Projects

The Question: What contexts and constraints give rise to successful leaderless group coordination?

A common theme across all of my projects is the ways in which groups work together to achieve a common goal. Whether it’s humans or honey bees, individuals coordinate their actions to achieve greater feats at faster speeds, even without an explicit leader. Identifying manipulatable factors to promote effective coordination strategies will allow workgroups to engineer their environments so as to increase efficiency and subsequently workplace health. Given recent shifts and advancements in online work teams and micro-blogging platforms, this question is increasingly important to disentangle in both the virtual and real world.

Social Media and Social Activism

As social media has become an integral part daily life, individuals have begun to harness these platforms to advance their ideas and political agendas. Through my work with Dr. Leah Windsor, Dr. Alistair Windsor, and Dr. Alex Paxton, I have investigated how individuals use social media as an alternative way to mobilize. We are working to identify just how much online activity actually reflects real-world activism in the Arab Spring. We use linguistic tools such as sentiment and affect analysis and linguistic cohesion calculations to determine how individuals harness these platforms to further their agendas (Chiovaro et al., 2021a, 2021b; Xia et al., under review). We are also interested in how language is harnessed in mainstream media during events such as the Rwandan Genocide (Windsor et al., in prep).

Colony Coordination

Honey bees are fascinating creatures. Even though their cognitive capabilities are limited, they demonstrate seamless action coordination (Chiovaro & Paxton, 2019). They divide tasks among themselves and are able to redistribute their workforce based on hive needs and external conditions. Many of my research questions focus on how we, as humans, can be more like the bees when working as groups. I investigate how multimodal communication impacts worker coordination and productivity (Chiovaro & Paxton 2020a, 202b).

Fractal Fiction

Fractality, nested self-similarity of structure at different timescales, is evident across many phenomena. The degree of fractality has been found to be a good indication of performance level and genre of movies (Blau et al., 2013). My collaborators and I are investigating how the fractal structure of speech in live theatre contributes to the overall performance impression by an audience, and how it may be used to categorize historical “problem plays” (Dhaim et al., in prep).