Emerging Capacities of Mass Participation Lab @ University of Washington
The Emerging Capacities of Mass Participation(emCOMP) Laboratory, directed by Assistant Professor Kate Starbird, investigates the dynamics of massive participation and interaction enabled by new and social media. Focusing on specific events and issues that bring people together on a large scale, researchers both examine the flow of interactions and explore possibilities for applying online participation to problem-solving on a massive or even global scale. Situated within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), as well as the emerging fields of collective intelligence, crowdsourcing, and human computation, the lab’s research integrates qualitative, quantitative, and computational analysis of social media interactions and seeks to identify and pursue design opportunities to support and harness mass participation within relevant contexts.
Learn More about Our Research (Coming Soon)
emCOMP Researchers
Directed by Assistant Professor Kate Starbird, emCOMP lab members are PhD, Master's and Undergraduate students in Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) and Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the University of Washington.

HCDE
My research looks at how social media are used during crisis events—focusing on emergent collaborations, collective sensemaking, and rumoring.

HCDE
My interests include collaborative systems and sense-making. I explore, design, and build systems to improve decision-making both individually and collaboratively.

HCDE
My research is a theory-driven exploration of online participation, especially rumoring, and how we can reflect and learn from our past participation to improve our future presentation

HCDE
I'm interested in information (hyper) locality and information flows on social media during emerging events.

HCDE
I'm interested in designing social media where people are cognizant how their online contributions affect the larger digital social space.

HCDE & CSE
I'm interested in how Twitter facilitates different narratives.