@redhenlab™
The International Distributed Little Red Hen Lab™ is a global big data science laboratory and cooperative for research into multimodal communication.
Mission
Red Hen's main goal is theory of multimodal communication. See Overview of the Red Hen Vision and Program.
Red Hen's secondary goal is the development of computational, statistical, and technical tools for big data science on multimodal communication. See e.g. Red Hen Lab's Google Summer of Code 2021 Projects page.
Red Hen's tertiary goal is pedagogy: see her Τέχνη Public Site—Red Hen Lab's Learning Environment
Tools developed or deployed by Red Hen—theoretical, computational, technical, statistical—are meant to help advance research in any study of multimodal communication, including any area in which there are records of human communication: speech in any language, infant vocalization, Ancient Near Eastern writing systems, Classical Archaeology, text of any kind, notation systems, audio recordings (radio, interviews, . . .), audiovisual records, architecture, signage, gesture, pose, Greek vase painting, Roman sculpture, representations of co-speech gesture in Medieval paintings, and of course, but not foundationally, modern digital media. Red Hen focuses on basic mental operations of cognition, affect, creativity, and communication that appear to have been common across our species for at least the last fifty thousand years, and which have been recruited to great effect by various forms of media. Red Hen finds non-human animal communication interesting, too. Records and methods related to non-human communication or communication between species (e.g., border collies responding to pointing gestures) accordingly fascinate Red Hen.
Red Hen is directed jointly by Francis Steen and Mark Turner. See Red Hen's twitter feed and Crowing Rooster's News & Announcements, or our github account. Red Hen's cross-disciplinary research projects have been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, by a Cyberenabled Discovery and Innovation program of the US National Science Foundation CNS 1028381 and 1027965 (2010-2016, PIs Zhu, Groeling, Steen, & Zhai), by an Anneliese Maier Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation awarded to Turner (2016-2020), by the Research Council of Norway, by Google Summer of Code four years in a row (see the reports for 2015, 2016, and 2017), and by many other funders. For particulars, see Red Hen awards.
Brief introduction to Red Hen Lab, at the National Academies of Science:
Highlights
Why is it called the "Distributed Little Red Hen Lab™"? Because we are a worldwide, networked cooperative of self-reliant, closely-collaborating researchers contributing to each other and to future researchers. The Little Red Hen is an industrious character in a folktale, always open to collaboration but able, willing, and proud to do any job herself, and in good time. We have named our lab in her honor. The very first Donald Duck cartoon (1934) is an adaptation of this folk tale; there is also a 1956 Russian version. Here are a few classic renditions of the folktale in English:
View a presentation of the Red Hen Lab™ by Mark Turner, 2 March 2012.
Read an article by Francis Steen & Mark Turner on the use of Red Hen to study Multimodal Construction Grammar.
View a presentation of the use of the Red Hen collection to study Causal Reasoning in the News by Francis Steen at MIT, 6 September 2012.
Hear another podcast about the Red Hen Lab™ by Mark Turner. Delivered (in the MIT Media Lab under emergency lighting and without presentation technology, during a blackout!), 29 November 2012.
Read about the history of the development of UCLA NewsScape, Ren Hen's largest multimodal dataset, March 2014.
Examples of High School Research in the Red Hen Lab™.
A syllabus for a self-taught course in how to use the statistical software package R on Red Hen data.
The Distributed Little Red Hen Lab™, also known as "Red Hen Lab™" or "Red Hen," utilizes high-performance computing clusters and sophisticated videoconferencing capacities provided by Case Western Reserve University. We are grateful to Information Technology Services at Case Western Reserve University for providing these resources. Principal nodes of the research network include
Francis Steen, Communication Studies, UCLA
Mark Turner, Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University
Jungseock Joo, Communication Studies, UCLA
Erik Bucy, Texas Tech
Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas, University of Murcia, Spain
Anders Hougaard, Communication Studies, Southern Denmark University, director of SoMe Lab
Anna Pleshakova, School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, University of Oxford, UK
Heiko Schuldt and the iMotion group at the University of Basel, Switzerland
Peter Uhrig, FAU, Germany
Javier Valenzuela, University of Murcia, Spain
Jacek Woźny, Institute of English Studies, University of Wroclaw, Poland
Red Hen conducts transdisciplinary research in multimodal communications, linguistics, computational linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, education, statistics, media effects studies, political communication, and library science.
Red Hen builds tools across a range of tasks, including automated data acquisition, distributed data storage, data enhancement, joint text, sound, and vision parsing, statistical analysis, multimodal search engines, user interfaces, presentation tools, publishing platforms, and pedagogical applications. We develop open-source software at RedHenLab on Github.