Hi! I am Michele.

Librarian, Musician, Teacher, Gamer

I am a doctoral student in the Information School at the University of Washington advised by Dr. Jin Ha Lee and Dr. Jason Yip. I am a member of the UW Gamer Group and the Digital Youth Lab working with KidsTeamUW and KidsTeam Seattle Public Libraries. I hold an MLIS from the University of Denver and a MMus in Music Theory from Indiana University, Bloomington. Along with my research, I’m also a musician and avid gamer, passions that often weave their way into my scholarly pursuits!

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What I do

My research focuses on understanding how the design and use of cultural software—software specifically created to generate, distribute, and preserve cultural knowledge and artifacts—supports creativity and facilitates the creation, transmission, and preservation of cultural heritage. More specifically, I center my research around the following: 1) understanding how digital cultural software impacts how creatives learn; 2) conducting user research to identify the needs of creators when utilizing cultural software; and 3) developing systems and practices for organizing and preserving the knowledge and artifacts created by communities using digital cultural software.

  • Knowledge Organization
  • Preservation of Interactive Media
  • Human Computer Interaction
  • Cultural Production
  • Music Information Retrieval
  • Learning and Kids

Publications

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

Dumas, D., Acar, S., Berthiaume, K., Organisciak, P., Eby, D., Grajzel, K., Vlaamster, T., Newman, M., & Carrera, M. (2023). WhatMakes Children’s Responses to Creativity Assessments Difficult to Judge Reliably? The Journal of Creative Behavior, 57(3), 419–438. https://doi.org/10.1002/jocb.588

Organisciak, P., Newman, M., Eby, D., Acar, S. & Dumas, D. (2023), “How do the kids speak? Improving educational use of text mining with child-directed language models”, Information and Learning Sciences, Vol. 124 No. 1/2, pp. 25-47. https://doi.org/10.1108/ILS-06-2022-0082

Published Conference Proceedings (Refereed)

*equal contribution; +presenting author

Newman, M.+, Morris, L., Kato, J., Goto, M., Yip, J., and Lee, J. H. (2024). Purposeful Play: Evaluation and Co-Design ofCasual Music Creation Applications with Children. Proceedings of the 25th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference.

Morris, L.*, Leger, R.*, Newman, M., Burgoyneand, J. A., Groves, R., Mangai, N., & Lee, J. H. (2024). Human-AI Music Process: A Dataset of AI-Supported Songwriting Processes from the AI Song Contest. Proceedings of the 254th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference.

Newman, M.+, Favors, D., Koughan, L.D., & Lee, J. H. (2024). Participatory Media and Game Preservation: A Taxonomy of YouTube Game‐Related Content. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 61(1), 277-289. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.1027

Cho, Y., Newman, M., Pitt, C., Yip, J.C., & Lee, J.H., (2024). You Are Tilted!: Leveraging Tabletop Gaming to Manage Tilt and Strengthen Team Dynamics in Esports. Proceedings of the 2024 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY). https://doi.org/10.1145/3677116

Dangol, A.*, Newman, M.* +, Wolfe, R., Lee, J. H., Kientz, J. A., Yip, J., & Pitt, C. (2024, July). Mediating Culture: Cultivating Socio-cultural Understanding of AI in Children through Participatory Design. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 1805-1822). https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661515

Newman, M.+, Sun, K., Dalla Gasperina, I. B., Shin, G. Y., Pedraja, M. K., Kanchi, R., Song, M.B., Li, R., Lee, J.H., & Yip, J. (2024, May). " I want it to talk like Darth Vader": Helping Children Construct Creative Self-Efficacy with Generative AI. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-18). https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642492 [26.4% acceptance rate] [Paper Honorable Mention, top 5% of submissions]

Newman, M.+, Morris, L., and Lee J. H. (2023). Human-AI music creation: Understanding the perceptions and experiences of music creators for ethical and productive collaboration. Proceedings of the 24th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference. https://archives.ismir.net/ismir2023/paper/000008.pdf

Cho, Y., Newman, M., Morris, L., Koughan, L. D., Yip, J., & Lee, J. H. (2023, June). Gender Differences in Ethical Stances for Playing AR Games: The Case of Pokémon GO. In Conference Proceedings of DiGRA 2023 Conference: Limits and Margins of Games Settings. https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/view/1902

Extended Abstracts (Refereed)

Newman, M.+ and Lee, J. H. (2023). “Accidental archivists”: YouTube gameplay content and game preservation. Proceedings of the 2023 Digital Games Research Association International Conference: The Limits and Margins of Games. https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/view/2106