I apologize for not blogging last week. I was at the SoCS PI conference in Seattle as the student representative of my research group\u2019s grant, learning a lot about different areas of social computing and the larger paradigm of academia. I\u2019ll use this blog post to briefly review what I learned at the conference, and then post again about things more immediately relevant to my internship.<\/p>\n
SoCS stands for Social Computing, and is pronounced like the counterpart to \u201cshoes\u201d. According to Wikipedia, Social Computing can be considered \u201ca general term for an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems\u201d (brief, awesome tangent: while compiling the first draft of the practitioner guide for PPSR data policy, I spent some time looking at different court rulings a) specifically about clickwrap v. browsewrap agreements, and b) generally pertaining to crowdsourcing. One of the rulings I found in the later category was Bates v. State<\/i>, a case heard in the Alaska Court of appeals that used the Wikipedia definition of \u201cdating\u201d as a best representation of the \u201czeitgeist,\u201d hence affirming the legal validity of some types of crowdsourced content.\u00a0 In a complementary ruling, Bates, Rainey v. Grand Casinos, Inc. <\/i>noted that crowdsourced content should not be relied upon for \u201cbright-line, verifiable\u201d facts).<\/p>\n
From my perspective as an HCI researcher, this definition is a bit strange. Given that computers exist qua<\/i> tools that serve the needs of human beings, shouldn\u2019t all<\/i> areas of computer science be concerned with at least some aspects of social behavior? \u00a0I believe this perspective is shared by colleagues at the conferences I usually attend, such as CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) and CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work). So SoCS was notable because, when I looked around the room during the closing remarks, I noticed about 50% of attendees that (based on the research they presented) cared about machines\u2014 singly, and passionately, the way some teenage girls care about Justin Bieber\u2014and about 50% who cared about people as well.<\/p>\n
The machines people aren\u2019t bad people, of course; they\u2019re not apathetic about the human race as a whole. But they\u2019re also probably not the types of people that would join me in geeking out over the temporal arcs of motivation or the ways that user experiences change over time due to the evolution of how a computational artifact is perceived.\u00a0 SoCS (which is now dead as a source of funding; as our program officer said, \u201cTry HCC instead\u201d) was a good call because it required, as a condition of receiving money, the collaboration of researchers in different fields.<\/p>\n
Our project funded through SoCS, Biotracker, draws on the expertise of \u201ccomputer\u201d and \u201csocial\u201d scientists in order to combine \u201ccomputer vision, state-of-the-art mobile phone technologies, and the Internet to encourage science enthusiasts to gather biological data.\u201d\u00a0 Other projects funded under SoCS include a study of how online social networks can facilitate real-life relationships, a project that uses technological interventions to increase political consciousness at the community level, and a study examining how human and computer intelligence can be combined to avoid misclassifications of different types of birds. Achieving the goals of these projects\u2014or even making substantial progress toward achieving them\u2014would be impossible without a) the technical intelligence of people who care about computers, and b) the social understanding of people who care about people more.<\/p>\n
Outliers are interesting because they are not the status quo. Unfortunately, the level of collaboration and integration involved is SoCS projects is not typical of academic research. I know this through my experience as a student, and also through a lit review conducted for my DataONE internship about the history of scientific funding in the USA and the norms that this history engendered.\u00a0 People who study citizen science as a phenomenon find it interesting in part because it blends hobby-level interest with some level of scholarly expertise. But citizen science also crosses disciplines more frequently than other crowdsourcing projects do; at the very least, most projects have a \u201cbiology person\u201d and a \u201ctechnology person\u201d working in tandem (although at certain times the \u201ctechnology person\u201d is in actuality a \u201cbiology person\u201d who converted out of necessity).<\/p>\n
My mentor, Andrea Wiggins, wrote a paper entitled \u201cFree as puppies: Compensating for ICT constraints in citizen science\u201d cautioning against the use of suboptimal ICT by citizen science campaigns.\u00a0 When I first read the paper, I was in the process of transforming a piece of \u201csuboptimal ICT\u201d into a more optimal mobile application. During this time, I listened to the director of the project that I was working with express embarrassment that she didn\u2019t have a good mobile app functioning despite having access to a larger budget and a larger staff than similar campaigns.\u00a0 What I read and what I experienced played off each other, and encouraged me to think deeply about the role of technology in citizen science or PPSR.<\/p>\n
What I realized was this: as projects progress, they will require more than just a \u201cbiology person\u201d and a \u201ctechnology person\u201d with a high level of expertise.\u00a0 For example, many projects are starting to consider the importance of education or political outreach, both at the community level and on larger scales.\u00a0 How long will it be before citizen science projects will need at least a \u201cbiology person,\u201d a \u201ctechnology person,\u201d and an \u201ceducation\/ outreach person\u201d to operate at their full potential? Two years?\u00a0 Three? And how long before finding an \u201ceducation\/ outreach person\u201d becomes a realistic goal?\u00a0 The answer to this second question depends, in part, on the ability of projects to secure funding that will be increasingly cross- disciplinary and inter-disciplinary.\u00a0 In this respect, citizen science shares some parallels with the really good social computing research that I witnessed at SoCS.<\/p>\n
The big question that comes out of this blog post is, \u201cwhat can we, as researchers, do to secure cross-disciplinary funding?\u201d\u00a0 A big question is essentially a question that needs to be broken down into smaller pieces before it can be adequately addressed.\u00a0 Funding is closely connected to institutional support.\u00a0 One access point into addressing this question could simply be acting\u2014speaking, reading, researching\u2014in ways that demonstrate the value of cross-cultural work in different institutional settings. This is less a solution and more a best practice to be integrated into everyday life.\u00a0 As such, it\u2019s something that I have the agency to accomplish\u2014a starting point, for supporting future work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I apologize for not blogging last week. I was at the SoCS PI conference in Seattle as the student representative of my research group\u2019s grant, learning a lot about different areas of social computing and the larger paradigm of academia. I\u2019ll use this blog post to briefly review what I Continue reading Reflections on SoCS<\/span>