Bringing together interdisciplinary faculty from the iSchool, economically disadvantaged/low socioeconomic status (SES) families, and public library partners may help minimize privacy and security challenges that librarians face and risks that low-SES families face using internet and communication technologies (ICTs).
Jessica Vitak
Jessica Vitak
Assistant Professor and Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information (CASCI)
Email:
Telephone:
(301) 405-8617
RESEARCH INTERESTS
- Benefits and drawbacks of communication technologies
- How social and technical affordances shape disclosures and interactions
- How individuals and organizations balance the tensions between disclosing personal information and protecting the privacy of that information
EDUCATION
- BA, Communication and Journalism, Elon University
- MA, Communication, Culture & Technology, Georgetown University
- PhD, Media & Information Studies, Michigan State
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Vitak is currently the Associate Director of HCIL and Director of CASCI. She is also affiliated with the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2) on campus. Vitak heads the Privacy+Security Internet Research Lab at Maryland and collaborates with a number of faculty and students across campus, at other US institutions, and with colleagues in Europe. In 2015, she received an UMD ADVANCE Seed Grant with two journalism professors to study women’s online harassment experiences and identify methods to mitigate the harmful effects of such behaviors. Vitak publishes regularly in prominent communication journals and within the CHI and CSCW communities.
TEACHING
- INST 201 Introduction to Information Science
- INST 611 Privacy & Security in a Networked World
- INST 627
- INST 808
RECENT PUBLICATIONS & PRODUCTS
- Vitak, J., Shilton, K., & Ashktorab, Z. (2016) Beyond the Belmont Principles: Ethical challenges, practices, and beliefs in the online data research community. Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 941-953). New York: ACM. doi: 10.1145/2818048.2820078 [pdf]
- Glasgow, K., Vitak, J., Tauszik, Y., & Fink, C. “With your help… we begin to heal”: Social media expressions of gratitude in the aftermath of. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction (SBP-BRiMS) (pp. 236-238). Washington, DC: Springer. [Best Paper Winner] [pdf]
- Glasgow, K., Vitak, J., Tausczik, Y., & Fink, C. (2016). Grieving in the 21st century: Social media’s role in facilitating supportive exchanges following community-level traumatic events. Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Social Media & Society. New York: ACM. [pdf]
- Ashktorab, Z., & Vitak, J. (2016). Designing cyberbullying mitigation and prevention solutions through participatory design with teenagers. Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. forthcoming). New York: ACM. [pdf]
- Vitak, J., Blasiola, S., Patil, S., & Litt, E. (2015). Balancing audience and privacy tensions on social network sites. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1485-1504. doi: 1932–8036/20150005 [pdf]
- Ellison, N., Vitak, J., Gray, R., & Lampe, C. (2014). Cultivating social resources: The relationship between bridging social capital and Facebook use among adults. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19, 855-870. doi: 10.1111/jcc4.12078 [pdf]
Research Projects:
Enhancing Digital Privacy and Security Skills for Low-Socioeconomic Families: Resources for Librarians and Patrons
Principal Investigator: Jessica Vitak
Investigator: Mega Subramaniam
Mapping Privacy and Surveillance Dynamics in Emerging Mobile Ecosystems: Practices and Contexts in the Netherlands and US
Principal Investigator: Jessica Vitak
Investigator:
Mobile devices are efficient and convenient, but also increase the potential for more pervasive forms of digitally mediated surveillance by media companies, marketers, governments, employers, and Internet Service Providers. This project evaluates mobile users’ mental models of privacy.
Collaborative Research: Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research (PERVADE)
Principal Investigator: Katie Shilton, Jessica Vitak
Investigator:
Increasingly pervasive data about people enables fundamentally new computational research. Simultaneously, changes in scale, scope, speed, and depth of data availability require reconsideration of ethics for computational research. Much work addressing ethics for big and pervasive data proceeds from first principles, applying traditional tenets of research ethics to computational data research.