Judd Antin

Research Interests:
Motivations for online participation; trust, reliability, and security in online contexts; musicians social networks on MySpace Music; combining qualitative and experimental methods

How I cross disciplines:
I began my academic career as an anthropologist, and now I am primarily a social psychologist. The change in perspective has really helped me see how fruitless disciplinary squabbling and boundary-drawing really is. Each perspective, each disciplinary history, each set of methodological conventions has strengths and weaknesses. The end result: mixing disciplines and methods will almost always lead to better research, more useful findings.

Information challenge I'd most like to address:
We've only just begun to understand what motivates people to spend their time contributing to collective efforts like Wikipedia, Digg, Flickr, blogs, etc. For me, even more interesting than the heavy contributors is understanding why people make small contributions. So many online systems are built bit by bit (in more ways than one) in a massive distributed effort over time. The beautiful thing about the web is that 10,000 people working for 1 minute can be just as effective as a few people working 40 hours a week. Understanding what motivates those 10,000 is a challenge I'll be tackling my whole career.

Favorite thing about the I School:
No matter what you’re interested in, there’s bound to be someone around here who is both an expert in it and passionate about it. That helps me to be passionate about it too.

A website I recommend:
http://www.lifehacker.com — Practical, functional, as geeky as you want it to be.

Something few people know about me:
My dream is to someday make a living carving and constructing beautiful hardwood doors.