At the 28th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW), held October 18-22 in Bergen, Norway, researchers affiliated with the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public facilitated one conference workshop and presented 5 papers, including one that received a Best Paper award.
- In “What is going on? An evidence-frame framework for analyzing online rumors about election integrity,” CIP-affiliated researchers use a grounded, interpretative, mixed-method approach to study Twitter activity during the 2022 U.S. Midterm Election in Arizona, and adapt Gary Klein’s data-frame theory of collective sensemaking to online rumors, demonstrating how misleading claims about election administration take shape online through interactions between (often factual) evidence and frames. The paper was co-authored by CIP co-founder and UW Human Centered Design & Engineering professor Kate Starbird, with UW Information School doctoral candidate Stephen Prochaska and HCDE graduate Ben Yamron.
- In “‘I blow up’: Understanding TikTok users’ reactions to sudden social media attention,” UW researchers led by CIP graduate research assistant Joseph S. Schafer, a HCDE doctoral candidate, use a mixed-methods analysis of TikTok trace data and interviews to show that massive surges in attention can have significant, varied, and long-lasting impacts on social media creators — within the platform and beyond. These include a short-term increase in views and sharing more similar content, and posting more content responding to other content on the platform. The paper was co-authored by Annie Denton (UW Computer Science), Chloe Seelhoff (UW HCDE), Jordyn Vo (UW HCDE), Lance Garcia (UW HCDE), Isha Madan (UW HCDE), Alisha Mudbhary (UW HCDE), Ruijingya Tang (UW HCDE) and Kate Starbird (UW HCDE).
- In “Deep storytelling: Collective sensemaking and layers of meaning in U.S. elections,” researchers led by CIP graduate research assistant Stephen Prochaska (UW Information School), integrated multi-layered qualitative coding with thematic analysis and quantitative visualizations to show how social media influencers, political elites, and audiences collaboratively told deep stories about U.S. elections from 2020 through 2022. The paper was co-authored by Julie Vera (UW HCDE), Douglas Lew Tan (UW Information School), Ben Yamron (UW HCDE), Sylvie Venuto (UC Berkeley), Amaya Kejriwal (Columbia University), Sarah Chu (UW Information School) and Kate Starbird (UW HCDE).
- In “Privacy versus transparency: Navigating public records requests and adversarial dynamics in a distributed multi-stakeholder collaboration,” CIP senior research scientist Rachel Moran-Prestridge (UW Information School), former CIP postdoctoral scholar Sukrit Venkatagiri (now at Swarthmore College), and CIP co-founders Emma S. Spiro (Information School) and CIP co-founder Kate Starbird (HCDE), explore how a large number of public records requests (PRRs) affected the collaborative work of a large, multi-site academic research project.
- “Data visualizations as propaganda: Tracing lineages, provenance, and political framings in online anti-immigrant discourse,” a paper co-led by CIP graduate research assistants Priya Dhwaka (UW HCDE) and Nina Lutz (UW HCDE) with CIP co-founder Kate Starbird (UW HCDE), won a Best Paper award at CSCW. In the paper, the researchers use a computationally-assisted qualitative analysis to first describe how data visualizations are used to support different rhetorical frames, highlighting key tactics and sources of these visualizations. They then conduct a deep analysis of three Data Visualization Lineages (DVLs), exploring the role of adaptations, annotations, and remixing within families of data visualizations that share the same origin but have diverged through distinct visual alterations.
In an October 18 CSCW workshop, “Beyond information: Online participatory culture and information disorder,” CIP-affiliated researchers Nina Lutz (UW HCDE), Stephen Prochaska (UW Information School), Joseph S. Schafer (UW HCDE), and Kate Starbird (UW HCDE) helped facilitate discussions around the directions of empirical research, methods, perspectives, interventions, public communications and other actions should be prioritized as the research community, which has become targets of disinformation and harassment campaigns, seeks to continue combating information disorder in this difficult climate. For the workshop, CIP researchers collaborated with Laura Kurek (University of Michigan), Marianne Aubin Le Quéré (Cornell University), Jason Greenfield (NYU), Phil Tinn (SINTEF), Daniel Thilo Schroeder (SINTEF), Shiva Darian (New Mexico State University), Sukrit Venkatagiri (Swarthmore College), Amer Arif (University of Texas at Austin), Anirban Sen (Microsoft Research India), and Joyojeet Pal (University of Michigan).
Photo of Bergen, Norway by Holger Uwe Schmitt / Wikimedia Commons via CC BY-SA 4.0
