This year’s ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW) kicks off in Bergen, Norway on October 18, and the University of Texas School of Information will be well represented. More than 15 current iSchool faculty and students will be presenting papers and posters at the event.
Singled out for recognition at this year’s CSCW is iSchool doctoral student Angie Zhang, co-author of the conference paper “Data and Technology for Equitable Public Administration: Understanding City Government Employees’ Challenges and Needs.” Along with her co-authors – including iSchool professor Min Kyung Lee, MSIS graduate Lee Kravchenko, and BSI and MSIS graduate Marshanah Taylor – Zhang received an “Honorable Mention” award, a recognition reserved for the top 4% of submitted papers. Congratulations!
Please join us in saluting all of the scholars listed below, who are leading the way in exploring and advancing the human aspect in technology. And for those in Bergen, please seek out these compelling presentations!
Papers
PhD student Angie Zhang, Prof. Min Kyung Lee, MSIS graduate Lee Kravchenko, and BSI/MSIS graduate Marshanah Taylor, co-authors
Wed, 22 Oct | 11:00 AM - 11:00 AM
City governments in the United States are increasingly pressured to adopt emerging technologies. Yet, these systems often risk biased and disparate outcomes. Scholars studying public sector technology design have converged on the need to ground these systems in the goals and organizational contexts of employees using them. We expand our understanding of employees' contexts by focusing on the \textit{equity practices} of city government employees to surface important equity considerations around public sector data and technology use. Through semi-structured interviews with thirty-six employees from ten departments of a U.S. city government, our findings reveal challenges employees face when operationalizing equity, perspectives on data needs for advancing equity goals, and the design space for acceptable government technology. We discuss what it looks like to foreground equity in data use and technology design, and considerations for how to support city government employees in operationalizing equity with and without official equity offices.
Prof. Hanlin Li and PhD student Riya Sinha, co-authors
Mon, 20 Oct | 2:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Wikidata, an open structured database and a sibling project to Wikipedia, has recently become an important platform for information professionals to share structured metadata from their memory institutions, e.g., publishing and managing records, creating representation information, and filling out data gaps. While studies have investigated why and how peer producers contribute to Wikidata, the institutional motivations and practices of these organizations are less understood. Given Wikidata's potential role in linking and supporting knowledge infrastructures and open data systems, we examined why and how information professionals in memory institutions use Wikidata as part of their organizational workflow. Through interviews with 15 participants, we identified three archetypes of Wikidata--providers, acquirers, and mutualists--and different types of contributions that memory institutions bring to Wikidata. We then explored potential collaboration opportunities between memory institutions and Wikidata and other volunteers, discussed the value of the data work conducted by these professionals, and examined how and why they track their contributions. Our work contributes to the wider discussions around collaboration and data work in CSCW by 1) studying the motivations and practices of information professionals, their differences from volunteer work, and opportunities for the Wikidata community to promote more collaborative efforts within memory institutions and with other volunteers and 2) drawing attention to the important data work done by memory institutions on Wikidata and pointing to opportunities for supporting information professionals' contributions.
Prof. Matthew Lease, Prof. Jacek Gwizda, and PhD student Houjiang Liu, co-authors
Mon, 20 Oct | 11:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Given the massive volume of potentially false claims circulating online, claim prioritization is essential in allocating limited human resources available for fact-checking. In this study, we perceive claim prioritization as an information retrieval (IR) task: just as multidimensional IR relevance, with many factors influencing which search results a user deems relevant, checkworthiness is also multi-faceted, subjective, and even personal, with many factors influencing how fact-checkers triage and select which claims to check. Our study investigated both the multidimensional nature of checkworthiness and effective tool support to assist fact-checkers in claim prioritization. Methodologically, we pursued Research through Design combined with mixed-method evaluation. Specifically, we developed an AI-assisted claim prioritization prototype as a probe to explore how fact-checkers use multidimensional checkworthy factors to prioritize claims, simultaneously probing fact-checker needs and exploring the design space to meet those needs. With 16 professional fact-checkers participating in our study, we uncovered a hierarchical prioritization strategy fact-checkers implicitly use, revealing an underexplored aspect of their workflow, with actionable design recommendations for improving claim triage across multidimensional checkworthiness and tailoring this process with LLM integration.
Prof Andrew Dillon, Prof. Angela D. R. Smith, Prof Yan Zhang, and PhD student Jiaying “Lizzie” Liu, co-authors
Mon, 20 Oct | 4:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Enhancing emotional well-being has become an important focus in HCI and CSCW, with technologies increasingly designed to track, visualize, and manage emotions. However, these approaches have faced criticism for potentially suppressing certain emotional experiences. Through a scoping review of 53 empirical studies from ACM proceedings implementing Technology-Mediated Emotion Intervention (TMEI), we critically examine current practices through lenses drawn from HCI critical theories. Our analysis reveals emotion intervention mechanisms that extend beyond traditional "emotion regulation" paradigms, identifying care-centered goals that prioritize non-judgmental emotional support and preserve users' identities. The findings demonstrate how researchers design technologies to generate artificial care, intervene in power dynamics, and nudge behavioral changes. We contribute the concept of "emotion support" as an alternative approach to "emotion regulation," emphasizing human-centered approaches to emotional well-being. This work advances the understanding of diverse human emotional needs beyond individual and cognitive perspectives, offering design implications that critically reimagine how technologies can honor emotional complexity, preserve human agency, and transform power dynamics in care context.
Prof. Angela D.R. Smith, undergraduate Veronica Engle
Mon, 20 Oct | 2:30 PM - 2:30 PM
To date, efforts to address misinformation have focused on broadly scoped legal, technical, and educational interventions. However, recent studies in HCI have begun exploring new directions that focus instead on the individualized nature of the problem and its roots in identity and community. To understand the potential benefits and challenges of applying community-driven methods in this and similarly contentious spaces, we examined the work of a large-scale participatory research project working to address the impact of misinformation, predominantly on rural communities and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) individuals, through the development of locally-contextualized educational resources and platforms. Through interviews with 23 project stakeholders, including both community partners and researchers, we heard that participants saw community-based research and design methods as a highly beneficial tool for addressing this problem. They shared that such methods allow participants to build relationships through the sharing of complex emotions and to surface a range of expertise and lived experiences that contribute to a more holistic understanding of misinformation. At the same time, participatory, community-based methods raise difficult questions around integrating such diverse expertise and protecting participants from internal and external risk. We also discuss emergent strategies for navigating these tensions, with the aim of informing and preparing CSCW researchers looking to apply participatory methods towards addressing misinformation and other contentious research topics.
PhD student Xinyue You, co-author
Wed, 22 Oct | 2:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Social virtual worlds provide students in remote online courses a unique approach to collaborative work and social interactions. However, the use of social virtual worlds in online learning raises concern about what privacy and ethical issues students might encounter. To shed light on this topic, we examined college students’ (N = 68) ethical and privacy concerns of using social virtual worlds across multiple class sessions, courses, universities, virtual environments, and technologies. Students revealed (a) struggling to manage their identity between classmates and strangers, (b) discomfort over violations of their avatars’ personal space, (c) issues of vulnerable populations experiencing harassment, nudity, and loneliness, and (d) concern over companies tracking and storing user data. In addition, students described the technological affordances that mitigated their privacy and ethical concerns. We discuss the implications of our findings for the future of collaborative learning and the design of social virtual worlds.
Prof. Yan Zhang and PhD student Jiaying “Lizzie” Liu, co-authors
Tue, 21 Oct | 2:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Mental health care-seeking among marginalized young adults has received limited attention in CSCW research. Through in-depth interviews and visual elicitation methods with 18 diverse U.S. participants, our study reveals how marginalized identities shape mental health care-seeking journeys, often characterized by low aspirations influenced by lived experiences of marginalization. We introduce the concept of "care encounters"—serendipitous interactions with mental health resources that occur when individuals are not actively seeking support. These encounters serve as critical turning points, catalyzing shifts in aspiration and enabling more proactive care-seeking behaviors. Their transformative impact operates through three mechanisms: tangible assistance, supportive discourse, and social connection building. Our analysis identifies the infrastructural conditions that facilitate these transformative encounters and their effectiveness in connecting marginalized young adults with appropriate mental health resources. This work advances CSCW's understanding of how marginalized identity influences care-seeking behaviors while providing actionable design implications for socio-technical interventions that can better support mental health care access for vulnerable populations.
Prof. Kenneth R. Fleischmann, PhD student Tina Lassiter, and PhD student Chelsea McCullough, co-authors
Sat, 11 Oct | 12:10 AM - 12:10 AM
This paper seeks to encourage the human-centered development of workplace technologies by demonstrating how care can inform the design of AI-based systems. The paper builds upon the ethics of care from feminist theory as well as from HCI and CSCW scholarship to foreground the interconnection between technology, those who use technology, and expressions of care in the workplace. Qualitative field research involving skilled trade workers and smart hand tool design provides evidence of how care can influence technology design and how socio-technical interventions can enable expressions of care related to safety, training, and effective tool use. The paper expands the feminist consideration of care to include skilled trade workers and showcases their potential role as co-designers of socio-technical interventions. The paper concludes by recommending further research that can expand upon these emergent concepts and lead to further collaborations that benefit socio-technical system design and the evolution of AI related to the future of work in the skilled trades.
Special Interest Group
Prof. Hanlin Li, co-presenter
Wed, 22 Oct | 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Even as large technology companies come under increasing legal and political scrutiny, their market dominance continues to grow. As Big Tech tends toward monopoly, however, people continue to seek out alternative technology systems and uses. What are the conditions that lead people to choose alternatives? What are the long-term values associated with having viable alternatives? This SIG presents alternative technology, or AltTech, as a growing area of interest for the CSCW community to consider. We invite community members with interests in technology non-use, design for disruption, and post-growth design to join us for a sketch-based speculative discussion to better understand the landscape and future of AltTech.
Workshop
PhD student Jiaying “Lizzie” Liu, co-presenter
Sat, 18 Oct | 9:00 AM - 9:00 AM
Design has the potential to cultivate hope in the face of complex societal challenges. These challenges are often addressed through efforts aimed at harm reduction and prevention---essential but sometimes limiting approaches that can unintentionally narrow our collective sense of what is possible. This one-day, in-person workshop builds on the first Positech Workshop at CSCW 2024 by offering practical ways to move beyond reactive problem-solving toward building capacity for proactive goal setting and generating pathways forward. We explore how collaborative and reflective design methodologies can help research communities navigate uncertainty, expand possibilities, and foster meaningful change. By connecting design thinking with hope theory, which frames hope as the interplay of ``goal-directed,'' ``pathways,'' and ``agentic'' thinking, we will examine how researchers might chart new directions in the face of complexity and constraint. Through hands-on activities including problem reframing, building a shared taxonomy of design methods that align with hope theory, and reflecting on what it means to sustain hopeful research trajectories, participants will develop strategies to embed a deliberately hopeful approach into their research.
Posters
PhD student Jiaying “Lizzie” Liu, co-presenter
Mon, 20 Oct | 9:30 PM - 11:00 PM
Digital calendars have subtly reshaped how people perceive and interact with time. By highlighting temporal boundaries (e.g., daily and weekly calendar views, scheduled time blocks), they fragment people’s daily routines, often pitting productivity against long-term well-being. However, how these perceived time boundaries are enacted and reified by digital interfaces remains underexplored. To address this gap, we analyzed the functionalities and user reviews of 22 digital calendars to characterize how current app designs support or hinder users’ negotiation of time boundaries among their multifaceted selves. We identified challenges and opportunities to implement time boundaries in app designs, unpacking the agency tension in users’ boundary work mediated by digital timekeepers. We discussed the potential for interface designs to nudge users towards work-life balance and enhance their well-being.
PhD student Jiaying “Lizzie” Liu, co-presenter
Thu, 23 Oct | 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
Understanding how people experience and assign meaning to places - what we term ''localness'' - is essential for designing systems that support orientation, belonging, and community integration. However, current computational approaches to modeling place struggle to capture the multimodal, relational, and contextual richness of localness. In this paper, we introduce a novel workflow for extracting structured localness representations from geotagged short-form social videos using a Graph-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Graph-RAG) framework. Our method aligns and fuses multimodal video data into a knowledge graph, retrieves relevant contextual evidence through a hybrid of graph-based and semantic retrieval, and then prompts large language models (LLMs) to infer fine-grained localness attributes across cognitive, relational, and physical dimensions. We evaluate our system using both human-annotated benchmarks and qualitative analysis, demonstrating full coverage across all localness components, with especially strong performance in environmental and emotional domains. Our findings reveal both the promise and challenges of grounding AI systems in lived experiences of place, and we offer design implications for localness-aware technologies in digital placemaking, community informatics, and contextual computing.