Collaborate with the lab
Researchers and students at any institution, and industry and community partners, are welcome. Cross-institutional and remote collaboration are normal. The lab works on questions, not on credentials.
Working with the lab
The lab collaborates as co-authors on studies of virtual environments, streaming platforms, computational methods, and virtual meetings. Alex Leith also joins research teams that need computational content analysis, livestream and platform data, or VR and AI communication methods.
Research partnerships that produce published work, with data handled under the partner's privacy requirements.
Students at SIUE and elsewhere collaborate on lab research as co-authors. Funded student positions, when grants allow, are for students enrolled in SIUE's Department of Mass Communications; students at other institutions are funded only through their own institution's part in a shared grant. The lab does not offer remote employment.
Common paths in
The lab maintains restricted-access corpora on Twitch chat behavior, VRChat- adjacent Twitter discourse, and pandemic remote-work tweets. A focused research question on one of these is a common starting point. Many projects produce a conference paper inside a single semester.
Active codebases in R, Python, and web stacks (SvelteKit, Next.js, TypeScript). TASS, GearOut, the v2v R package, the Mass Comm Careers Dashboard: all welcome contributors.
ICA, NCA, DiGRA, Meaningful XR, AoIR, HICSS, CHI. Most students who collaborate with the lab have at least one of these on their CV before they finish.
For students at SIUE: undergraduate research through URCA across multiple departments (Mass Comm, Applied Communication Studies, Psychology, Integrative Studies), MA thesis chairing in Mass Comm, and committee work across the consortium.
What the first conversation looks like
Bring a question, an interest, or a dataset. The first conversation is about whether a project is workable and where the friction will be, not about whether the idea is "good enough." Most workable projects don't start fully formed. Most start with something specific you noticed.
Reach out
aleith@siue.edu. Short messages are fine. A sentence on who you are, a sentence on what caught your interest, and a sentence on what you'd like to do is plenty.