A very intense CHI conference

The CHI 2019 conference ended yesterday. It was the most intense CHI I’ve ever had — I was on stage five times in two days. (In fact, it was the most intense conference experience of any kind that I’ve ever had.) Here’s a brief run-down of my activities.

alt.chi presenting

I started by presenting my alt.chi paper in the 9am session on Tuesday, after getting up at 4:15 that morning and finally finishing my slides about 8:15. (It’s easier for me to get up early than to stay up late.) Several people told me it was really good and said it should have been a full paper. I’m pondering how to enrich it for submission to another SIGCHI conference.

Diversity and Inclusion Lunch

For the past few years, CHI has had a Diversity and Inclusion Lunch on the Tuesday, and this year I spoke about doing a PhD as an older student (I started at 60). I won’t say more about that here because I plan a separate blog post on that talk. I’ll just say that my first draft was six minutes long and I had been told to target 3 minutes. I ended up with about 3.5 (which was fine), but it took a good while to cut it down to that and still convey everything important. That talk, too, wasn’t completely finished until almost the last minute (the night before). It was incredibly well received; see my blog post about that specific talk.

UX Event

I had the role of Industry Liaison for this year’s conference, and the main thing I did for that was to organize and chair a “UX event” on the Tuesday evening to get academics and practitioners exploring together things they could do to help bridge the gap between them. The event started with a talk by Giles Colborne, followed by three brief presentations with ideas for addressing the problem, followed by more than an hour of working together to create bridging ideas and plans for putting them into practice. This effort builds on previous work (mainly at CHI conferences) regarding research-practice interaction. This event was very popular, and we had a fantastically even balance between academics and practitioners. I ascribe much of the academic interest in the event to the REF (Research Excellence Framework), a newish way of evaluating UK universities’ research that includes its impact outside of academia. The event was partially successful — some folks thought it was fabulous and others (including myself) expressed concerns — and I’m still collecting outputs from it and have created a Slack team in hopes of fostering further discussion and bridge building. (If you’d like to join the Slack team, send me your email address; and if I don’t know you, tell me why you want to join and/or what you see yourself contributing.)

Session chairing

On Wednesday I chaired a paper session. I hadn’t had time to read the papers closely (my bad!) but I had at least read the abstracts and I had some idea of what they were about. And of course I paid attention to the presentations. One of a session chair’s most important responsibilities is to keep the session on time: CHI sessions generally have four presentations each, and the presentations are timed to start and end at fixed times (for the last few years they’ve had 20 minutes each, including Q&A), and I had to cut one presenter off before he was finished and hold another back from starting two minutes early. A key person in SIGCHI told me later that I had amazing session-chairing skills (I think he was referring to my timekeeping), which pleased me inordinately.

SIG co-chairing

I collaborated with two people to run a special interest group (SIG) at the conference (and two additional people to write the proposal for it); our SIG was on technology to foster transformative experiences. I was a relatively minor figure in this one, so it wasn’t very stressful for me.

Future possibilities

Several things came out of various discussions.

My PhD supervisor was there for part of the time, and he attended my alt.chi talk (and was one of the people who said it should have been a full paper). We have been invited to write an article for a journal, so we sat down together and worked out a way to approach it. We explained the approach to the journal’s editor, and he agreed in principle. So now we have to write an abstract and get busy on the article.

I suggested to my SIG co-organizers that we explore ideas for collaborating on other research, and we talked for about half an hour about that. There’s an event happening in Milan in about ten days, but unfortunately I can’t go to that because of a work commitment on the same day. I think there’s a lot of potential for that collaboration.

I’ve been invited to Weimar to speak and discuss. I don’t know a great deal about what that’ll turn into, but I trust the person who invited me and I know we’ll work out something good.

And finally, I had lunch on the last day with someone I met at a conference several years ago (while we were both students). He works for a large company that is open to supporting research that might benefit them, and I told him of something I want to know more about (not related to transcendent or transformative experiences, but something else altogether), and he seemed excited about the idea. I’m optimistic on that front as well.

All in all, it was a very good CHI. And I’m very ready to see some castles and abbeys in the Scottish Borders on my way home.

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.

My PhD thesis is now online!

I don’t have much to say with this post, except that I have received word that my thesis has been placed in the Northumbria Research Link. Here’s the link to it. I’d love to know what you think, and if you’re interested in collaborating on future research, please do get in touch.

Whew!

This afternoon I met with my PhD supervisor to discuss the reviewers’ comments on our submission to the DPPI conference, and to my surprise and great relief he was very reassuring. The reviewers did not criticize the goals, the method, or the data analysis, he pointed out — which means that the study itself was not in question. Their concerns related to the way it was framed, the lack of a clear statement of goals and audience, the need to add a few more references to related work, and the weakness of the design implications. All of these are straightforward and can be corrected fairly easily, and Mark and I decided how we will do that. He also said that pretty much all of the reviews gave mid-range numbers and that some papers were conditionally accepted, so my mid-range number with unconditional acceptance is good.

We decided to take the design implications out of the paper  altogether. I will write them up separately as tips for creators of meditation videos on video sharing sites, and will post it right here in this very blog.

Whew. :-)

Corpus verba academica

I stayed up waaaaay too late last night, to meet the deadline for submitting a conference paper — a real research paper, in this case, rather than an “alt” paper like the previous one. And I’ve been thinking about language.

I’ve been forced to use the word “corpus”.

Now, I heartily dislike this word — it’s ugly-looking and ugly-sounding. It evokes images of corpulent corpses (which, sadly, I’m likely to be, eventually), and it’s stuffy and off-putting and heavy-sounding to non-academicians. (Or so I suspect, having been one myself for almost 40 years.)

Unfortunately, however, it’s the right word for this job. “This job” being, referring to a body of data and information that one has collected and on which one has conducted some analyses.

This word is unavoidable. “Corpus” is terminology.

For the last few years, I have been involved in efforts to bring research and practice closer together in my field of human-computer interaction. My colleagues and I call this “research-practice interaction“, or “RPI” (for what I hope are obvious reasons). One issue that emerged very early, when we started looking at what keeps research and practice apart, is that academic papers are usually written in a language that’s fairly inscrutable to practitioners, who generally aren’t steeped in that language. This produces a barrier to getting research results understood by practitioners and used in improving the design of actual products. One of RPI’s goals is to reduce unnecessary inscrutability and make academic writing easier to read. (“Unnecessary” being the operative word there.) We know we aren’t going to change academic culture as a whole (nor should we), but if we can get academics to begin to write some of their works in an accessible style — especially research findings that might have implications for practice — we will have reduced those barriers at least a little.

When I was preparing to start my PhD, I read two books about the process (specifically for the UK), suggested to me by my friend Maria Wolters, of Edinburgh University. Both books said that one objective of the PhD thesis (“dissertation” in the USA) is to show that the candidate can write in academic language. On reading this I rolled my eyes, but on thinking further I do see value in it. But methinks that one does not have to do it any more than necessary.

“Corpus” is necessary, I have decided. It is not just language, it is terminology. It has a specific meaning, understood for what it is by those who need to evaluate the work and build on it. The more practitioner-familiar “data base” is the closest thing I can think of in “plain language” (“plain” to technically oriented folks, that is :-), but it doesn’t mean quite the same thing; and in any case it conjures up images of data plus a data base management system.
So perhaps my RPI friends and I have another assignment: Build a dictionary of academic terminology for practitioners. Or perhaps there’s one out there already. A corpus verba academica, as it were.

Of academic papers and presentations

I’m headed off soon to Paris for the CHI2013 conference, the premier conference in human-computer interaction. I’ll be presenting in the alt.chi venue the paper that I wrote with my supervisor (Mark Blythe), called “Spirituality: There’s an app for that! (but not a lot of research)”. I’m currently putting the finishing touches on the presentation slides. (Actually, I’m currently writing this blog post, but you know what I mean.) Then I have to finish writing the script and rehearse and tweak the talk, to make sure I stay within ten minutes. (Here’s the draft that we submitted. I’ll post the final paper after the conference ends and will post the presentation to SlideShare or Vimeo [or both].)

I should add that, although I’ve been around CHI since the beginning of time (I was at the 1982 conference in Gaithersburg, Maryland, considered by many to be Where It All Began — and it was definitely where everything started for me), and although I’ve been on the program numerous times (mostly for SIG sessions, although I was on a panel in 2011), this will be my first academic presentation there (or in any venue, really). I’m especially excited to be realizing a long-held dream.

Mark and I met this week to discuss next steps, and we mapped out papers for both DPPI 2013 and CHI 2014. I won’t say what they are until they’ve been accepted or rejected, but let me just say that I am excited about both of them. The DPPI paper is due on 1 June and I have data to collect before I can start writing it, so as soon as I get back from CHI next week I will have to spend pretty much all of my waking hours on that for the following four weeks. (The CHI paper is not due until 18 September, so I have some time on that. Part of the CHI paper will go into my PhD thesis as well, so this work will serve both purposes.)

Milestones Part 5: First academic paper accepted!

My first paper as an academic has been accepted!

A month ago I submitted to “alt.chi” — a venue of the CHI conference for contributions that are somewhat on the edge — a paper that I had written with my supervisor on the state of HCI research into techno-spirituality and some of the gaps that remain. Notifications of acceptance were supposed to come on Monday (two days ago), but they had a lot of submissions this year and it wasn’t until this morning that the email arrived in my inbox.

“Dear Elizabeth Buie,” it said. “Thank you for submitting to alt.chi 2013. We are sorry to tell you that we are not able to include your paper Spirituality: There’s an App for That! (But Not a Lot of Research). We were able to accept 25% of the submissions we received, which required making difficult choices and rejecting some submissions that were well-liked by their reviewers and/or our jury.”

What a disappointment! So I read the jurors’ comments appended to the email and wrote what I hoped was a thoughtful reply to them. My supervisor and I discussed the possible reasons and identified another conference to which we would submit a revised version of the paper.

Late this afternoon I received another email from the chairs. “Dear Elizabeth,” it read, “We deeply apologize. You paper should have been accepted but was not due to glitches in our reviewing-system and our unfortunate space constraints. … [co-chair’s name] and I have amended this error and invite you to present your paper Spirituality: There’s an App for That! (But Not a Lot of Research) at alt.chi 2013.”

Whew! And Yay!!

We have four days to incorporate reviewer and juror comments and submit the final camera-ready version. That’s going to be a big challenge, given that tomorrow I will be at a workshop all day and will be staying in Edinburgh for a couple of days afterward, to take advantage of being there anyhow and enjoy the city. But maybe I can spend some time with my laptop in a cafe. After all, Edinburgh is only 90 minutes from Newcastle by train, which costs only a little over $30 round trip. Nothing says I can’t go again sometime.

So it looks as though I’m going to go to Paris in the the spring.

Many people would be envious. Don’t get me wrong — I’m very excited about presenting at CHI. (I’ve led special interest groups and workshops, and I’ve been on a panel, but I’ve never before presented research there.) But I confess that Paris doesn’t appeal to me very much. Possibly it’s because I don’t speak French and don’t like being dependent. But it can’t be just that — I don’t speak Croatian, but that didn’t stop me from going to Croatia for ten days, almost two years ago. If it were somewhere in Italy I’d be over the moon, I can tell you.

My supervisor and I are still planning to prepare a submission for that other conference. We will have to look at their policy on self-plagiariam to ensure that what we submit is adequately different from our alt.chi paper, but we have already identified some things we can do to add on to what we’ve got in this one. And some things we can remove.

And now I have to call it a night; it’s almost 11:30 pm and I’ve got a train at 6:25 am tomorrow.