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- Journal ArticleAugmenting Multi-Party Face-to-Face Interactions Amongst Strangers with User Generated Content(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 26, No. 0, 43070) Kytö, Mikko; McGookin, DavidWe present the results of an investigation into the role of curated representations of self, which we term Digital Selfs, in augmented multi-party face-to-face interactions. Advancements in wearable technologies (such as Head-Mounted Displays) have renewed interest in augmenting face-to-face interaction with digital content. However, existing work focuses on algorithmic matching between users, based on data-mining shared interests from individuals’ social media accounts, which can cause information that might be inappropriate or irrelevant to be disclosed to others. An alternative approach is to allow users to manually curate the digital augmentation they wish to present to others, allowing users to present those aspects of self that are most important to them and avoid undesired disclosure. Through interviews, video analysis, questionnaires and device logging, of 23 participants in 6 multi-party gatherings where individuals were allowed to freely mix, we identified how users created Digital Selfs from media largely outside existing social media accounts, and how Digital Selfs presented through HMDs were employed in multi-party interactions, playing key roles in facilitating strangers to interact with each other. We present guidance for the design of future multi-party digital augmentations in collaborative scenarios.
- Journal ArticleAn Analysis of the Use of Qualifications on the Amazon Mechanical Turk Online Labor Market(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 26, No. 0, 43070) Sodré, Ianna; Brasileiro, FranciscoSeveral human computation systems use crowdsourcing labor markets to recruit workers. However, it is still a challenge to guarantee that the results produced by workers have a high enough quality. This is particularly difficult in markets based on micro-tasks, where the assessment of the quality of the results needs to be done automatically. Pre-selection of suitable workers is a mechanism that can improve the quality of the results achieved. This can be done by considering worker’s personal information, worker’s historical behavior in the system, or through the use of customized qualification tasks. However, little is known about how requesters use these mechanisms in practice. This study advances present knowledge in worker pre-selection by analyzing data collected from the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform, regarding the way requesters use qualifications to this end. Furthermore, the influence of using customized qualification tasks in the quality of the results produced by workers is investigated. Results show that most jobs (93.6%) use some mechanism for the pre-selection of workers. While most workers use standard qualifications provided by the system, the few requesters that submit most of the jobs prefer to use customized ones. Regarding worker behavior, we identified a positive and significant correlation between the propensity of the worker to possess a particular qualification, and both the number of tasks that require this qualification, and the reward offered for the tasks that require the qualification, although this correlation is weak. To assess the impact that the use of customized qualifications has in the quality of the results produced, we have executed experiments with three different types of tasks using both unqualified and qualified workers. The results showed that, generally, qualified workers provide more accurate answers, when compared to unqualified ones.
- Journal ArticleA Case Study of How a Reduction in Explicit Leadership Changed an Online Game Community(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 26, No. 0, 43070) McEwan, Gregor; Gutwin, CarlLeadership is considered critical to virtual community success. Leaders engage in important community activities such as encouraging members and building social structure. These potential benefits, however, have rarely been empirically tested. We were presented with an opportunity to explore this issue while studying an online board-and-card-game community. During our study, the community experienced a major change in leadership when the founder – and formal leader – decided to substantially reduce his involvement in the site. This provided us with the rare opportunity to carry out a case study of leadership reduction in a real-world community. To look at the effects of leadership on community behaviour, we analysed 16 months of activity logs, supported by interviews, to compare the community before, during, and after the founder’s withdrawal. We observed strong variability in the effects of a leadership reduction – some results were in line with the “leadership hypothesis,” but others were unexpected. In some cases, we found evidence that reducing formal leadership can have negative effects on the success of the community; but in other cases, we found surprising sources of resilience to the reduction in leadership activities. Our study is the first to look at the details of how leadership (and a reduction in this role) affects several types of sub-community within a board-and-card game site, and the first to consider some of the factors that lead to differences in the effects of leadership reduction. Overall, we found that negative effects on sub-communities were closely tied to the specific activities that the leader provided, and the degree to which he was the only person able to provide those roles. The broad strokes of this finding agree with the leadership hypothesis, but there are several unexpected elements within the main story: the negative effects were less drastic than we anticipated, and all of the sub-communities (even the most dependent) survived the transition. The strong resilience of some of the sub-communities seems to be connected to their ability to “fall back” to a foundation of shared activity (i.e., game play) – an idea that has been introduced in earlier work but never studied empirically. This research helps designers to understand the complexities of leadership in online communities, providing an important foundation for developing and supporting online groups.
- Journal ArticleWhat if it Switched on the Sun? Exploring Creativity in a Brainstorming Session with Children Through a Vygotskyan Perspective(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 26, No. 0, 2017) Kinnula, Marianne; Molin-Juustila, Tonja; Sánchez Milara, Iván; Cortes, Marta; Riekki, JukkaWe contribute in this study a first step in theory-based understanding on how creativity in collaborative design sessions relates to the elements that are present in a creative act. These elements include group composition, objects present, practices used, and previous knowledge of the participants. The context of this study was our search for lightweight methods for technology design with children, which can be used in a school context with large groups, will require as little amount of training as possible, and can be set up quickly. We formed a mixed group, consisting of young children, an older child and an adult, with the aim of involving children in creative collaborative brainstorming during the very early phases of design, so as to come up with fruitful ideas for technology development. We report our process and examine the implications of our results in relation to different elements that trigger and affect creativity in the collaborative design process. Use of Vygotsky’s cycle of creativity as our theoretical lens together with timeline analysis method presented in the paper were essential for seeing beneath the surface of what happened in this complex, collaborative creative process. Our results can be used for further methodological development of creative collaborative sessions, both with children and adults.
- Journal ArticleInfrastructuring for Cross-Disciplinary Synthetic Science: Meta-Study Research in Land System Science(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 26, No. 0, 42826) Young, Alyson L.; Lutters, Wayne G.Traditionally infrastructure studies are post-hoc analyses of emergent phenomena. While acknowledging the contextual complexity of co-evolution, there has been a turn toward exploring these processes from a design perspective. In this paper we examine a new interdiscipline, Land System Science, whose scientific inquiry is predicated on a deep and ongoing integration of radically disparate data from across the natural, physical, and social sciences. We report the results of a three-and-a half year field study of meta-study practice. In doing so, we perform infrastructural inversion to foreground the backstage scientific work practice to identify points of infrastructure. We used these insights regarding breakdowns and workarounds to inform the design of GLOBE, infrastructural tools that support this community’s needs for communication, cooperation, and knowledge construction. Our insight comes from being embedded both with domain scientists and software developers. Through four cases, we highlight the scientists’ unique challenges, strategies developed to address them, and the system components designed to better support many of these tactics. Specifically, we address the difficulties of finding, standardizing, interpreting, and validating data. This advances the infrastructuring literature by illustrating how design can be used to engage a scientific community in active self-reflection.
- Journal ArticleExploring the Difficulties African-American Middle School Girls Face Enacting Computational Algorithmic Thinking over three Years while Designing Games for Social Change(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 26, No. 0, 43070) Thomas, Jakita O.; Rankin, Yolanda; Minor, Rachelle; Sun, LiComputational algorithmic thinking (CAT) is the ability to design, implement, and assess the implementation of algorithms to solve a range of problems. It involves identifying and understanding a problem, articulating an algorithm or set of algorithms in the form of a solution to the problem, implementing that solution in such a way that the solution solves the problem, and evaluating the solution based on some set of criteria. CAT is an important scaffolded on-ramp as students develop more advanced computational thinking capabilities and apply computational thinking to solve problems that are more constrained and require greater expertise. Supporting Computational Algorithmic Thinking (SCAT) is both a longitudinal between-subjects research project and a free enrichment program supporting and guiding African-American middle school girls over three years as they iteratively design a set of complex games for social change. This article explores Scholars’ reflections about the difficulties they faced while using CAT capabilities as they engaged in collaborative game design for social change over those three years. We particularly focus on how these difficulties changed over the course of three years as well as new difficulties that emerged from year to year as Scholars become more expert game designers and computational algorithmic thinkers.
- Journal ArticleThis Is Not a Fish: On the Scale and Politics of Infrastructure Design Studies(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 26, No. 0, 42826) Parmiggiani, ElenaInterconnected workplace information technologies (information infrastructures) are distributed across user and system types, agendas, locales, and temporal rhythms. The term infrastructuring describes the design of information infrastructure not as a bounded phase but as a continuous collaborative and inherently political process. From the perspective of ethnographers, however, this conceptualization presents the practical challenge of dealing with the political work involved in infrastructuring and in its study. In this paper, I discuss the challenges of infrastructuring activities for ethnographic research. Based on a self-revealing account of my three-year ethnographic study of an oil company’s project to design a platform for subsea environmental monitoring in the Arctic region, I discuss how my framing of infrastructuring was the result of my process of constructing the ethnographic field in my research. I combined four mechanisms to scale my ethnographic method to investigate infrastructuring across heterogeneous dimensions. Drawing on my practical experience, I discuss how my process of constructing the field let me discover richer possibilities for understanding the politics involved in the study of infrastructuring.
- Journal ArticleFrom Episodes to Continuity of Care: a Study of a Call Center for Supporting Independent Living(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 26, No. 3, 42887) Farshchian, Babak A.; Vilarinho, Thomas; Mikalsen, MariusCall centers are a central coordination hub for remote health services and telemedicine. Recently, also telecare providers use call centers to support the remote care of seniors living independently. Although we know that the quality of the interaction between caregiver and senior care recipient is important, there is a gap in our knowledge as to how ICT solutions can support this interaction through a call center model. In this paper, we describe a case study of a modern call center designed to provide services for independent living, primarily for seniors. The case study gives us new insight into how service providers envision ICT support for independent living in the future. We discuss our findings from interviews, observations and design workshops in light of relevant literature about independent living and call centers. We conclude with a set of directions for future ICT for call centers to support independent living of seniors. These tools should: 1) support continuity of care instead of episodes of care, 2) support caregiving activities in addition to medical triage activities, 3) support “technical caregiving” i.e. remote use, testing and maintenance of technology at home, and 4) support call center operators in leading ad hoc and emergent coordination in distributed teams.
- Journal ArticleRe-Infrastructuring for eHealth: Dealing with Turns in Infrastructure Development(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 26, No. 0, 42826) Grisot, Miria; Vassilakopoulou, PolyxeniIn this paper, we examine infrastructuring in the context of developing national, public eHealth services in Norway. Specifically, we analyze the work of a project team engaged in the design and development of new web-based capabilities for communication between citizens and primary healthcare practitioners. We frame the case as a study of re-infrastructuring to signify a particular occasion of infrastructuring that entails facilitating a new logic within established social and technological networks. To make sense of the particularities of re-infrastructuring, we draw from research in infrastructure studies which considers embeddedness as a resource in infrastructure evolution. We analyze how actors worked to re-infrastructure through adapting primary care information systems, information flows and representations of patient data. Our findings show how the work of re-infrastructuring revolves around addressing two key design concerns: a) bringing novelty without being trapped in the existing arrangements or harming what is in place, b) bringing changes that are within a specific direction although they happen through distributed decision taking.
- Journal ArticlePaper Practices in Institutional Talk: How Financial Advisors Impress their Clients(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 26, No. 0, 43070) Dolata, Mateusz; Schwabe, GerhardPaper is a persistent element of financial advisory encounters, despite the increasing digitisation of the financial industry. We seek to understand the reasons behind the resilience of paper-based encounters and advisors’ resistance to change by understanding the paper’s roles in financial advisory encounters. While applying multimodal analysis to a set of field and experimental data, we point to a range of prevalent advisory practices that rely on the use of paper documents and hand-written notes. We focus on the choreography of paper and how this intersects with the participants’ institutional identities and goals. Specifically, we show how advisors’ paper-oriented actions seek to convey a positive impression about the advisor and about the bank to the client, i.e. how they engage in seemingly mundane practices to impress their clients. Paper is far more than a medium for saving and presenting information: it is an interaction resource, a semiotic resource and an institutional resource; all these aspects of paper come into play during a financial advisory encounter. The manuscript concludes with suggestions on the design of technologies that may potentially replace the paper in financial advisory encounters and assesses the likelihood of this in light of the results.
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