@redhenlab

The Distributed Little Red Hen Lab is a global laboratory and consortium for research into multimodal communication. Its main goal is theory. Its second goal is the development of new computational, statistical, and technical tools to assist research into multimodal communication. Red Hen is a cooperative of engaged researchers who collaborate closely and contribute power and content to Red Hen and hence to each other and to future researchers. It lacks the resources and organization to serve scholars other than those who work in the cooperative. Red Hen's vast and growing archive is not designed to be a corpus, but some collaborators use it to help create corpora for specific purposes. Researchers who would like to work on yet newer ways of deriving corpora from the archive, on providing user-friendly interfaces for the archive, on improving the tagging of data, or on anything else that would benefit the distributed laboratory are warmly encouraged to write to the directors.

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 Cyberenabled Discovery and Innovation program of the US National Science Foundation CNS 1028381 and 1027965 (2010-2016, PIs Zhu, Groeling, Steen, & Zhai), the Anneliese Maier Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation awarded to Turner (2016-2020), the Research Council of Norway, and Google Summer of Code (see our 2015 report).
  1. Why is it called the "Distributed Little Red Hen Lab"?  Because we are a 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.  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.
  2. View a presentation of the Red Hen Lab by Mark Turner, 2 March 2012.
  3. Read an article by Francis Steen & Mark Turner on the use of Red Hen to study Multimodal Construction Grammar.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. Read about the history of the development of UCLA NewsScape, Ren Hen's largest multimodal dataset, March 2014.
  7. Examples of High School Research in the Red Hen Lab.
  8. 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 includeCWRU high-performance computing logo
  • Francis Steen, Communication Studies, UCLA
  • Mark Turner, Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University
  • Song-Chun Zhu, Statistics, UCLA
  • Cheng Zhai, Computer Science, UIUC
  • Anders Hougaard, Communication Studies, Southern Denmark University,
    director of Corpus-Based Multimedia Analysis.
  • Erik Bucy, Texas Tech
  • Javier Valenzuela, University of Murcia, Spain
  • Peter Uhrig, FAU, Germany
  • Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas, University of Navarra, Spain
  • Heiko Schuldt and the iMotion group at the University of Basel, Switzerland
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.