Delphine Gardiner
Emily Hu, a fourth-year doctoral student in the Computational Social Science Lab (CSSLab), recently launched her award-winning Team Communication Toolkit at the Academy of Management Conference on August 12 in Chicago.
This toolkit allows researchers to analyze text-based communication data among groups and teams by providing over a hundred research-backed conversational features, eliminating the need to compute these features from scratch.
For social scientists, being able to identify meaningful attributes in conversations is essential, as it helps us understand the factors that influence our interactions in a variety of contexts — from team dynamics to conversations to negotiations. But the process of identifying and extracting conversation features can be time consuming.
Realizing the complexities of analyzing conversations, Hu set out to build a platform to help promote a collective understanding of communication. Her team spent the last two years reviewing the literature on these conversational features and has implemented 164 of them (and counting!) into the toolkit.