CSCW 2020 (on “computer-supported cooperative work and social computing”) is running from October 17th to 21st. While I’m not attending, I went through the program to look for papers that caught my eye. This post has the highlights.

Have some suggestions? Is your paper missing? Would you like to see me write about one of these papers? Let me know by emailing me @ <this domain>.

How I did this and what I’m looking for

Looking through a program of 300+ papers is challenging at best. I scrolled through the full list of papers with no particular goal in mind—just looking for anything that caught my eye.

It’s difficult to find papers that I might be interested in from a long list. There’s no great way to surface work that I might enjoy, and it’s easy to miss interesting papers. I’m sure that, if I did a second pass through the program, I’d come up with a list that was only partially overlapping with the one below.

That’s why I’ll repeat—if you see anything that looks interesting, please email me about it!

All of this is to say that I was loosely looking for papers in these areas:

  • Online communities, including how community is formed, how norms develop, and anything on content moderation
  • Human-AI collaboration, how data is created, how people interpret AI, and how humans and AI can work alongside each other
  • Misinformation and ‘fake news’, how it spreads, how people interpret it, and interventions for limiting its effectiveness
  • Digital well-being, people’s interactions with social media, and their interpretation of algorithmic black boxes
  • Crowdsourcing and crowdwork
  • Mental health and wellness

Let’s dive in.

Best paper awards and honorable mentions

This seemed like an easy place to start. Starred papers (☆) are my highlights.

☆ How We’ve Taught Algorithms to See Identity: Constructing Race and Gender in Image Databases for Facial Analysis; blog post by Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, Caitlin Lustig, Kandrea Wade, Jed R Brubaker

Mitigating Exploitation: Indie Game Developers’ Reconfigurations of Labor in Technology by Guo Freeman, Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, Nathan McNeese

☆ Conformity of Eating Disorders through Content Moderation by Jessica L Feuston, Alex S Taylor, Anne Marie Piper

What Makes People Join Conspiracy Communities?: Role of Social Factors in Conspiracy Engagement by Shruti Vikas Phadke, Mattia Samory, Tanushree Mitra

☆ Moving Across Lands: Online Platform Migration in Fandom Communities by Casey Fiesler, Brianna Dym

Data and Power: Archival Appraisal Theory as a Framework for Data Preservation by Sarita Schoenebeck, Paul Conway

☆ Learning from Tweets: Opportunities and Challenges to Inform Policy Making During Dengue Epidemic by Farhana Shahid, Shahinul Hoque Ony, Takrim Rahman Albi, Sriram Chellappan, Aditya Vashistha, A B Islam

☆ Data Integration as Coordination: The Articulation of Data Work in an Ocean Science Collaboration by Andrew B. Neang, Will Sutherland, Michael W. Beach, Charlotte P. Lee

Hidden Figures: Roles and Pathways of Successful OSS Contributors by Bianca Trinkenreich, Mariam Guizani, Igor Wiese, Anita Sarma, Igor Steinmacher

Shifting forms of Engagement: Volunteer Learning in Online Citizen Science by Corey Brian Jackson, Carsten Østerlund, Kevin Crowston, Mahboobeh Harandi, Laura Trouille

Full papers

Here are the rest (in alphabetical order), again using ☆ to note my highlights. If you have suggestions, let me know!

☆ A Generalized Framework for Understanding the Relationship between Social Media Discourse and Mental Health by Sanjana Mendu, Anna N. Baglione, Sonia Baee, Congyu Wu, Brandon W. Ng, Adi Shaked, Gerald Clore, Mehdi Boukhechba, Laura E. Barnes

☆ “At the End of the Day Facebook Does What It Wants”: How Users Experience Contesting Algorithmic Content Moderation by Kristen Vaccaro, Christian Sandvig, Karrie Karahalios

Can you Turn it Off? The Spatial and Social Context of Mobile Disturbance by Eran Toch, Hadas Chassidim, Tali Hatuka

☆ Conceptual Metaphors Impact Perceptions of Human-AI Collaboration by Pranav Khadpe, Ranjay Krishna, Li Fei-Fei, Jeff Hancock, Michael S. Bernstein

Countering Fake News: A Comparison of Possible Solutions Regarding User Acceptance and Effectiveness by Jan Kirchner, Christian Reuter

Data Analysts and Their Software Practices: A Profile of the Sabermetrics Community and Beyond by Justin Middleton, Emerson Murphy-Hill, Kathryn T Stolee

Data Migrations: Exploring the Use of Social Media Data as Evidence for Human Rights Advocacy by Adriana Alvarado, Dhairya Doshi, Matt Britton, Munmun de Choudhury, Christopher Le Dantec

Designing Alternative Representations of Confusion Matrices to Support Non-Expert Public Understanding of Algorithm Performance by Hong Shen, Haojian Jin, Ángel Alexander Cabrera, Adam Perer, Haiyi Zhu, Jason I. Hong

Exploring Antecedents and Consequences of Toxicity in Online Discussions: A Case Study on Reddit by Yan Xia, Haiyi Zhu, Tun Lu, Peng Zhang, Ning Gu

☆ Good for the Many or Best for the Few? A Dilemma in the Design of Algorithmic Advice by Graham Dove, Martina Balestra, Devin Mann, Oded Nov

Hate begets Hate: A Temporal Study of Hate Speech by Binny Mathew, Anurag Illendula, Punyajoy Saha, Soumya Sarkar, Pawan Goyal, Animesh Mukherjee

How Developers Talk about Personal Data and What It Means for User Privacy: A Case Study of a Developer Forum on Reddit by Tianshi Li, Elizabeth Louie, Laura Dabbish, Jason I. Hong

How do Data Science Workers Collaborate? Roles, Workflows, and Tools by Amy X. Zhang, Michael Muller, Dakuo Wang

☆ Human Factors in Model Interpretability: Industry Practices, Challenges, and Needs by Sungsoo Ray Hong, Jessica Hullman, Enrico Bertini

“I run the world’s largest historical outreach project and it’s on a cesspool of a website.’’ Moderating a public scholarship site on Reddit: A case study of r/AskHistorians by Sarah Gilbert

Narrative Maps: An Algorithmic Approach to Represent and Extract Information Narratives by Brian Felipe Keith Norambuena, Tanushree Mitra

☆ On the Misinformation Beat: Understanding the Work of Investigative Journalists Reporting on Problematic Information Online by Melinda McClure Haughey, Meena Devii Muralikumar, Cameron A Wood, Kate Starbird

Opportunistic Collective Experiences: Identifying Shared Situations and Structuring Shared Activities at Distance by Ryan Louie, Kapil Garg, Jennie Werner, Allison Sun, Darren Gergle, Haoqi Zhang

Origins of Algorithmic Instabilities in Crowdsourced Ranking by Keith Burghardt, Tad Hogg, Raissa D’Souza, Kristina Lerman, Marton Posfai

Rare, but valuable: Understanding data-centered talk in news website comment sections by Brian James McInnis, Lu Sun, Jungwon Shin, Steven P. Dow

☆ Reconsidering Self-Moderation: the Role of Research in Supporting Community-Based Models for Online Content Moderation by Joseph Seering

☆ Social Norm Vulnerability and its Consequences for Privacy and Safety in an Online Community by Brianna Dym, Casey Fiesler

Spontaneous, Yet Studious: Esports Commentators’ Live Performance and Self-Presentation Practices by Lingyuan Li, Jirassaya Uttarapong, Guo Freeman, Donghee Yvette Wohn

Supporting Youth Activists’ Strategic Use of Social Media: A Qualitative Investigation of Design Opportunities by Farnaz Irannejad Bisafar, Brooke Foucault Welles, Catherine D’Ignazio, Andrea G Parker

☆ The Complementary Nature of Perceived and Actual Time Spent Online in Measuring Digital Well-being by Lillio Mok, Ashton Anderson

☆ The New Reality of Reproducibility: The Role of Data Work in Scientific Research by Melanie Feinberg, Will Sutherland, Sarah Beth Nelson, Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi, Arcot Rajasekar

Trans Time: Safety, Privacy, and Content Warnings on a Transgender-Specific Social Media Site by Oliver L. Haimson, Justin Buss, Zu Weinger, Denny L Starks, Dykee Gorrell, Briar Sweetbriar Baron

Unpacking Sharing in the Peer-to-Peer Economy: The Impact of Shared Needs and Backgrounds on Ride-Sharing by Ning F. Ma, Benjamin V. Hanrahan

Look out for some summaries in the next few weeks!