Papers by Stephanie B. Steinhardt
On the Production of the Spirit of Feminism
Interactions , 2016
Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '16, 2016
This paper asks what we can learn from breaking down systems to understand the development of sys... more This paper asks what we can learn from breaking down systems to understand the development of systems. Through ethnographic fieldwork around a large-scale infrastructure development project in the ocean sciences experiencing a scale downward and threat of further defunding, I highlight four often overlooked components of innovation and development that have important implications for the HCI community. The first debunks the mythical liquidation and restart of Western development's "fail fast, fail often" mantra by tracing the complexities of breaking down an infrastructure, highlighting that the end of a technology is entrenched in longer-lived social, political and organizational consequences. The second dives deeper into these social consequences, as formalized structures are broken down and new temporary and contingent working orders surface to fill their place. Third, I signal the critical consequences of the thoughtful practices of assessment and evaluation of both human and material resources that occur during the downturn of systems. Last, I discuss the deeply personal connections that amplify through processes of breaking down systems.
Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing - CSCW '14, 2014
ABSTRACT Plans and planning assume a central role and challenge of collaborative scientific work,... more ABSTRACT Plans and planning assume a central role and challenge of collaborative scientific work, bridging and coordinating often discordant rhythms and events emanating from the organizational, infrastructural, biographical and phenomenal dimensions of collaborative life. Plans align rhythms embedded in local practice with those operating at larger institutional levels, and establish shared temporal baselines around which local choice and action may be calibrated. This paper develops these arguments through ethnographic study of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a prominent U.S.-based large-scale long-term collaborative research program in the ocean sciences. We emphasize the intersection between rhythms and plans at two crucial moments: formation ('plans-in-the-making'), and enactment ('plans-in-action') across complex fields of practice. Our findings hold important implications for CSCW research and practice around scientific and large-scale collaborative efforts, and for federal science policies meant to support productive forms of cooperation and discovery.
Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing - CSCW '15, 2015
Problems of temporality in distributed cooperative work have emerged as an important theme of CSC... more Problems of temporality in distributed cooperative work have emerged as an important theme of CSCW and HCI work. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork into large-scale infrastructure development in ecology and ocean science and analyses of futurism in science and technology studies to call attention to "anticipation work": the practices that cultivate and channel expectations of the future, design pathways into those imaginations, and maintain those visions in the face of a dynamic world. We advance three basic claims: first, that long term technological development and sustainability in science is guided by complex and distributed forms of futurism; second, that all actors (both individual and collective) orient towards the future (at both temporally close and distant scales); and third, that actors engage in complex and skilled forms of anticipation work -individual and collective, formal and informal -that guide and shape the present character and experience of collaborative life.
Sharing, re-use and circulation of resources in cooperative scientific work
Proceedings of the companion publication of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing - CSCW Companion '14, 2014
ABSTRACT This one-day workshop aims to stimulate research on the sharing and reuse of scientific ... more ABSTRACT This one-day workshop aims to stimulate research on the sharing and reuse of scientific resources in cooperative scientific work. As science trends toward increasing geographic and temporal scales, larger collaborations, and greater interdisciplinarity, scientific resources increasingly need to be more mobile and integrated with computer supported information and communication environments. Sharing, reuse and circulation of resources become a central challenge and critical component of cooperative scientific work. We interpret sharing broadly to include circulating scientific materials in any way that makes them available to other scientists. We include a variety of resources such as data, software, materials and specimens, workflows, technical know-how, clinical and laboratory protocols, and algorithms. We explore a range of sharing and reuse practices past and present, what motivates and limits them, how sharing can be done more effectively, what tools and techniques facilitate or constrain it, and how this relates to systems and science policy.
Material Engagements: Putting Plans and Things Together in Collaborative Ocean Science
2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2014
ABSTRACT Programs of scientific research, like other formally organized collective practices, mee... more ABSTRACT Programs of scientific research, like other formally organized collective practices, meet the materiality of the world in complex and dynamic ways. This intersection has important and under explored consequences for the planning and practice of distributed scientific collaboration, including programs of large-scale infrastructure development currently underway across a range of scientific fields and national contexts. Building on ethnographic fieldwork around the Ocean Observatories Initiative, this paper advances two basic arguments about the relation between formal planning efforts and the material worlds they are meant to engage. First, we argue for the mutual plasticity and co-evolution of plans and the material world. Second, the mutually constitutive character of plans and the material world provides a critical connection between top-down governance over scientific collaborations and the bottom-up emergence that emanates from the material world, blurring notions of control and agency and capturing the complex relationship between science policy and local culture.
Using bibliometric methods, this exploratory work shows evidence of transitions in the field of c... more Using bibliometric methods, this exploratory work shows evidence of transitions in the field of computer science since the emergence of HCI as a distinct sub-discipline. We mined the ACM Digital Library in order to expose relationships between sub-disciplines in computer science, focusing in particular on the transformational nature of the SIG Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) in relation to other SIGs. Our results suggest shifts in the field due to broader social, economic and political changes in computing research and are intended as a prolegomena to further investigations.
Writing documents together using collaborative editing tools has become extremely common with the... more Writing documents together using collaborative editing tools has become extremely common with the widespread availability of tools such as Google Docs. The design of such tools, rooted in early CSCW research, has historically been focused on providing awareness of the presence and activities of one's collaborators. Evidence from a recent qualitative study, however, suggests that people are also concerned about how their behaviors -- and they themselves -- will be perceived by others; and take steps to mitigate possible negative perceptions. We present an experimental study of dyads composing documents together, focusing in particular on group maintenance, impression management and relationship-focused behavior. Results suggest that communication is positively related to social relations, but only for synchronous writing in a shared space; the reverse can be true in asynchronous commenting and editing.
Proceeding CSCW '13 Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work, 2013
This paper explores the relationship between CSCW studies of scientific collaboration and the lar... more This paper explores the relationship between CSCW studies of scientific collaboration and the larger worlds of science practice and policy they are embedded in. We argue that CSCW has much to learn from debates in science policy, including questions around the changing nature of science and science-society relations that are partly but obliquely referenced in technology- or data-centered accounts of scientific change. At the same time, science policy has much to learn from CSCW -- about design, infrastructure, and the organizational complexities of distributed collaborative practice. We conclude with recommendations for a better integration of the CSCW and science policy literatures around collaboration and new infrastructure development in the sciences, and speculation around what a post-normal cyberinfrastructure -- and post-normal CSCW -- might look like.
Proceeding EACL 2012 Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Deception Detection, 2012
In this study, we explore several popular techniques for obtaining corpora for deception research... more In this study, we explore several popular techniques for obtaining corpora for deception research. Through a survey of traditional as well as non-gold standard creation approaches, we identify advantages and limitations of these techniques for web-based deception detection and offer crowd-sourcing as a novel avenue toward achieving a gold standard corpus. Through an in-depth case study of online hotel reviews, we demonstrate the implementation of this crowdsourcing technique and illustrate its applicability to a broad array of online reviews.
Building for social translucence: a domain analysis and prototype system
Proceeding CSCW '12 Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2012
The relationships and work that facilitate content creation in large online contributor system ar... more The relationships and work that facilitate content creation in large online contributor system are not always visible. Social translucence is a stance toward the design of systems that allows users to better understand collaborative system participation through awareness of contributions and interactions. Like many socio-technical constructs, social translucence is not something that can be simply added after a system is built; it should be at the core of system design. In this paper, we conduct a domain analysis to understand the space of architectural support required to facilitate social translucence in systems. We describe an instantiation of those requirements as a system architecture that relies on data from Wikipedia and illustrate how translucence can be propagated to some basic visualizations which we have created for Wikipedia users. We close with some reflections on the state of social translucence research and some openings for this important design perspective.
Wiki architectures as social translucence enablers
Proceeding WikiSym '11 Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, 2011
Whether novice or expert, it is useful for contributors to understand the environment to which th... more Whether novice or expert, it is useful for contributors to understand the environment to which they are contributing, including the relationships of other users to the content and to users. However, the relationships and work that enable content creation in an online contributor system, such as Wikipedia, are not always visible. To expose and better understand these relationships, we have built an information visualization toolkit called Re:Flex to support components of social translucence in Wikipedia, with broad applicability to other contributor systems. By mimicking the flexible, fluid architecture of a wiki within the blackboard architecture of this visualization toolkit, we demonstrate how the composable interactions inherent to contributor systems can be mirrored in the tools that support the work which creates them.