writing

Book

The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online
Judith Donath
MIT Press, May 2014
How interface design shapes online behavior -- what we need to know in order to create the interactions, customs and cultures we would like to see in the future.

about identity, deception, signaling, and social analysis

Signals, Truth and Design
Judith Donath. work in progress
book-in-progress on human signaling in mediated and face-to-face communication.
Op-eds about fake news. How (Not) to Refute a Lie (on medium.com) and Why fake news stories thrive online (on cnn.com)
Why we need online alter egos now more than ever
Judith Donath, April, 2014
Wired
Insisting on real names threatens privacy; anonymity devolves into anarchy. Pseudonymity provides the best balance.
Various essays on brain basis of lie detection, honesty among avatars, and personal appearance and justice. 2010.
Based on a series of talks I hosted on The Psychology and Economics of Trust and Honesty
Is reputation obsolete?
Judith Donath, Oct 2008.
Harvard Berkman Center Publius Project
Should we rely on gossip or the ever encroaching surveillant eye?
Giving avatars emote control (a pre-press draft)
Judith Donath, Feb 2008.
Harvard Business Review, Breakthrough ideas for 2008
About the continuum of veracity.
Virtually trustworthy
Judith Donath, July 6, 2007.
Science
Today I'll wear my most persuasive avatar.
Signals in social supernets
Judith Donath, Oct 2007
The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol 13, no 1.
the evolutionary line that goes from apes grooming, to people gossiping, to future humans linking their profiles together
Public displays of connection.
Judith Donath and danah boyd. 2004.
BT Technology Journal Vol 22 No 4 October 2004, pp 71-82.
how listing all your acquaintances can make you more credible - or less.
Mediated Faces
Judith Donath. 2001.
M. Beynon, C.L. Nehaniv, K. Dautenhahn (Eds.). Cognitive Technology: Instruments of Mind Proceedings of the 4th International Conference
making sure that the face that represents you does not have a mind of its own.
Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community (or .pdf)
Judith Donath. 1998.
In Communities in Cyberspace. (M. Smith and P. Kollock, eds.) London: Routledge.
how cheap identifiers led to an onslaught of trolls

about interface design, art, etc.

The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online
Judith Donath MIT Press, 2014
Balancing legibility, social responsibilty and innovation in the design of radically new environments for social interaction.
Data Portraits
Judith Donath, Alex Dragulescu, Aaron Zinman, Fernanda Viegas, Rebecca Xiong, Yannick Assogba.
Oct 2008
SIGGRAPH 2010 Art Papers
depicting people as they live online
Technological interventions in everyday interaction
Judith Donath, Oct 2008
Act/React, Milwaukee Art Museum
the mechanical gaze in art and public space
The Rhythms of Salience: A Conversation Map
Judith Donath
an impressionistic picture of a conversation
Words as landscape
Judith Donath. 2005.
CHI 2005 Workshop: Beyond threaded conversation
imagine words piling up, like lexical anthills
Sociable Media.
Judith Donath. 2004.
In The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, William Sims Bainbridge (ed), Berkshire Publishing Group
if you majored in sociable media, what would you know.
A semantic approach to visualizing online conversations (or here)
Judith Donath. 2002.
Communications of the ACM Volume 45 , Issue 4
incorporating subtle editorializing into social visualizations.
Talking in Circles
Roy Rodenstein, Judith Donath. 2000.
Proceedings of CHI 2000 .
a visual interface for audioconferencing that lets you tell secrets
Visiphone
Judith Donath, Karrie Karahalios, Fernanda Viegas. 2000.
Proceedings of ICAD 2000.
a mesmerizing interface object for speakerphone calls
Chat Circles.
Fernanda Viegas and Judith Donath. 1999.
Proceedings of CHI 99.
the abstract graphical chat interface.
Visualizing the crowds at a web site
Nelson Minar and Judith Donath. 1999.
Proceedings of CHI 99.
a bird's-eye animation of visits to a website
Visualizing Conversation (or .pdf)
Judith Donath, Karrie Karahalios, and Fernanda Viegas. 1999.
Proceedings of HICSS-32, reprinted in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, vol 4, issue 4.
showing the social patterns in online conversations
Inhabiting the Virtual City: The Design of Social Environments for Electronic Communities
Judith Donath. 1996.
My doctoral dissertation.
Visual Who
Judith Donath. 1995. Proceedings of ACM Multimedia '95 Nov 5-9, San Francisco, CA.
visualizing a community with mailing lists and springs
Sociable Information Spaces
Judith Donath. 1995.
Presented at the Second IEEE International Workshop on Community Networking, Princeton, NJ.
when this was written, the web as a social space was a radically new idea
The Illustrated Conversation
Judith Donath. 1995.
Multimedia Tools and Applications. Vol. 1, March 1995.
turning heads in virtual conversations
Structured Video and the Construction of Space
J. Donath. 1995.
Proceedings of the IS&T/SPIE Symposium on Electronic Imaging, San Jose, CA, February 1995.
video compositing with the perspective of the Renaissance
The Sociable Web
J. Donath and N. Robertson. 1994.
Proceedings of the Second International WWW Conference. Chicago, IL, October 1994.
the first implementation of presence on the web
Casual Collaboration
J. Donath. 1994.
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems, pp. 490-496, Boston, MA. May 1994.

about knowing the not-quite-human other

The robot dog fetches for whom?
Judith Donath, 2017
draft article - also in .pdf form, with full references
Anthropomorphic entities elicit our trust and affection. They're potentially quite persuasive -- whom do they work for and what do they want from us?
The Imperfect Observer
Judith Donath, 2010
In Questioning Nineteenth-Century Assumptions about Knowledge: Dualism a Symposium SUNY Press.
neuroscience, robotics, and the illusion of thinking we can know everything
Artificial pets: Simple behaviors elicit complex attachments.
Judith Donath
The Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior, Marc Bekoff (ed.), Greenwood Press.
why machines will evolve to misbehave.
Being Real ( pdf)
Judith Donath. 2000.
In The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, K. Goldberg (ed.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (In French, Être réel. Also available in Armenian.)
as chatbots get smarter, what will it take to prove you are human?
See the full collection of Sociable Media Group papers