inequality in Media and Technology Working Group -The roots of systemic inequality have structured our contemporary world. Those with economic and political power have upheld these patterns of inequality as they shape mediated discourse and technological development. We see it today as information and communication technologies are framed as neutral, colorblind, meritocratic arbiters of ever-wider swathes of public and private life while placing certain populations at higher risk, blaming them for their vulnerability, and exonerating powerful entities from accountability. Examples abound—from the manufacture of widely-used technologies that exploit the labor of the global working class, and the unequal distribution of internet access and health disparities, to the ways the media covers racially-motivated violence and corporate surveillance. As such, this interdisciplinary group explores a broad variety of media and information technologies’ intersections with society, with the goal of promoting justice, equity, and sustainability, as well as expanding on the scholarship of this multifaceted and important topic at SC&I and the university.

The Social Media & Society Cluster is a transdisciplinary unit within Rutgers School of Communication and Information that supports research that extends across the boundaries of the iSchool, communication, and media studies programs within the School. Consisting of faculty from the departments of Communication, Journalism and Media Studies, and Library and Information Science, our faculty offer an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program, as well as a Master of Communication and Information Studies and a Master of Information.

The Health and Wellness Faculty Cluster brings together faculty across the school whose research, teaching, and service focus centrally on closing disparities and improving health and wellness outcomes for individual, groups, and communities in the U.S. and globally. Our work examines the evolving role that communication, information, and media play in facilitating personal and public health via a range of processes and mechanisms – health education and health literacy, risk communication, persuasion and social influence, social support, capacity-building, and informatics – and across a wide range of health challenges, including drug and alcohol addiction, cancer, HIV/AIDS, obesity, Alzheimer’s disease, mental health, and wellness more generally.