Social media websites are continuously becoming more prominent and addicting, said researcher Jennifer Preece, and she wants to pinpoint why.
After more than 20 years of work in computer-human interaction, Preece, professor and dean of the information studies college, was recognized last week for her research with one of the top honors in her field. Preece’s recent research focuses on why and how some people contribute to online communities — such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — and others do not.
She will be inducted in May into the Association for Computing Machinery’s Computer Human Interaction Academy — an honor reflecting her long-term, influential work about people’s motivations for contributing to social media and how they do so. She was one of seven people honored with the annual award and the fourth ever at this university.
“This is a very prestigious award by the ACM,” Preece said. “I feel privileged that my work is being recognized.”
Throughout her career as a researcher, Preece has authored or co-authored numerous books, several of which have been especially influential in the field, led national discussions on the topic and is considered a pioneer by her peers in her field for studying how people use social media to communicate with one another.
“I want to see what motivates people to contribute to social software,” she said.
The honor puts Preece’s name in the same category as other industry elites, but she’s not the first person in her family or at this university to be a recipient. Her husband, Ben Shneiderman, who is also a professor in the university’s computer science department, was honored with the same award in 2001.
“Jenny is an established leader whose ‘Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability’ book was a pioneering contribution that helped trigger the current explosion of interest in social media,” he wrote in an email.
Her colleagues said Preece’s dedication to her work and leading research made her an obvious candidate for the award.
“When I heard that our dean was given this honor, the first thing that came to mind was ‘of course!'” wrote information studies college Associate Dean Allison Durin, who has also been recognized by the academy, in an email. “It’s an honor for Dean Preece to receive one of the most prestigious awards the [human-computer interaction] field gives.”
Other professors said the award adds to the university’s credibility in the study of human-computer interaction.
“I was truly delighted to learn Jenny was elected as a Fellow of the ACM CHI Academy,” Shneiderman wrote. “Her election also demonstrates UMd’s leadership in the growing topic of Human-Computer Interaction.”
Preece is also the principal investigator of the Biotracker project, an initiative funded by the National Science Foundation that encourages people to collect their own information on worldwide wildlife with photos.
The information will be included into the Smithsonian Institution’s Encyclopedia of Life, an online database for all of Earth’s estimated 2 million living organisms.
Preece has spent all of her six years at the university studying people’s use of social media, but for eight years before she was a professor and department chairwoman of information systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
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