Danah Boyd

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Danah Michele Boyd (born 1977), also known as danah boyd, is an American academic, researcher, blogger, and employee of Yahoo! Research Berkeley best known for media appearances where she speaks about social networking sites such as Friendster and MySpace. Since 2003, she and her research have been quoted on the subject of social networking in dozens of different articles in media sources such as NPR, Wired, MSNBC, USA Today, and The O'Reilly Factor. [link]. She was also the subject of a major profile in The New York Times in 2003.[link]

Biography

Born Danah Michele Mattas, Boyd grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. According to her website [link], Boyd experimented with different methods of spelling and capitalizing her name, and during college was known as "Danah Michele Mattas Beard", but after her mother's divorce, she chose her maternal grandfather's name, Boyd, as her own last name.

She initially studied computer science at Brown University where she worked with Andy van Dam, and then pursued her Masters Degree in sociable media with Judith Donath at the MIT Media Lab. In 1999, she worked for the New York-based V-Day, first as a volunteer and then as paid staff. She eventually moved to San Francisco, California, where she became associated with individuals involved in creating the new Friendster service. She documented what she was observing via her blog, and this grew into a career as she became a recognized authority on the subject of social networking.

Boyd presently resides in San Francisco, California, where she works at Yahoo! Research Berkeley, and is a Ph.D. student with Peter Lyman in the UC Berkeley School of Information.

Boyd has written over a dozen academic papers and op-ed pieces on various facets of online culture, and has presented papers or been a speaker on the subject at major conferences such as SIGGRAPH, CHI, Etech and the AAAS annual meeting.

References

[Boyd's personal website] ([List of press and media appearances])
[apophenia] - Boyd's blog
New York Times, November 23, 2003 ["Decoding the New Cues in Online Society"] - a major profile of Boyd
San Francisco Chronicle, April 25, 2004, ["The Profiler; Why the online masses act the way they do"]
NPR, February 1, 2006, ["Teens Create their Own Space Online"]

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