Red Hen's secondary goal is the development of computational, statistical, and technical tools for big data science on multimodal communication. See e.g.
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
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'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