My first post-PhD publication (incipient)

Yesterday I got word that the first piece of work I’ve derived from my thesis has been accepted. The venue is the “alt.chi” track of the CHI 2019 conference (to be held in Glasgow this May). alt.chi is “a forum for controversial, risk-taking, and boundary pushing presentations at CHI. … Contributions to alt.chi often innovate methodologically, critique accepted practices, or take on controversial questions.” I had a critique to offer.

Here’s the abstract of my paper:

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in HCI research on the use of technology in spiritual practices. Some of these works cover spiritual/transcendent experiences associated with these practices, but strikingly few of them describe in any way the experiences they studied or aimed to support, let alone give operational definitions of the terms they use for those experiences. Even fewer papers cite any literature on the relevant experiences. We have to ask: How do the authors understand the experiences their work is aiming to observe, invite, or support? How do they know when and whether they have observed, invited, or supported the kinds of experiences they target? How do they know what they are studying?

This paper discusses the presence and absence of operational definitions for spiritual/transcendent experiences in HCI research, and of citations of relevant literature. It speculates about possible reasons for the oversight and proposes some operational definitions aimed at filling the gap.

As soon as I identified that gap in the HCI literature, I knew it would be a good topic for alt.chi; and I was encouraged by a comment from one of my thesis examiners, during my viva (thesis defense), that I had made a good case for defining it as a gap. For this paper I decided that finger-wagging alone wasn’t enough — or even appropriate — I needed to offer at least an approach, if not some part of a solution. So I added in the definitions of terms that I had provided in my thesis and proposed them as operational definitions for transcendent user experience (TUX) research going forward.

The reviews of my submission were uniformly positive, and the reviewers offered helpful suggestions. Now I have ten days to consider them, incorporate them as makes sense to me, and put the final version in camera-ready format.

I’ll post the final paper as soon as ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) allows me to do so. This will probably be sometime in April.