Jennifer J. Preece, Ph.D.

                                              

Professor, Information Systems Department
University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) 
1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA
E-mail: preece@umbc.edu 

Higher Education

1985 Open University, Ph.D. Dissertation: Interpreting Cartesian Graphs: A Study of Children’s Interpretation Skills Using Computers.

1971 University of Ulster, Honors Degree, Biology (i.e., level required for Ph.D. (scholarship grant award guaranteed). 

Employment                  

1997 Professor (and Dept. Chair until 2002), Information Systems Department, University of Maryland Baltimore County.
1994 South Bank University, Professor of Information Systems and Human-Computer Interaction. Director of the Center for People and Systems Interactions.  
1979 The Open University (see full cv for details)  

Jennifer Preece is a professor of information systems at UMBC where she was department chair for five and half years until fall 2002. During this time the department increased in size from 8 to 20 tenured and tenure-track faculty. The number of graduate students doubled to around 300, undergraduate students almost tripled to around 1650 and research productivity increased dramatically.

Prior to joining UMBC, Jenny Preece was a professor at the British Open University for fifteen years before becoming research professor of human-computer interaction and director of the HCI research center at South Bank University, London for two years. In 1996 she moved to the USA.

Jenny Preece teaches and writes texts on human computer interaction www.id-book.com and online communities www.ifsm.umbc.edu/onlinecommunities  

Her research focus is online communities and social computing. The over arching question that she researches is: ‘what makes an online community successful?’ Her work provides insights about how sociability and usability are intricately connected in the evolution of online communities. Sociability is concerned with how people interact in digital social spaces. Usability is concerned with how users interact with technology across a human-computer interface. (See full cv).

Recent selected books and book chapters

Jenny Preece is author, co-authored or editor of seven HCI books, as well as research papers and teaching texts

Preece, J., Rogers, Y. & Sharp, H. (2002) Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. (519 pages) 
This co-authored book is the text for teaching human-computer and interaction design for undergraduate and master students in many universities. www.id-book.com  

Preece, J. (2000) Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons. (439 pages)
This was one of the first comprehensive texts about online communities.  It coherently brings together the sociability and usability issues in online community development. www.ifsm.umbc.edu/onlinecommunities

Preece, J., Rogers, Y., Sharp, H., Benyon, D., Holland, S. & Carey, T. (1994) Human-Computer Interaction. Wokingham, UK: Addison-Wesley. (775 pages)
This book was a leading text in HCI until Interaction Design was published in 2002.  

Preece, J., Maloney-Krichmar, D., and Abras, C. (2003 in press) History of Emergence of Online Communities. In B. Wellman (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Community. Berkshire Publishing Group, Sage.  

Nonnecke, B. & Preece, J. (2003) Silent Participants: Getting to Know Lurkers Better. In C. Leug & D. Fisher (Eds.) From Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with Social Information Spaces. Springer-Verlag: Amsterdam, Holland. (in press)  

Preece, J. and Diane Maloney-Krichmar (2003) Online Communities. In J. Jacko and A. Sears, A. (Eds.) Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. Publishers. Mahwah: NJ. 596-620.  

Preece, J. and Ghozati, K. (2001) Observations and Explorations of Empathy Online. In. R. R. Rice and J. E. Katz, The Internet and Health Communication: Experience and Expectations. Sage Publications Inc.: Thousand Oaks. 237-260.  

Lazar, J. and Preece, J. (2002) Social Considerations in Online Communities: Usability, Sociability, and Success Factors. In H. van Oostendorp, Cognition in the Digital World. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. Publishers. Mahwah: NJ. (in press)  

Preece, J. (2001) Online communities: Usability, Sociability, Theory and Methods. In R. Earnshaw, R. Guedj, A. van Dam and T. Vince (Eds) Frontiers of Human-Centred Computing, Online Communities and Virtual Environments. Springer Verlag: Amsterdam, 263-277.  

See cv for full list of publications

Special editions

Preece, J. (Ed.) (2002) Supporting Community and Building Social Capital. Special edition of Communications of the ACM, 45, 4. 37- 39.

Preece, J. (1999) What happens after you get online? Information Impacts Magazine. December 

Recent selected refereed journal publications

De Souza, C., S., Preece, J. (2004) A framework for analyzing and understanding online communities. Interacting with Computers, The Interdisciplinary Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. (accepted, in press)

Feng, J., Lazar, J., Preece, J. (2004) Empathic and predictable communication influences online interpersonal trust. Behavior and Information Technology. (accepted, in press)

Preece, J. (2004) Etiquette Online: From nice to necessary.  Communications of the ACM. (accepted, in press)

Preece, J. (2004) Etiquette and trust drive online communities of practice. Journal of Universal Computer Science. (accepted, in press)

Preece, J., Abras, C., Maloney-Krichmar, D. (2004) Designing and Evaluating Online Communities: Research Speaks to Emerging Practice. International Journal of Web-based Communities (accepted, in press).

Preece, J., Nonnecke, B., Andrews, D. (2004) The top 5 reasons for lurking: Improving community experiences for everyone. Computers in Human Behavior, 2, 1 (in press)  

Andrews, D., Nonnecke, B., Preece, J. (2003) Electronic survey methodology: A case study in reaching hard to involve Internet Users. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 16, 2, 185-210.

Andrews, D., Preece, J., and Turoff, M. (2002) A conceptual framework for demographic groups resistant to online community. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 6, 3, 9-24. http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/dca4/article-ijec.html  

Preece, J. (2001) Sociability and usability: Twenty years of chatting online. Behavior and Information Technology Journal, 20, 5, 347-356.  

Lazar, J., Hanst, E., Buchwalter, J., and Preece, J. (2001). Collecting user requirements in a virtual population. WebNet Journal: Internet Technologies, Applications, and Issues, 2, 4, 20-27.  

Brown, J. R., van Dam, A., Earnshaw, R., Encarnacao, J., Geudj, R., Preece, J., Shneiderman, B., Vince, J. (1999) Human-centered computing, online communities, and virtual environments. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. 19, 6, 70-74.  

Lazar, J & Preece, J. (1999) Designing and implementing web-based surveys. The Journal of Computer Information Systems. Xxxix, 4, 63-67  

Lazar, J., Tsao, R., and Preece, J. (1999). One foot in cyberspace and the other on the ground: A case study of analysis and design issues in a hybrid virtual and physical community. WebNet Journal: Internet Technologies, Applications, and Issues, 1, 3, 49-57.  

Preece, J. (1999) Empathic communities: Balancing emotional and factual communication. Interacting with Computers, The Interdisciplinary Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. 12, 1, 63-77.  

Preece, J. (1999) Empathy online. Virtual Reality. 4, 1-11.  

See cv for full list of publications

Recent selected refereed conference publications

Schoberth, T., Preece, J., Armin Heinzl (2003) Online Communities: A Longitudinal Analysis of Communication Activities Proceedings of the Thirty-sixth Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE Press: Washington, D.C. (accepted, to appear)  

Preece, J., Resnick, P., Schuler, D., Sieckenius de Souza (2002) What’s  SIGCHI’s role in strengthening community? Extended Abstracts, CHI’2002 Conference, 566-567  

Maloney-Krichmar, D., Abras, C. Preece, J. (2002) Revitalizing a stalled online community: Beyond user-centered design. Social Implications of  Information and Communication Technology. 2002 International Symposium on Technology and Society ISTAS’02, 13-19

Maloney-Krichmar, D., Preece, J. (2002) The Meaning of an Online Health Community in the Lives of Its Members: Roles, Relationships and Group Dynamics Social Implications of  Information and Communication Technology. 2002 International Symposium on Technology and Society ISTAS’02, 20-27.  

Nonnecke, B. & Preece, J. (2001) Why Lurkers Lurk. AMCIS Conference, Boston, June http://snowhite.cis.uoguelph.ca/~nonnecke/research/whylurk.pdf  

Nonnecke, B. and Preece, J. (2000) Lurker Demographics: Counting the Silent. Proceedings of CHI’2000, Hague, The Netherlands, 73-80.

See cv for full list of publications

PowerPoint slides for recent talks

Slides for some of the most recent are shown below. A full list can be seen on her cv. 

Closing Keynote for HCI International, Crete 2003.

Hopkins University distinguished lecture series for the Security Institute (October 2002)

Opening Keynote for Interact’2001 Conference in Tokyo (June 2001)