6 research outputs found
Design and Somatic Sensibilities
 Cultivating somatic sensibilities involves heightening our sensory appreciation as a path to devise meaningful multisensory experiences in interaction design. Immersed in an increasingly digitalized and data-cenÂtric world, research projects centering on the sensory, embodied, and material reality of our experience, might start losing momentum. On the other hand, the pandemic has also transferred our labs from the public nature of our workshop room to the intimacy of our homes, bringing unexpected benefits and challenges. The articles included in this issue center on the sensory and material experiences of designers, who work with design methods that foreground somatic modes of inquiry and show how these changes could open a door for new opportunities to emphasize the importance of embodied and somatic practices in design and HCI
Taboo and Collaborative Knowledge Production: Evidence from Wikipedia
By definition, people are reticent or even unwilling to talk about taboo
subjects. Because subjects like sexuality, health, and violence are taboo in
most cultures, important information on each of these subjects can be difficult
to obtain. Are peer produced knowledge bases like Wikipedia a promising
approach for providing people with information on taboo subjects? With its
reliance on volunteers who might also be averse to taboo, can the peer
production model produce high-quality information on taboo subjects? In this
paper, we seek to understand the role of taboo in knowledge bases produced by
volunteers. We do so by developing a novel computational approach to identify
taboo subjects and by using this method to identify a set of articles on taboo
subjects in English Wikipedia. We find that articles on taboo subjects are more
popular than non-taboo articles and that they are frequently vandalized.
Despite frequent vandalism attacks, we also find that taboo articles are higher
quality than non-taboo articles. We hypothesize that stigmatizing societal
attitudes will lead contributors to taboo subjects to seek to be less
identifiable. Although our results are consistent with this proposal in several
ways, we surprisingly find that contributors make themselves more identifiable
in others