SRL PhD Dissertation defense Stephanie Valentine. Friday, June 10. Title: Design, Deployment, Identity, & Conformity: An Analysis of Children's Online Social Networks

Dissertation Defense

Friday, June 10

Title: Design, Deployment, Identity, & Conformity: An Analysis of Children's Online Social Networks

Stephanie Valentine

10:00am Friday, June 10, 2016

Room 326 Teague Building

Abstract

Preadolescents (children aged 7 to 12 years) are participating on online social networks whether we, as a society, like it or not. Enacted by the United States Congress in 1998, the collection of online data about children under the age of 13 is illegal without express parental consent. As such, most mainstream social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram limit their registration by requiring new users to assert that they are at least 13 years of age, an assertion which is often falsified. Researchers, bound by the same legal requirements regarding online data collection, have resorted to surveys and interviews to understand how and why children interact on social networks. While valuable, these prior works explain only what children say they do online, and not what they actually do on a daily basis. In this work, we describe the design, development, deployment, and analysis of our own online social network for children, KidGab. This work explores common social networking affordances for adults and their suitability for child audiences; analyzes the participatory behaviors of our users (Girl Scouts from around central Texas) and describes how they shaped KidGab's continuing growth; discusses our quantitative analysis of users' tendencies and proclivities toward identity exploration; leverages graph algorithms and link-analysis techniques to understand the sociality of conformity on the network; and finally, this work describes the lessons we learned about children's social networks and social networking througout KidGab's 450 days of active deployment. 

Biography

Stephanie Valentine is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Texas A&M University. A Nebraska native, Valentine completed a BA in Computer Science with a minor in Electronic Publishing from Saint Mary's University of Minnesota. Valentine is an NSF Graduate Fellow, winner of the Susan M. Arseven ’75 Make A-Difference Award, and Vice President of the CSE Departmental graduate student association. Valentine's research focuses around understanding how children communicate in online social networks and empowering children to have safe, healthy, and expressive digital friendships. Valentine is also the founding president of Wired Youth, Inc., a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that works to educate the community about safe social networking for children as an active prevention strategy for cyberbullying, online predation, and other cyberthreats.Stephanie Valentine is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Texas A&M University. A Nebraska native, Valentine completed a BA in Computer Science with a minor in Electronic Publishing from Saint Mary's University of Minnesota. Valentine is an NSF Graduate Fellow, winner of the Susan M. Arseven ’75 Make-A-Difference Award, recipient of the 2016 NCWIT Collegiate Award (Honorable Mention), and winner of the 2015 Texas A&M University Department of Computer Science & Engineering Mentoring Excellence Award. Valentine's research focuses around understanding how children communicate on online social networks and empowering children to have safe, healthy, and expressive digital friendships. Valentine is also the founding president of Wired Youth, Inc., a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that works to educate the community about safe social networking for children as an active prevention strategy for cyberbullying, online predation, and other cyberthreats.

Advisor: Dr. Tracy Hammond