March 27, 2009
Position Paper Deadline Extension: Monday, March 30
We've received several requests for an extension on the position paper deadline, and have agreed to move it back until Monday, March 30. Notification of acceptance will be shifted accordingly to April 1st.
Please use the ACM SIG Proceedings template, and email .pdf or .doc versions of your position paper to jt17@cornell.edu by 5:00pm PST on Mar 30th, 2009.
Thanks to those who have already submitted. We look forward to reading the rest of your position papers.
Posted by ericcook at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)
March 08, 2009
Call for Participation: Approaching “Amateur” Workshop
GROUP 2009 Workshop
May 10th, 2009
Sanibel Island, Florida
OVERVIEW
What do a birdwatcher, photographer, tennis player, video gamer and Wikipedia editor have in common? Each might be characterized as an amateur in his or her respective area of participation. While amateur participation in such diverse contexts have been of interest to researchers in various fields [2], recent technological developments (e.g. MMORPGs and systems that rely on user-generated content like Flickr) have affected in some way how these amateur participants collaborate, share and publish the products of their labor.
However, as HCI researchers and practitioners design and study these socio-technical systems, there exists uncertainty about the meaning and implication of the concept of the amateur. [6], for example, characterizes an amateur as one whose skill level may never reach the level of an expert. Others [9] maintain that amateur participants can be quite skilled yet remain a distinctive class of user, whether from lack of formal training or paid employment from their activities. Additionally, focusing on seriously committed amateurs who might broadcast their activities widely [5] or the photographers who capture moments for a personal audience [11]. These diverse perspectives suggest that the amateur participant is not a singular type of user but perhaps a set of categories with particular prototypical characteristics [4].
This workshop proposes to leverage this ambiguity as a way to unpack the different issues that emerge as the Group and CSCW communities attend to systems that have been appropriated by amateur participants. It is a first step in creating a working vocabulary for addressing the opportunities and implications for research and design that are presented by amateur participation in groupware and collaborative contexts.
THEMES
Discussion will center on the following themes and raise the following questions:
Theme: Designing for Variable CommitmentWhat lessons might HCI researchers and designers be able to draw from the lessons of open-source peer production with respect to amateur contributions? How can HCI address the needs of the different categories of amateurs who vary according to commitment to their activities?Theme: Questioning the Value of Expertise
Can amateur participants be empowered to design the environments in which they participate by leveraging that knowledge? How does this differ from concepts of end-user programming and other design approaches (e.g. everyday design [12], lead user design [8], meta-design [7] and participatory design [10]) that propose a transfer of agency within the design process to the user? How is the role of an amateur situated with respect to a professional who participates in the same context?
Theme: Changing Nature of the Public
How does the amateur participant construct his/her audience? How can we design systems that allow amateurs to better address different types of audiences?Theme: Centering the Critical Perspective
How can we use critique to analyze the implications of amateur participation in technological contexts [1]? How can the insights gained from this reflection be integrated into the design of systems that support amateur production?
Theme: Research Methods for Studying Amateurs
How do different intellectual traditions deal with the study of amateur participations? For example, the issue of participant anonymity in social science research can be inconsistent with the nature of authorship and fair credit when the participant desires recognition for his or her contribution [3]. How can researchers address sampling issues when the nature of amateur participation is voluntary and variable levels of commitment exist? What are the ethical implications of studying amateurs and the systems they appropriate?
SUBMISSION INFORMATION
March 27: Deadline extension! Revised dates below.
We invite 1-2 page position papers addressing an aspect of the proposed topics of discussion or an extended abstract of relevant research.
Please use the ACM SIG Proceedings template, and email .pdf or .doc versions to jt17@cornell.edu by 5:00pm PST on Mar 30th, 2009.
Important dates (revised):
Mar 30th, 2009: Position papers due.
Apr 1st, 2009: Notification of acceptance
Apr 5th, 2009: Early registration deadline for GROUP 2009
May 10th, 2009: Workshop
AGENDA
9:00-9:45: Participant introductions in Madness format
9:45-10:30: Introductory remarks (Amy Bruckman)
10:30-11:00: Break
11:00-12:30: Small group exercise: Create concept map illustrating different categories, characteristics and implications of amateurs
12:30-2:00: Lunch
2:00-3:30: Breakout discussion structured around a menu selection of themes
3:30-4:00: Break
4:00-5:15: Open group discussion, plan next steps
5:15-6:00: Closing remarks (David McDonald)
ORGANIZERS
Jennifer Thom-Santelli is a doctoral candidate in the department of Communication at Cornell University. Her dissertation research focuses on the expression of territoriality between peers in distributed collaborative communities such as Wikipedia. Her additional research interests include the nature of audience in social software systems and the application of design as a critical and reflective lens to examine values and assumptions within HCI.
Eric Cook is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information. His research focuses on the influences of technology on creative practice and amateur media. His dissertation focuses on the concept of networked home mode production – the use of snapshot media for the construction and maintenance of coherence familial biographies in technologically mediated contexts.
Kurt Luther is a doctoral student in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on supporting online creative collaboration through the design of social software systems. His recent work includes studies of authorship attitudes among amateurs in online video remixing communities and collaboration practices among amateurs in online Flash animation communities. He participated in workshops at Creativity & Cognition 2007 and CSCW 2008.
Jeffrey Bardzell is an Assistant Professor of HCI/Design and new media at the School of Informatics in Indiana University–Bloomington. He leverages research and practice from a number of fields, including HCI, philosophy, literature and the arts, postmodern critical theory, multimedia design, and learning theory to explore the meaning, value, and aesthetics of emerging phenomena in digital environments, ranging from creative design software for amateur media producers to massively multiplayer online games.
Amy Bruckman is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She and her students in the Electronic Learning Communities (ELC) research group do research on online communities and education. In the Science Online project, she is exploring how students can learn about science by writing about it online. She is also exploring how Wikipedia actually works, conducting empirical studies of regular contributors, administrators, participants in WikiProject subgroups, and people banned from Wikipedia. She has organized or co-organized workshops for CHI 1999, CSCW 2000, and CHI 2001.
Dr. David W. McDonald joined the faculty at The Information School at the University of Washington in January 2002. He has ongoing projects studying Wikipedia and technology and media use in the home. He has published research on collaborative authoring, recommendation systems, organizational memory, and public use of large screen displays. His research interests span Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). David earned his Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. At UC Irvine he was part of the Computing, Organizations, Policy and Society (CORPS) group. David has worked at FX Palo Alto Laboratory in the Personal and Mobile technology group and at AT&T Labs.
REFERENCES
1. Bardzell, J. Interaction Criticism and Aesthetics. Proc.CHI2009, ACM Press.
2. Bardzell, J. Creativity in Amateur Multimedia: Popular culture, critical theory, and HCI. Human Technology: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Humans in ICT Environments 3, 1 (2007), 12-33.
3. Bruckman. Studying the Amateur Artist: A perspective on disguising data collected in human subjects research on the Internet. Ethics and Information Technology 4, 3 (2002), 217-231.
4. Bruckman, A. A New Perspective on "Community" and its Implications for Computer-Mediated Communication Systems. CHI '06 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, ACM (2006), 616-621.
5. Cook, E. Many-to-Few: Expanding the Model of User-Generated Media Production. Extended Abstracts, ACM Press.
6. Davis, S.B. and Moar, M. The amateur creator. Proceedings of the 5th conference on Creativity & Cognition, ACM Press(2005), 158-165.
7. Fischer, G. and Scharff, E. Meta-design: design for designers. Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, ACM (2000), 396-405.
8. Hippel, E.V. Democratizing Innovation. 2005.
9. Jenkins, H. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press, 2006.
10. Muller, M.J. Participatory Design: The Third Space in HCI. In J.A. Jacko and A. Sears, eds., The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies, and Emerging Applications. CRC, 2002.
11. Okabe, D. and Ito, M. Everyday Contexts of Camera Phone Use. In J.R. Höflich and M. Hartmann, eds., Mobile Communication in Everyday LifE. 2006, 325.
12. Wakkary, R. and Maestri, L. The Resourcefulness of Everyday Design. Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity & Cognition, ACM (2007), 163-172.
Posted by ericcook at 01:27 PM | Comments (0)
