Networking research often abstracts away the people who build, operate, and experience the Internet. Yet, human decisions shape what gets measured, which problems are prioritized, and how solutions are deployed. This paper argues that such human influence is foundational and deserves methodological attention. To do so, we discuss three well-known qualitative methods and approaches: participatory action research, ethnographic methods, and positionality as concrete ways of engaging with the social and operational realities that underlie technical systems. These approaches formalize processes that are commonly implicit in networking research, help surface questions that cannot be answered with traces alone, and make space for voices often left out of the research pipeline or are inadvertently concealed due to the lack of formal procedures to include them in our research methods. Ultimately, we argue for a broader understanding of legitimate, and sometimes informal, contributions to networking research—one that better reflects the human element of how the Internet is structured and is experienced.

In tiny house villages (THVs), land ownership, local regulations such as zoning, and management frameworks affect how formerly unhoused residents can leverage and augment their built infrastructure with ''smart'' technologies. These dynamics influence THV residents' lived experiences, creating both constraints and opportunities for deploying networked sensors in support of communication, physical security, and shared governance. Through a series of participatory design (PD) workshops and visits with residents of two villages, we identified how residents balance privacy and security concerns when considering Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensor design and deployment. We find, for example, that residents impose constraints on designed sensors for the group's protection, such as a strict ban on camera-based visual or audio surveillance and a preference for local as opposed to cloud data storage. They also identify opportunities for diverse sensors and actuators to improve village accessibility and to alleviate resource sharing tensions. Meanwhile, differences between public and private land ownership directly impact the regulation and infrastructure possibilities for THVs, and historical and current zoning of land shapes the social problems that the community must navigate. Our findings deepen the CSCW research agenda by examining parameters for successful ''smart'' and data-driven technology interventions among low-resourced urban groups experiencing housing precarity and homelessness.

To date, efforts to address misinformation have focused on broadly scoped legal, technical, and educational interventions. However, recent studies in HCI have begun exploring new directions that focus instead on the individualized nature of the problem and its roots in identity and community. To understand the potential benefits and challenges of applying community-driven methods in this and similarly contentious spaces, we examined the work of a large-scale participatory research project working to address the impact of misinformation, predominantly on rural communities and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) individuals, through the development of locally-contextualized educational resources and platforms. Through interviews with 23 project stakeholders, including both community partners and researchers, we heard that participants saw community-based research and design methods as a highly beneficial tool for addressing this problem. They shared that such methods allow participants to build relationships through the sharing of complex emotions and to surface a range of expertise and lived experiences that contribute to a more holistic understanding of misinformation. At the same time, participatory, community-based methods raise difficult questions around integrating such diverse expertise and protecting participants from internal and external risk. We also discuss emergent strategies for navigating these tensions, with the aim of informing and preparing CSCW researchers looking to apply participatory methods towards addressing misinformation and other contentious research topics.

Recent studies in HCI have explored how we might reduce the spread of online misinformation by helping people learn how to evaluate information in more skillful ways. Unfortunately, it isn’t clear that such interventions have been meaningfully integrated into communities. To better understand why this is the case, this paper engages over thirty information professionals (educators, librarians, and journalists) who promote digital literacy in BIPOC and rural communities. Our participants describe a temporal mismatch, whereby digital literacy requires time-consuming processes that cannot be accelerated, but institutional and societal pressures demand speed. We also describe strategies that participants envisaged to cope with this mismatch. This leads us to discuss how the HCI community can better engage with the temporal aspects of digital literacy work, with a view toward expanding the range of solutions we can design to address the misinformation crisis.