Work with the lab
Students and researchers — at SIUE and anywhere else — are welcome. Cross-institutional and remote collaboration are normal. The lab works on questions, not on credentials.
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 and student maintainers.
ICA, NCA, DiGRA, Meaningful XR, AoIR, HICSS, CHI. Most students who work 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.
Office hours and quick chats are scheduled through apleith.com.