I will be attending ACM CHI 2022 in May 2022. I’m going to be an online participant having been rendered unable to travel. I am participating in several different ways and this page summarises my activities at the conference. I am contributing:

• A paper
• A late breaking work
• A course
• Two workshop papers

Paper

I am presenting one full paper at the conference, Consumption Experiences in the Research Process. This paper has received an honourable mention from the conference committee (top 5% of submissions). It will be presented 5th May 2022, in 0900-1015 “Think Critically” session.

PDF and HTML preprints of the paper are available.

I’ve made the slides I am presenting available.

Abstract

Data collection is often a laborious enterprise that forms part of the wider craft skill of doing research. In this essay, I try to understand whether parts of research processes in Human-Centred Computing (HCC) have been commodified, with a particular focus on data collection. If data collection has been commodified, do researchers act as producers or consumers in the process? And if researchers are consumers, has data collection become a consumption experience? If so, what are the implications of this? I explore these questions by considering the status of craft and consumption in the research process and by developing examples of consumption experiences. I note the benefits of commodity research artefacts, while highlighting the potentially deleterious effects consumption experiences could have on our ability to generate insights into the relations between people and technology. I finish the paper by relating consumption experiences to contemporary issues in HCC and lay out a programme of empirical work that would help answer some of the questions this paper raises.

Videos

Citation

Sandy J.J. Gould. 2022. Consumption experiences in the research process. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’22), April 29-May 5, 2022, New Orleans, LA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 17 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3502001

Late Breaking Work

Laura Lascău has lead on our late breaking work paper, Crowdworkers’ Temporal Flexibility is Being Traded for the Convenience of Requesters Through 19 ‘Invisible Mechanisms’ Employed by Crowdworking Platforms, which will be presented during poster sessions on the 2nd and 3rd of May.

PDF and HTML preprints of the paper are available.

Abstract

Crowdworking platforms are a prime example of a product that sells flexibility to its consumers. In this paper, we argue that crowdworking platforms sell temporal flexibility to requesters to the detriment of workers. We begin by identifying a list of 19 features employed by crowdworking platforms that facilitate the trade of temporal flexibility from crowdworkers to requesters. Using the list of features, we conduct a comparative analysis of nine crowdworking platforms available to U.S.-based workers, in which we describe key differences and similarities between the platforms. We find that crowdworking platforms strongly favour features that promote requesters’ temporal flexibility over workers’ by limiting the predictability of workers’ working hours and restricting paid time. Further, we identify which platforms employ the highest number of features that facilitate the trade of temporal flexibility from workers to requesters, consequently increasing workers’ temporal precarity. We conclude the paper by discussing the implications of the results.

Video

Citation

Laura Lascău, Sandy J. J. Gould, Duncan P. Brumby, and Anna L. Cox. 2022. Crowdworkers’ Temporal Flexibility is Being Traded for the Convenience of Requesters Through 19 ‘Invisible Mechanisms’ Employed by Crowdworking Platforms: A Comparative Analysis Study of Nine Platforms. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI ‘22 Extended Abstracts), April 29-May 5, 2022, New Orleans, LA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA 8 Pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3519629

Course

This year, I will be reprising a ggplot2 course that I first taught at CHI 2019: Complex Data Visualisation Made Easy with R and ggplot2. The course webpage provides detailed information about the schedule and materials.

PDF and HTML preprints of the course abstract are available.

Abstract

Being able to visualise data in consistent, high-quality ways is a useful skill for HCI researchers and practitioners. In this course, attendees will learn how to produce high quality plots and visualisations using the ggplot2 library for the R statistical computing language. There are no prerequisites and attendees will leave with scripts to get them started as well as foundational knowledge of free open-source tools that they can build on to produce complex, even interactive, visualisations. Course information materials can be found at https://www.sjjg.uk/chi22-course.

Citation

Sandy J. J. Gould. 2022. Complex Data Visualisation Made Easy with R and ggplot2. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI ‘22 Extended Abstracts), April 29-May 5, 2022, New Orleans, LA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA 3 Pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3503748

Workshop contributions

I am participating in two workshops:

Investigating Data Work Across Domains: New Perspectives on the Work of Creating Data

I have written a short position paper for this workshop, Mapping craft and consumption in data work. This paper is based on some of the work I present in the full CHI paper.

Reimagining Global Crowdsourcing for Better Human-AI Collaboration

With my colleagues Laura Lascău, Duncan Brumby and Anna Cox, I have submitted a short position paper for this workshop, Intractable problems of crowdsourcing. This position paper is based in part on Laura’s Late Breaking work paper.