Daniel Houli
I study how people make sense of information together in online communities.
About
I earned my PhD in Communication, Information and Media from Rutgers University in October 2026, under the direction of Marie L. Radford and Jeffrey Lane. My dissertation is a digital ethnography of TM‑Connect, an online Transcendental Meditation (TM) community that formed on Zoom and Facebook in March 2020 and has grown to more than 16,000 members.
Alongside my research, I lead AI product work at Dell Technologies, focused on explainable AI, self-serve support, and generative AI for content categorization and summarization. Before that I spent eleven years as a support and customer engineer for enterprise storage at EMC, where I taught technical certification courses. Both sides of my work ask the same question: how do people find and build the knowledge they need when the systems around them change?
How a Transcendental Meditation community born in crisis learned to last
My dissertation follows TM‑Connect, an online Transcendental Meditation (TM) community, from the first lockdown calls in March 2020 to a 16,000-member community that still meets twice a day.
Read the abstract and findings- 1March 2020
Crisis formation
Lockdowns end in-person group meditation, and Bob Roth begins leading twice-daily sessions on Zoom.
- 22020–2021
Early adaptation
Members learn the platforms together, and Facebook becomes a space for collective troubleshooting.
- 32021–2023
Stabilization
A collective identity forms, and members use both platforms with growing sophistication.
- 42023–2025
Sustained engagement
The community outlasts the crisis, welcoming new members while honoring its history.
Publications
Peer-reviewed work with Marie Radford, Vivek Singh, and colleagues on how search, apps, and voice assistants shape what people know.
See all publications- 2021“COVID19 is_”: The perpetuation of coronavirus conspiracy theories via Google AutocompleteProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 58(1), 218–229Supported by the National Science Foundation (award 2027784)
- 2020An exploratory study using mindfulness meditation apps to buffer workplace technostress and information overloadProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 57(1), e373
- 2019“Alexa, where do babies come from?” Investigating children’s practices with intelligent personal assistantsALISE 2019 Conference Proceedings (Juried Papers), Association for Library and Information Science Education
Research and practice
Qualitative research on online communities
Digital ethnography, interviews, and content analysis that explain how people make sense of information together, grounded in Dervin, Weick, and collective sensemaking.
Senior Product Manager, Artificial Intelligence, Dell Technologies
- Lead self-serve actions, coordinating cross-functional data gathering and backend enablement to deliver AI-driven guidance and resolution to customers.
- Drove an explanatory AI initiative that surfaces anomalous data patterns and makes complex backend data intuitive for stakeholders.
- Integrated generative AI to improve content categorization and summarization for technical support teams.
Outside work
Outside of research and work, I'm a husband and a dad of four, and we have two dogs.
Building toward the classroom
I'm starting as a teaching assistant, and I plan to teach information behavior, online communities, qualitative methods, and technology. I've taught technical certification courses for enterprise engineers.
Email me about teachingdanielhouli@yahoo.com