Crafting, Communality, and Computing: Building on Existing Strengths To Support a Vulnerable Population

In Nepal, sex-trafficking survivors and the organizations that support them have limited resources to assist the survivors in their on-going journey towards reintegration. We take an asset-based approach wherein we identify and build on the strengths possessed by such groups. In this work, we present reflections from introducing a voice-annotated web application to a group of survivors. The web application tapped into and built upon two elements of pre-existing strengths possessed by the survivors -- the social bond between them and knowledge of crafting as taught to them by the organization. Our findings provide insight into the array of factors influencing how the survivors act in relation to one another as they created novel use practices and adapted the technology. Experience with the application seemed to open knowledge of computing as a potential source of strength. Finally, we articulate three design desiderata that could help promote communal spaces: make activity perceptible to the group, create appropriable steps, and build in fun choices.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figure. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'20

The Care Work of Access

Current approaches to AI and Assistive Technology (AT) often foreground task completion over other encounters such as expressions of care. Our paper challenges and complements such task-completion approaches by attending to the care work of access—the continual affective and emotional adjustments that people make by noticing and attending to one another. We explore how this work impacts encounters among people with and without vision impairments who complete tasks together. We find that bound up in attempts to get things done are concerns for one another and how well people are doing together. Reading this work through emerging disability studies and feminist STS scholarship, we account for two important forms of work that give rise to access: (1) mundane attunements and (2) noninnocent authorizations. Together these processes work as sensitizing concepts to help HCI scholars account for the ways that intelligent ATs both produce access while sometimes subverting people with disabilities

Conformity of Eating Disorders through Content Moderation

For individuals with mental illness, social media platforms are considered spaces for sharing and connection. However, not all expressions of mental illness are treated equally on these platforms. Different aggregates of human and technical control are used to report and ban content, accounts, and communities. Through two years of digital ethnography, including online observation and interviews, with people with eating disorders, we examine the experience of content moderation. We use a constructivist grounded theory approach to analysis that shows how practices of moderation across different platforms have particular consequences for members of marginalized groups, who are pressured to conform and compelled to resist. Above all, we argue that platform moderation is enmeshed with wider processes of conformity to specific versions of mental illness. Practices of moderation reassert certain bodies and experiences as 'normal' and valued, while rejecting others. At the same time, navigating and resisting these normative pressures further inscribes the marginal status of certain individuals. We discuss changes to the ways that platforms handle content related to eating disorders by drawing on the concept of multiplicity to inform design

Heterogeneity in making: Findings, approaches, and reflections on inclusivity in making and makerspaces

Making, that is, the hobbyist and technologically based creation of things, has been associated with many benefits. It is considered to contribute to the development of skills and to enable participation in innovation, and even democracy. At the same time, institutionalized making (in makerspaces, FabLabs) is known to be exclusive as members of such spaces are very often young well-educated white men. This is in contradiction to the promise and self-understanding of the maker culture, which aims to be open and inclusive. In the past 3 years, we, a group of researchers, makers, fablab employees, hackerspace operators, and artists, have engaged with such disparities in a collaborative research project. We inquired into barriers that women* and other underrepresented groups experience, created visions to change the status quo, and implemented smaller and bigger interventions in different spaces (fablab, hackerspace, and makers' homes) to explore their impacts. This article discusses findings, approaches, and foremost, reflections and experiences. In addition to presenting selected insights from our explorations, we pay particular attention to the tensions and challenges that we encountered during our research endeavors. Many of those are rooted in our own roles, perspectives, and backgrounds, which are multiple, sometimes conflicting, troubling, frustrating, yet enriching, and rewarding. In the form of a written conversation among project members, we present those different viewpoints, connect them where possible, and oppose them where needed. We conclude by articulating tensions that we see as characteristic regarding making and the research around it

Proceed with Care:Reimagining Home IoT Through a Care Perspective

As the internet is increasingly embedded in the everyday things in our homes, we notice a need for greater focus on the role care plays in those relationships—and therefore an opportunity to realize un- seen potential in reimagining home Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper we report on our inquiry of home dwellers’ relationships to caring for their everyday things and homes (referred to as thing- care). Findings from our design ethnography reveal four thematic qualities of their relationships to thingcare: Care Spectacle, Care Liminality, Ontological Binding, and Care Condition. Using these themes as touchstones, we co-speculated to produce four specula- tive IoT concepts to explore what care as a design ethic might look like for IoT and reflect on nascent opportunities and challenges for domestic IoT design. We conclude by considering structures of power and privilege embedded within care practices that critically open new design imaginaries for IoT

Wikipedia Edit-a-thons as Sites of Public Pedagogy

Wikipedia edit-a-thon events provide a targeted approach toward incorporating new knowledge into the online encyclopedia while also offering pathways toward new editor participation. Through the analysis of interviews with 13 edit-a-thon facilitators, however, we find motivations for running edit-a-thons extend far beyond adding content and editors. In this paper, we uncover how a range of personal and institutional values inspire these event facilitators toward fulfilling broader goals including fostering information literacy and establishing community relationships outside of Wikipedia. Along with reporting motivations, values, and goals, we also describe strategies facilitators adopt in their practice. Next, we discuss challenges faced by facilitators as they organize edit-a-thons. We situate our findings within two complementary theoretical lenses-information ecologies and public pedagogy to guide our interpretation. Finally, we suggest new ways in which edit-a-thons, as well as similar peer production events and communities, can be understood, studied, and evaluated

Exploring the Role of Paradata in Digitally Supported Qualitative Co-Research

Academics and community organisations are increasingly adopting co-research practices where participants contribute to qualitative data collection, analysis, and dissemination. These qualitative practices can often lack transparency that can present a problem for stakeholders (such as funding agencies) who seek evidence of the rigour and accountability in these decision-making processes. When qualitative research is done digitally, paradata is available as interaction logs that reveal the underlying processes, such as the time spent engaging with different segments of an interview. In practice, paradata is seldom used to examine the decisions associated with undertaking qualitative research. This paper explores the role of paradata arising from a four-month engagement with a community-led charity that used a digital platform to support their qualitative co-research project. Through observations of platform use and reflective post-deployment interviews, our findings highlight examples of paradata generated through digital tools in qualitative research, e.g., listening coverage, engagement rate, thematic maps and data discards. From this, we contribute a conceptualisation of paradata and discuss its role in qualitative research to improve process transparency, enhance data sharing, and to create feedback loops with research participants

Behind the Screens: Social Media Managers at Cultural Institutions

Social media managers may not be the first people that come to mind during a pandemic – their work is trivialized, undervalued, and denigrated as tasks any young person could perform. However, they are one of few, if not the only, information professionals at cultural institutions able to nurture scholarship, creativity, and imagination digitally during worldwide shutdowns. While library and museum staff believe social media is important (and will become even more so in the future) many organizations have no strategy for its use nor measure their efforts (Oosman et al., 2014; Aerni & Schegg, 2017; OCLC, 2018). In response to this absence of guidance, this study takes a practitioner-centered approach to learn how these communicators define, perform, and evaluate their work. This research uses longitudinal interpretative phenomenological analysis (LIPA) and dramaturgical metaphors to uncover and document social media managers’ lived experiences and the evolution of their role during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results are then used to inform a descriptive framework of social media work at cultural institutions and map participant descriptions of virtual content and programming to a continuum of institutional practices. These applications offer guidance for cultural institutions looking to better support their social media communicators and ultimately foster more meaningful engagement with broader audiences.Doctor of Philosoph

Behind the Screens: Social Media Managers at Cultural Institutions

Social media managers may not be the first people that come to mind during a pandemic – their work is trivialized, undervalued, and denigrated as tasks any young person could perform. However, they are one of few, if not the only, information professionals at cultural institutions able to nurture scholarship, creativity, and imagination digitally during worldwide shutdowns. While library and museum staff believe social media is important (and will become even more so in the future) many organizations have no strategy for its use nor measure their efforts (Oosman et al., 2014; Aerni & Schegg, 2017; OCLC, 2018). In response to this absence of guidance, this study takes a practitioner-centered approach to learn how these communicators define, perform, and evaluate their work. This research uses longitudinal interpretative phenomenological analysis (LIPA) and dramaturgical metaphors to uncover and document social media managers’ lived experiences and the evolution of their role during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results are then used to inform a descriptive framework of social media work at cultural institutions and map participant descriptions of virtual content and programming to a continuum of institutional practices. These applications offer guidance for cultural institutions looking to better support their social media communicators and ultimately foster more meaningful engagement with broader audiences