Playing Unbound: Towards a Radically Intersectional HCI

This short essay is a call to action for digital games researchers to positively transform the future of HCI by meaningfully adopting an explicitly intersectional approach to our work as a scholarly community

Digital Intimacy in Real Time: Live Streaming Gender and Sexuality

This article serves as the guest editors’ introduction to the Television and New Media special issue dedicated to gender and sexuality in live streaming. Live streaming is a key part of the contemporary digital media landscape; it sits at the center of wide-reaching shifts in how culture, entertainment, and labor are expressed and experienced online today. Gender and sexuality are crucial elements of live streaming. Across live streaming’s many forms, these elements manifest in myriad ways: from gendered performances to gender-based harassment, from LGBTQ community building to real-time sex work. This special issue models an interdisciplinary approach to studying gender and sexuality in live streaming, featuring scholarship from the humanities, social sciences, and human-computer interaction. It also serves as an impassioned call to those who study technological tools and platforms like live streaming to pay attention to the crucial roles that identity, power, embodiment, and intimacy play in these technologies. There can be no full cultural understanding of live streaming that does not address its entanglements with sexuality and gender

Indy R&D: Doing HCI research off the beaten path

This panel discusses independent research and development in HCI. We focus on possible models for Indy R&D operations, supporting infrastructures, practical methods, and taking advantage of academic skills in the transition. Panel participants have experience in several different models of funding, conducting, and disseminating results from independent research. We will provide the audience with practical tips to help them decide if Indy R&D is right for them, and if so, help them do it. © 2012 Authors

Frēstyl: Simplifying the Process of Promoting and Discovering Local Live Music

In this paper, we present a new service for web and iPhone for promoting and discovering live music, frēstyl. We will show how frēstyl addresses and attempts to solve the problem that emerging musicians, local promoters and small/medium venues face when publicizing their events, both on a local and global level, and the problem that music fans face when trying to gather a complete but not overwhelming understanding of local and global live music events

Aesthetic Journeys

Researchers and designers are increasingly creating technologies intended to support urban mobility. However, the question of what mobility is remains largely under-examined. In this paper we will use the notion of aesthetic journeys to reconsider the relationship between urban spaces, people and technologies. Fieldwork on the Orange County bus system and in the London Underground leads to a discussion of how we might begin to design for multiple mobilities

In-Between Theory and Practice: Dialogues in Design Research

Why Wait? and Betwixt are two of the workshops we have recently run on the theme of in-between-ness. The approach of social computing, where researchers work to understand how the socio-cultural aspects of human life relate to the design of new technologies, was the starting point for our investigation. By observing actual instances of in-between-ness in context we explored how design activities can be used as an opportunity to discuss and take positions on a specific theme, and as a space for narrowing the gap in design research between theoretical and practical thinking

Sexual Interactions: Why We Should Talk About Sex in HCI

Within the CHI community there is growing interest in moving beyond cognition and expanding into the social, emotional, and bodily aspects of the human-computer experience. Sex lies at the intersection of these concerns, and indeed outside of HCI, has become a central topic for anthropology, behavioral sciences, and other areas of intellectual inquiry. Examining sex and themes related to it has benefited these disciplines and we intend to understand how it can contribute to HCI. There is a tendency to desexualize technology, despite the presence of sex and sexuality in a variety of interactions, including the use of the internet for viewing pornography, building online communities, and facilitating intimacy. By rendering these interactions sexless, we risk gaining only a marginal understanding of technology\u27s role in day-to-day life

An Innovative Use of Twitter to Disseminate and Promote Medical Student Scholarship During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Usability Study

BACKGROUND: Due to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, the cancellation of in-person learning activities forced every aspect of medical education and student engagement to pivot to a web-based format, including activities supporting the performance and dissemination of scholarly work. At that time, social media had been used to augment in-person conference learning, but it had not been used as the sole platform for scholarly abstract presentations. OBJECTIVE: Our aim was to assess the feasibility of using Twitter to provide a completely web-based forum for real-time dissemination of and engagement with student scholarly work as an alternative to a traditional in-person poster presentation session. METHODS: The Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University launched an online Medical Student Scholarship Forum, using Twitter as a platform for students to present scholarly work and prepare for future web-based presentations. A single student forum participant created posts using a standardized template that incorporated student research descriptions, uniform promotional hashtags, and individual poster presentations. Tweets were released over 5 days and analytic data were collected from the Twitter platform. Outcome measures included impressions, engagements, retweets, likes, media engagements, and average daily engagement rate. RESULTS: During the conference, the student leader published 63 tweets promoting the work of 58 students (55 medical and 3 dental students) over 5 days. During the forum and the following week, tweets from the @BrodyDistinctly Twitter account received 63,142 impressions and 7487 engagements, including 187 retweets, 1427 likes, and 2082 media engagements. During the 5 days of the forum, the average daily engagement rate was 12.72%. CONCLUSIONS: Using Twitter as a means of scholarly dissemination resulted in a larger viewing community compared to a traditional in-person event. Early evidence suggests that social media platforms may be an alternative to traditional scholarly presentations. Presenting via Twitter allowed students to receive instantaneous feedback and effectively network with wider academic communities. Additional research is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of knowledge uptake, feedback, and networking

Massively distributed authorship of academic papers

Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that would be necessary or useful to the writing process. The process of collaboratively writing this paper was used to discover, negotiate, and document issues in massively authored scholarship. Our work provides the first extensive discussion of the experiential aspects of large-scale collaborative research.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Multicopy Single-Stranded DNA Directs Intestinal Colonization of Enteric Pathogens

Multicopy single-stranded DNAs (msDNAs) are hybrid RNA-DNA molecules encoded on retroelements called retrons and produced by the action of retron reverse transcriptases. Retrons are widespread in bacteria but the natural function of msDNA has remained elusive despite 30 years of study. The major roadblock to elucidation of the function of these unique molecules has been the lack of any identifiable phenotypes for mutants unable to make msDNA. We report that msDNA of the zoonotic pathogen Salmonella Typhimurium is necessary for colonization of the intestine. Similarly, we observed a defect in intestinal persistence in an enteropathogenic E. coli mutant lacking its retron reverse transcriptase. Under anaerobic conditions in the absence of msDNA, proteins of central anaerobic metabolism needed for Salmonella colonization of the intestine are dysregulated. We show that the msDNA-deficient mutant can utilize nitrate, but not other alternate electron acceptors in anaerobic conditions. Consistent with the availability of nitrate in the inflamed gut, a neutrophilic inflammatory response partially rescued the ability of a mutant lacking msDNA to colonize the intestine. These findings together indicate that the mechanistic basis of msDNA function during Salmonella colonization of the intestine is proper production of proteins needed for anaerobic metabolism. We further conclude that a natural function of msDNA is to regulate protein abundance, the first attributable function for any msDNA. Our data provide novel insight into the function of this mysterious molecule that likely represents a new class of regulatory molecules