Darren Gergle
Has also published under the name of:
"D. Gergle"
Personal Homepage:
soc.northwestern.edu/dgergleCurrent place of employment:
Center for Technology and Social Behavior, Northwestern UniversityDarren is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He also holds appointments in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and is a faculty member of the Center for Technology and Social Behavior. His research interests include small group communication in face-to-face and mediated environments, the design and study of tools to support distributed collaboration, and computational modeling of group discourse and interaction.
Publications by Darren Gergle (bibliography)
» 2009 «
Scissors, Lauren E., Gill, Alastair J., Geraghty, Kathleen and Gergle, Darren (2009): In CMC we trust: the role of similarity. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 527-536. Available online
“This paper examines how different forms of linguistic similarity in a text-chat environment relate to the establishment of interpersonal trust. Sixty-two pairs played an iterative social dilemma investment game and periodically communicated via Instant Messenger (IM). Novel automated and manual analysis techniques identify linguistic similarity at content, structural and stylistic levels. Results reveal that certain types of content (some positive emotion words, task-related words), structural (verb tense, phrasal entrainment), and stylistic (emoticons) similarity characterize high trusting pairs while other types of similarity (e.g., negative emotion words) characterize low trusting pairs. Contrary to previous literature, this suggests that not all similarity is good similarity.”
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Bao, Patti and Gergle, Darren (2009): What's "this" you say?: the use of local references on distant displays. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 1029-1032. Available online
“This study explores how the design of visual display configurations relates to linguistic expressions. Twenty-five participants performed a series of object identification and narrative Description tasks on either a large wall-sized or small desktop display. Results revealed that during the Description tasks, large display users produced significantly greater rates of local deictic references than small display users, but in the identification tasks, the rates were similar for both large and small display users. Implications for the design of interactive technologies are discussed.”
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» 2008 «
Gill, Alastair J., Gergle, Darren, French, Robert M. and Oberlander, Jon (2008): Emotion rating from short blog texts. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 1121-1124. Available online
“Being able to automatically perceive a variety of emotions from text alone has potentially important applications in CMC and HCI that range from identifying mood from online posts to enabling dynamically adaptive interfaces. However, such ability has not been proven in human raters or computational systems. Here we examine the ability of naive raters of emotion to detect one of eight emotional categories from 50 and 200 word samples of real blog text. Using expert raters as a 'gold standard', naive-expert rater agreement increased with longer texts, and was high for ratings of joy, disgust, anger and anticipation, but low for acceptance and 'neutral' texts. We discuss these findings in light of theories of CMC and potential applications in HCI.”
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Scissors, Lauren E., Gill, Alastair J. and Gergle, Darren (2008): Linguistic mimicry and trust in text-based CMC. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW08 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2008. pp. 277-280. Available online
“This study examines the relationship between linguistic mimicry and trust establishment in a text-chat environment. Twenty-six participant pairs engaged in a social dilemma investment game and chatted via Instant Messenger (IM) after every five rounds of investment. Results revealed that, within chat sessions, lexical mimicry (repetition of words or word phrases by both partners) was significantly higher for high-trusting pairs than for low-trusting pairs, but that lexical mimicry across chat sessions was significantly higher for low-trusting pairs than for high-trusting pairs. Theoretical and applied implications are discussed.”
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Gill, Alastair J., French, Robert M., Gergle, Darren and Oberlander, Jon (2008): The language of emotion in short blog texts. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW08 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2008. pp. 299-302. Available online
“Emotion is central to human interactions, and automatic detection could enhance our experience with technologies. We investigate the linguistic expression of fine-grained emotion in 50 and 200 word samples of real blog texts previously coded by expert and naive raters. Content analysis (LIWC) reveals angry authors use more affective language and negative affect words, and that joyful authors use more positive affect words. Additionally, a co-occurrence semantic space approach (LSA) was able to identify fear (which naive human emotion raters could not do). We relate our findings to human emotion perception and note potential computational applications.”
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Thompson, Will and Gergle, Darren (2008): Modeling situated conversational agents as partially observable Markov decision processes. In: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces 2008. pp. 401-404. Available online
“A Situated Conversational Agent (SCA) is an agent that engages in dialog about the context within which it is embedded. An SCA is distinguished from non-situated conversational agents by an intimate connection of the agent's dialog to its embedding context, and by intricate dependencies between its linguistic and physical actions. Constructing an SCA that can interact naturally with users while engaged in collaborative physical tasks requires the agent to interleave decision making under uncertainty, action execution, and observation while maximizing expected utility over a sequence of interactions. These requirements can be fulfilled by modeling an SCA as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). We show how POMDPs can be used to formalize and implement psycholinguistic proposals on how situated dialog participants collaborate in order to make and ground dialog contributions.”
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Tan, Desney S., Gergle, Darren, Mandryk, Regan L., Inkpen, Kori, Kellar, Melanie, Hawkey, Kirstie and Czerwinski, Mary (2008): Using job-shop scheduling tasks for evaluating collocated collaboration. In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 12 (3) pp. 255-267
» 2007 «
Gergle, Darren, Rosé, Carolyn P. and Kraut, Robert E. (2007): Modeling the impact of shared visual information on collaborative reference. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2007. pp. 1543-1552. Available online
“A number of recent studies have demonstrated that groups benefit considerably from access to shared visual information. This is due, in part, to the communicative efficiencies provided by the shared visual context. However, a large gap exists between our current theoretical understanding and our existing models. We address this gap by developing a computational model that integrates linguistic cues with visual cues in a way that effectively models reference during tightly-coupled, task-oriented interactions. The results demonstrate that an integrated model significantly outperforms existing language-only and visual-only models. The findings can be used to inform and augment the development of conversational agents, applications that dynamically track discourse and collaborative interactions, and dialogue managers for natural language interfaces.”
Copyrights may apply
Avrahami, Daniel, Gergle, Darren, Hudson, Scott E. and Kiesler, Sara (2007): Improving the match between callers and receivers: A study on the effect of contextual information on cell phone interruptions. In Behaviour and Information Technology, 26 (3) pp. 247-259
“A problem with the location-free nature of cell phones is that callers have difficulty predicting receivers' states, leading to inappropriate calls. One promising solution involves helping callers decide when to interrupt by providing them contextual information about receivers. We tested the effectiveness of different kinds of contextual information by measuring the degree of agreement between receivers' desires and callers' decisions. In a simulation, five groups of participants played the role of 'Callers', choosing between making calls or leaving messages, and a sixth group played the role of 'Receivers', choosing between receiving calls or receiving messages. Callers were provided different contextual information about Receivers' locations, their cell phones' ringer state, the presence of others, or no information at all. Callers provided with contextual information made significantly more accurate decisions than those without it. Our results suggest that different contextual information generates different kinds of improvements: more appropriate interruptions or better avoidance of inappropriate interruptions. We discuss the results and implications for practice in the light of other important considerations, such as privacy and technological simplicity.”
Copyrights may apply
» 2006 «
Gergle, Darren, Kraut, Robert E. and Fussell, Susan R. (2006): The impact of delayed visual feedback on collaborative performance. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2006. pp. 1303-1312. Available online
“When pairs work together on a physical task, seeing a common workspace benefits their performance and transforms their use of language. Previous results have demonstrated that visual information helps collaborative pairs to understand the current state of their task, ground their conversations, and communicate efficiently. However, collaborative technologies often impinge on the visual information needed to support successful collaboration. One example of this is the introduction of delayed visual feedback in a collaborative environment. We present results from two studies that detail the form of the function that describes the relationship between visual delay and collaborative task performance. The first study precisely demonstrates how a range of visual delays differentially impact performance and the collaborative strategies employed. The second study describes how parameters of the task, such as the dynamics of the visual environment, reduce the amount of delay that can be tolerated.”
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Tan, Desney S., Gergle, Darren, Scupelli, Peter and Pausch, Randy (2006): Physically large displays improve performance on spatial tasks. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 13 (1) pp. 71-99
“Large wall-sized displays are becoming prevalent. Although researchers have articulated qualitative benefits of group work on large displays, little work has been done to quantify the benefits for individual users. In this article we present four experiments comparing the performance of users working on a large projected wall display to that of users working on a standard desktop monitor. In these experiments, we held the visual angle constant by adjusting the viewing distance to each of the displays. Results from the first two experiments suggest that physically large displays, even when viewed at identical visual angles as smaller ones, help users perform better on mental rotation tasks. We show through the experiments how these results may be attributed, at least in part, to large displays immersing users within the problem space and biasing them into using more efficient cognitive strategies. In the latter two experiments, we extend these results, showing the presence of these effects with more complex tasks, such as 3D navigation and mental map formation and memory. Results further show that the effects of physical display size are independent of other factors that may induce immersion, such as interactivity and mental aids within the virtual environments. We conclude with a general discussion of the findings and possibilities for future work.”
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» 2005 «
Gergle, Darren (2005): The value of shared visual space for collaborative physical tasks. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2005 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2005. pp. 1116-1117. Available online
“The goal of this research is to elucidate the ways shared visual space supports group communication and performance. This work involves three stages: a series of empirical studies that decompose the features of shared visual space and task, a methodology for assessing the sequential structure of how visible actions serve to augment discourse, and the development of a computational model of discourse to further our theoretical understanding of the ways in which shared visual information serves communication in collaborative physical tasks.”
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» 2004 «
Gergle, Darren, Millen, David R., Kraut, Robert E. and Fussell, Susan R. (2004): Persistence matters: making the most of chat in tightly-coupled work. In: Dykstra-Erickson, Elizabeth and Tscheligi, Manfred (eds.) Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria. pp. 431-438. Available online
“How much history of the dialogue should a chat client include? Some chat clients have minimized the dialogue history to deploy the space for other purposes. A theory of conversational coordination suggests that stripping away history raises the cost of conversational grounding, creating problems for both writers and readers. To test this proposition and inform design, we conducted an experiment in which one person instructed another on how to solve a simple puzzle. Participants had chat clients that showed either a single conversational turn or six of them. Having the dialogue history helped collaborators communicate efficiently and led to faster and better task performance. The dialogue history was most useful when the puzzles were more linguistically complex and when instructors could not see the work area. We present evidence of participants adapting their discourse to partially compensate for deficits in the communication media.”
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Tan, Desney S., Gergle, Darren, Scupelli, Peter and Pausch, Randy (2004): Physically large displays improve path integration in 3D virtual navigation tasks. In: Dykstra-Erickson, Elizabeth and Tscheligi, Manfred (eds.) Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria. pp. 439-446. Available online
“Previous results have shown that users perform better on spatial orientation tasks involving static 2D scenes when working on physically large displays as compared to small ones. This was found to be true even when the displays presented the same images at equivalent visual angles. Further investigation has suggested that large displays may provide a greater sense of presence, which biases users into adopting more efficient strategies to perform tasks. In this work, we extend those findings, demonstrating that users are more effective at performing 3D virtual navigation tasks on large displays. We also show that even though interacting with the environment affects performance, effects induced by interactivity are independent of those induced by physical display size. Together, these findings allow us to derive guidelines for the design and presentation of interactive 3D environments on physically large displays.”
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Gergle, Darren, Kraut, Robert E. and Fussell, Susan R. (2004): Action as language in a shared visual space. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW04 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2004. pp. 487-496. Available online
“A shared visual workspace allows multiple people to see similar views of objects and environments. Prior empirical literature demonstrates that visual information helps collaborators understand the current state of their task and enables them to communicate and ground their conversations efficiently. We present an empirical study that demonstrates how action replaces explicit verbal instruction in a shared visual workspace. Pairs performed a referential communication task with and without a shared visual space. A detailed sequential analysis of the communicative content reveals that pairs with a shared workspace were less likely to explicitly verify their actions with speech. Rather, they relied on visual information to provide the necessary communicative and coordinative cues.”
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» 2003 «
Tan, Desney S., Gergle, Darren, Scupelli, Peter and Pausch, Randy (2003): With similar visual angles, larger displays improve spatial performance. In: Cockton, Gilbert and Korhonen, Panu (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2003 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 5-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA. pp. 217-224.
» 2002 «
Bos, Nathan, Olson, Judith S., Gergle, Darren, Olson, Gary M. and Wright, Zach (2002): Effects of four computer-mediated communications channels on trust development. In: Terveen, Loren (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2002 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 20-25, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota. pp. 135-140.
Kraut, Robert E., Gergle, Darren and Fussell, Susan R. (2002): The use of visual information in shared visual spaces: informing the development of virtual co-presence. In: Churchill, Elizabeth F., McCarthy, Joe, Neuwirth, Christine and Rodden, Tom (eds.) Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 16 - 20, 2002, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. pp. 31-40. Available online
“A shared visual workspace is one where multiple people can see the same
objects at roughly the same time. We present findings from an experiment
investigating the effects of shared visual space on a collaborative puzzle
task. We show that having the shared visual space helps collaborators
understand the current state of their task and enables them to communicate and
ground their conversations efficiently. These processes are associated with
faster and better task performance. Delaying the visual update in the space
reduces benefits and degrades performance. The shared visual space is more
useful when tasks are visually complex or when actors have no simple vocabulary
for describing their world. We find evidence for the ways in which participants
adapt their discourse processes to their level of shared visual information.”
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Nichols, Jeffrey, Wobbrock, Jacob O., Gergle, Darren and Forlizzi, Jodi (2002): Mediator and medium: doors as interruption gateways and aesthetic displays. In: Proceedings of DIS02: Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, & Techniques 2002. pp. 379-386. Available online
“Office doors are more than entrances to rooms, they are entrances to a person's time and attention. People can mediate access to themselves by choosing whether to leave their door open or closed when they are in their office. Doors also serve as a medium for communication, where people can broadcast individual messages to passersby, or accept messages from others who stopped by when the door was closed. These qualities make the door an excellent location for designing solutions that help people better manage their time and attention. In this paper, we present a study of doors, derive design insights from the study, and then realize some of these insights in two cooperating implementations deployed in our workplace.”
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» 2001 «
Brinck, Tom, Gergle, Darren and Wood, Scott D. (2001): Usability for the Web: Designing Web Sites that Work. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
View info on Amazon.com or .co.uk 
» 1998 «
Brinck, Tom and Gergle, Darren (1998): The Design of Banking Websites: Lessons from Iterative Design. In: Third Asian Pacific Computer and Human Interaction July 15-17, 1998, Kangawa, Japan. pp. 386-392. Available online
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Mar 19th, 2010
Changes to this page (author)
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