Anti-vaccine advocates have long engaged in a harmful and baseless campaign that ties infertility to vaccines. Preliminary analysis of a large, real-time data collection of Twitter posts that filtered for COVID-19 vaccine and fertility content revealed a surprising moment when, after the vaccines rolled out, anti-vaccine advocates made a new tie to menstrual health not previously seen in anti-vaccine advocacy. We traced the tie to a co-opting of reports commencing soon after vaccines were distributed when people began to report menstrual anomalies—anomalies that would be alarming unless they could be confirmed to be a temporary side effect. These reports, which were attempts to cross-check experiences with others, soon became new sites of “convergence” where information exchange became disordered. Discourse analysis describes how a politicized debate around vaccines, reproductive health, the medical establishment, and the validity of lived experiences was differently argued. This disordered information space can be further characterized by three waves of “social convergence” of people with varying intentions and knowledge. Furthermore, a verification analysis of international popular press articles revealed a long delay before medical groups addressed the link anywhere in the world. Meanwhile, worrisome links between vaccines and other health matters—myo- and pericarditis—were rapidly confirmed with their attendant fears managed. One year after vaccines were distributed, insufficient messaging to women and menstruators persisted; meanwhile, disinforming behaviors were fueled by worry and the ready presence of anti-vaccine activists, illustrating how marginalized topics provide “fertile ground” for information disorder. Results contribute theoretically to our understanding of information disorder, with additional lessons for public health communication and disinformation mitigation.

Disaster events – which can arise from meteorologic, geologic, technologic, or biologic hazards – have long served as sites to investigate socio-behavioral phenomena. Their disruption to and suspen...

Vaccine hesitancy has always been a public health concern, and anti-vaccine campaigns that proliferate disinformation have gained traction across the US in the last 25 years. The demographics of resistance are varied, with health, religious, and, increasingly, political concerns cited as reasons. With the COVID-19 pandemic igniting the fastest development of vaccines to date, mis- and disinformation about them have become inflammatory, with campaigning allegedly including racial targeting. Through a primarily qualitative investigation, this study inductively examines a large online vaccine discussion space that invokes references to the unethical Tuskegee Syphilis Study to understand how tactics of racial targeting of Black Americans might appear publicly. We find that such targeting is entangled with a genuine discussion about medical racism and vaccine hesitancy. Across 12 distinct voices that address race, medical racism, and vaccines, we discuss how mis- and disinformation sit alongside accurate information in a “polyvocal” space.

Abstract Risks associated with natural hazards such as hurricanes are increasingly communicated on social media. For hurricane risk communication, visual information products—graphics—generated by meteorologists and scientists at weather agencies portray forecasts and atmospheric conditions and are offered to parsimoniously convey predictions of severe storms. This research considers risk interactivity by examining a particular hurricane graphic which has shown in previous research to have a distinctive diffusion signature: the ‘spaghetti plot’, which contains multiple discrete lines depicting a storm’s possible path. We first analyzed a large dataset of microblog interactions around spaghetti plots between members of the public and authoritative weather sources within the US during the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season. We then conducted interviews with a sample of the weather authorities after preliminary findings sketched the role that experts have in such communications. Findings describe how people make sense of risk dialogically over graphics, and show the presence of a fundamental tension in risk communication between accuracy and ambiguity . The interactive effort combats the unintended declarative quality of the graphical risk representation through communicative acts that maintain a hazard’s inherent ambiguity until risk can be foreclosed. We consider theoretical and practice-based implications of the limits and potentials of graphical risk representations and of widely diffused scientific communication, and offer reasons we need CSCW attention paid to the larger enterprise of risk communication.

Conveying uncertainty in information artifacts is difficult; the challenge only grows as the demand for mass communication through multiple channels expands. In particular, as natural hazards increase with changing global conditions, including hurricanes which threaten coastal areas, we need better means of communicating uncertainty around risks that empower people to make good decisions. We examine how people share and respond to a range of visual representations of risk from authoritative sources during hurricane events. Because these images are now shared widely on social media platforms, Twitter provides the means to study them on a large scale as close to in vivo as possible. Using mixed methods, this study analyzes diffusion of and reactions to forecast and other risk imagery during the highly damaging 2017 Atlantic hurricane season to describe the collective response to visual representations of risk.

Temporal coordination endures as a central topic in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) because information systems still struggle to adequately support varying representations of time in the context of collaborations that areboth temporally and geographically dispersed. Moreover, the adaptive practices of these broadly dispersed groups are still not well understood. We ask:How do globally distributed teams temporally coordinate to accomplish their work? We examine an extreme case of online temporal coordination: high-tempo information curation about the urgent humanitarian crisis following the 2017 Hurricane Maria landfall in Puerto Rico. Our analysis of synchronous chat transcripts and data artifacts produced by The Standby Task Force reveals how this digital humanitarian group establishes temporal coordination through different shared understandings of time relative to the crisis, the globally distributed work, and the collaborative information technologies. We make four contributions from our analysis: First, we developed a pluritemporal analytical framework that describes different forms of socially constructed time and disambiguates their meaning in talk. Next, we present empirical evidence of how this distributed team establishes shared temporal orders to collectively orient their work in time. Then, we describe how they reconcile multiple and conflicting instances of sociotemporal "disorder'' to enable productive work. Last, we reflect on the design implications for collaborative information systems informed by this work.

This work propels social media research beyond the single post as the unit of analysis toward fuller treatment of interaction by making the construct of the conversation analytically available. We offer a method for constructing @reply conversations in Twitter to apprehend social media conversational features at scale. We apply this method to the high-tempo, high-stakes environment of 2012's Hurricane Sandy, with its high volume of online talk by affected locals and distinct disaster-stage phasing by which to consider interactional difference. We investigate the temporality of conversations; the relationality of who speaks to whom; the number and kind of conversationalists; and how content affects temporal features. The analysis reveals that, during the height of the emergency, people expand conversations both in number and kind of conversational partners-just as their information search intensifies. This expansion contributes to longer, slower-paced conversations in the high-emergency period, suggesting reliance on online relationships during times of greatest uncertainty.

Today, disaster events are mobilizing digital volunteers to meet the data needs of those on the ground. One form of this crowd work is Volunteered Geographic Information. This peer-produced spatial data creates the most up-to-date map of the affected region; maintaining the accuracy of these data is therefore a critical task. Accuracy is one aspect of data quality, a relative concept requiring standards to measure against. The field of Geographic Information Sciences has developed standards for this comparison, achieving widespread acceptance. However, the peer production model of spatial data presents new opportunities—and challenges—to traditional methods of quality assessment. Through analysis of the OpenStreetMap database, we show that temporal editing patterns and contributor characteristics can provide additional means of understanding spatial data quality. Drawing upon experiences from Wikipedia, we offer and evaluate three intrinsic quality metrics of peer-produced spatial data to assess the quality of contributions to OpenStreetMap for crisis response.

Over the past 20 years, the practices of crisis preparedness, response, and recovery have become increasingly dependent on information and communication technology (ICT) to accomplish their work. More recently, crisis informatics has developed an analysis of these phenomena from social and computational perspectives. To further to assess the consequences and opportunities of technological developments in the field, we re-interpret the concept of informating, first developed by Zuboff to describe the impacts of technological changes on the workplace during the 1980s. We draw on four contemporary examples of how ICT is changing the way we conceive of and respond to natural hazards to offer a new reading of the concept of informating in the growing field of crisis informatics. We then argue that this concept suggests the adoption of a more critical agenda for crisis informatics research to better respond to contemporary challenges presented by climate change and natural hazards.

This paper reports on two years of ethnographic observation of the science and politics of flood risk in Colorado, as well as design research that examines citizen interaction with expert knowledge about flooding in the region. We argue that the 100-year floodplain standard that inform maps produced by the USA Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)'s National Floodplain Insurance Program (NFIP) represent a problematic form of discursive closure of scientific understanding of flood hazard. We show that in order to meet the requirements of the NFIP, this standard acts as a closure that conveys a certainty that the underlying science does not warrant and foreshortens dialogue on disaster risk and public understanding of flood hazard. Engaging with literature in science and technology studies and human-centered computing, we investigate design opportunities for resisting closure and supporting public formation through encounters with the uncertainty and complexities of risk information.

Nepal was struck by two major earthquakes in April and May 2015 which gave rise to much media attention. Because of photographs' power to influence how people perceive significant events, we investigate how these disasters are represented visually through Twitter-shared images in three ways. First, we compare how geotagged image tweets are distributed vis-à-vis the reported damage, to see if a seemingly "objective" method of representation stands up. Second, with an iteratively developed coding scheme, we examine how images are differently produced and shared within global versus local populations and after each earthquake, with the idea that amplification "collectively instructs" what features of the event are most important. Third, we analyze how images from other locations, disasters, and time periods are appropriated as part of the "story" of the disaster event. We found differences in image popularity, with global twitterers emphasizing recovery and relief efforts in their diffusion of images, and locals emphasizing people suffering and major damage in their sourcing and re-sharing. We also found that globals were more likely to appropriate images, evoking lessons from Sontag about "the pain of others" [39].

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the most widely used volunteer geographic information system. Although it is increasingly relied upon during humanitarian response as the most up-to-date, accurate, or accessible map of affected areas, the behavior of the mappers who contribute to it is not well understood. In this paper, we explore the work practices and interactions of volunteer mappers operating in the high-tempo, high-volume context of disasters. To do this, we built upon and expanded prior network analysis techniques to select high-value portions of the vast OSM data for further qualitative analysis. We then performed detailed content analysis of the identified activity and, where possible, conducted interviews with the participants. This research allowed the identification of seven distinct mapping practices that can be classified according to dimensions of time, space, and interpersonal interaction. Our work represents a baseline for future research about how OSM crisis mapping practices have evolved over time.

Disasters and their impacts have unavoidable spatial characteristics. As such, maps are necessary and omnipresent features of the information landscapes that surround and support disaster response. Professional and volunteer GIS services are increasingly in demand to support map-based information visualization during crises. This paper investigates the work of mapmakers working on the response to the 2015 Nepal earthquakes. In comparison to prior events, we found significantly more collaboration and spatial data sharing took place between map producers working across humanitarian organizations and parts of the Nepal government. Collaboration between mapping practitioners was supported by a complex and emergent information infrastructure composed of social and technical elements, some of which were brought through experience with prior disaster events, and some which were shaped anew by the availability and acceptance of open data sources. Our research investigates these elements of the spatial information infrastructure in post-earthquake Nepal to consider infrastructural emergence.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a volunteer-driven, globally distributed organization whose members work to create a common digital map of the world. OSM embraces ideals of open data, and to that end innovates both socially and technically to develop practices and processes for coordinated operation. This paper provides a brief history of OSM and then, through quantitative and qualitative examination of the OSM database and other sites of articulation work, examines organizational growth through the lens of two catastrophes that spurred enormous humanitarian relief responses-the 2010 Haiti Earthquake and the 2013 Typhoon Yolanda. The temporally- and geographically- constrained events scope analysis for what is a rapidly maturing, whole-planet operation. The first disaster identified how OSM could support other organizations responding to the event. However, to achieve this, OSM has had to refine mechanisms of collaboration around map creation, which were tested again in Typhoon Yolanda. The transformation of work between these two events yields insights into the organizational development of large, data-producing online organizations.

Hurricane Sandy wrought $6 billion in damage, took 162 lives, and displaced 776,000 people after hitting the US Eastern seaboard on October 29, 2012. Because of its massive impact, the hurricane also spurred a flurry of social media activity, both by the population immediately affected and by the globally convergent crowd. In this paper we explore how retweeting activity by the geographically vulnerable differs (if at all) from that of the general Twitter population. We investigate whether they spread information differently, including what and whose content they chose to propagate. We investigate whether the Twitter-based relationships are preexisting or if they are newly formed because of the disaster, and if so if they persist. We find that the people in the path of the disaster favor in their retweeting locally-created tweets and those with locally-actionable information. They also form denser networks of information propagation during disaster than before or after.

This ethnographic study reveals how expertise was sought, articulated and actuated across online and offline worlds to enable the evacuation of 38 horses from an isolated ranch in the mountainous region of Northern Colorado following a series of devastating flash floods in September 2013. The shared expertise within a loosely connected community of practice bridged spatial-temporal limitations and afforded opportunities for practical assistance and response, both virtually and on the ground. Interaction via social media articulated the parameters of the emergent problem to be solved, and "cast a net" to find the expertise necessary to address different aspects of the perceived problem. Eventually, more than 60 people with equine expertise converged onto the ranch, bringing their materials to execute a single-day evacuation and relocation of the herd.

Social media and other online communication tools are a subject of great interest in mass emergency response. Members of the public are turning to these solutions to seek and offer emergency information. Emergency responders are working to determine what social media policies should be in terms of their "public information" functions. We report on the online communications from all the coastal fire and police departments within a 100 mile radius of Hurricane Sandy's US landfall. Across four types of online communication media, we collected data from 840 fire and police departments. Findings indicate that few departments used these online channels in their Sandy response efforts, and that communications differed between fire and police departments and across media type. However, among the highly engaged departments, there is evidence that they bend and adapt policies about what constitutes appropriate public communication in the face of emergency demands; therefore, we propose that flexibility is important in considering future emergency online communication policy. We conclude with design recommendations for making online communication media more "listenable" for both emergency managers and members of the public.

This ethnographic study of a Facebook Page founded on 28 October 2012 in anticipation of Hurricane Sandy's US landfall reveals how on-line pet advocates--a large but loosely organized social movement--mobilized their ad hoc discretionary activities to more cooperative, organized work to assist numerous displaced pets. The investigation shows how innovations around 'crossposting' to create a more persistent form of visual data management were important. It describes how these innovations produced an improvised case management system around which members of the pet-advocacy crowd could collectively work to help displaced pets. The paper connects to the CSCW and organizational science literature to consider how this emergent community articulated work and structured the mission of the Page.

In an increasingly global society and on a planet experiencing effects of climate change, large-scale emergencies both instigated by humans and arising from nature can devastate human life and our tightly- woven social fabric. With a promise of improved warning and coordination, a prevailing hope is that information and communication technology (ICT) can help reduce the impacts of large-scale disruptions, including political crises, natural disasters, pandemics, and terrorist threats. Much of the focus of development has been on the formal emergency response effort.

Humanity Road is a volunteer organization working within the domain of disaster response. The organization is entirely virtual, relying on ICT to both organize and execute its work of helping to inform the public on how to survive after disaster events. This paper follows the trajectory of Humanity Road from an emergent group to a formal non-profit, considering how its articulation, conduct and products of work together express its identity and purpose, which include aspirations of relating to and changing the larger ecosystem of emergency response. Through excerpts of its communications, we consider how the organization makes changes in order to sustain itself in rapid-response work supported in large part by episodic influxes of volunteers. This case enlightens discussion about technology-supported civic participation, and the means by which dedicated long-term commitment to the civic sphere is mobilized.

Disaster-related research in human-centered computing has typically focused on the shorter-term, emergency period of a disaster event, whereas effects of some crises are long-term, lasting years. Social media archived on the Internet provides researchers the opportunity to examine societal reactions to a disaster over time. In this paper we examine how blogs written during a protracted conflict might reflect a collective view of the event. The sheer amount of data originating from the Internet about a significant event poses a challenge to researchers; we employ topic modeling and pronoun analysis as methods to analyze such large-scale data. First, we discovered that blog war topics temporally tracked the actual, measurable violence in the society suggesting that blog content can be an indicator of the health or state of the affected population. We also found that people exhibited a collective identity when they blogged about war, as evidenced by a higher use of first-person plural pronouns compared to blogging on other topics. Blogging about daily life decreased as violence in the society increased; when violence waned, there was a resurgence of daily life topics, potentially illustrating how a society returns to normalcy.

We examine the public, social media communications of 110 emergency medical response teams and organizations in the immediate aftermath of the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake. We found the teams through an inductive analysis of Twitter communications acquired over the three-week emergency period from 89,114 Twitterers. We then analyzed the teams' Twitter streams, as well as all digital media they generated and pointed to in their streams - blog posts, photographs, videos, status updates and field reports - to understand the medical coordination challenges they faced from pre-deployment readiness to on-the-ground action. Here we identify opportunities for improving coordination in a decentralized and distributed environment where staffing, disease trajectories, and other circumstances rapidly change. We extrapolate from these findings to theorize about how "beaconing" behavior is a sign of latent potential for coordination upon which mechanisms of coordination can capitalize.

This paper examines microblogging information diffusion activity during the 2011 Egyptian political uprisings. Specifically, we examine the use of the retweet mechanism on Twitter, using empirical evidence of information propagation to reveal aspects of work that the crowd conducts. Analysis of the widespread contagion of a popular meme reveals interaction between those who were "on the ground" in Cairo and those who were not. However, differences between information that appeals to the larger crowd and those who were doing on-the-ground work reveal important interplay between the two realms. Through both qualitative and statistical description, we show how the crowd expresses solidarity and does the work of information processing through recommendation and filtering. We discuss how these aspects of work mutually sustain crowd interaction in a politically sensitive context. In addition, we show how features of this retweet-recommendation behavior could be used in combination with other indicators to identify information that is new and likely coming from the ground.

This empirical study of "digital volunteers" in the aftermath of the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake describes their behaviors and mechanisms of self-organizing in the information space of a microblogging environment, where collaborators were newly found and distributed across continents. The paper explores the motivations, resources, activities and products of digital volunteers. It describes how seemingly small features of the technical environment offered structure for self-organizing, while considering how the social-technical milieu enabled individual capacities and collective action. Using social theory about self-organizing, the research offers insight about features of coordination within a setting of massive interaction.

A Level-1 US trauma center introduced role-tags in their trauma resuscitation rooms to help team members identify respective medical functions, and to limit the number of people in the rooms to required staff only. We use this in situ experiment with a paper prototype to investigate the role-driven nature of coordination and to identify system requirements for computerized support of role-based coordination in time-critical work. While role information is useful in coordinating time-critical work, our findings show that the current low-tech solution did not provide significant improvement in team coordination. The situations that were most in need of role-identification were the least likely to achieve it because role-tags required work by trauma team members. Similarly, because role-tags allowed workarounds and misuse, they proved ineffective in controlling the number of people in the room. We suggest technological ways of identifying roles to help coordination in the trauma bay.

We analyze microblog posts generated during two recent, concurrent emergency events in North America via Twitter, a popular microblogging service. We focus on communications broadcast by people who were "on the ground" during the Oklahoma Grassfires of April 2009 and the Red River Floods that occurred in March and April 2009, and identify information that may contribute to enhancing situational awareness (SA). This work aims to inform next steps for extracting useful, relevant information during emergencies using information extraction (IE) techniques.

This paper considers a subset of the computer-mediated communication (CMC) that took place during the flooding of the Red River Valley in the US and Canada in March and April 2009. Focusing on the use of Twitter, a microblogging service, we identified mechanisms of information production, distribution, and organization. The Red River event resulted in a rapid generation of Twitter communications by numerous sources using a variety of communications forms, including autobiographical and mainstream media reporting, among other types. We examine the social life of microblogged information, identifying generative, synthetic, derivative and innovative properties that sustain the broader system of interaction. The landscape of Twitter is such that the production of new information is supported through derivative activities of directing, relaying, synthesizing, and redistributing, and is additionally complemented by socio-technical innovation. These activities comprise self-organization of information.

This paper examines online, widescale interaction during an emergency event of national interest. Widescale interaction describes the potential for broad, immediate, and varied participation that the conditions of online forums, and social networking sites in particular, increasingly allow. Here, we examine a group on a popular social networking site as a virtual destination in the aftermath of the Northern Illinois University (NIU) shootings of February 14, 2008 in relation to related activity that happened in response to the Virginia Tech (VT) tragedy 10 months earlier. We consider features of interactions that are enabled when a vast audience converges under such conditions. We discuss how commiseration and information seeking are interrelated, and how geographical communities that share a common experience ally in such a public, online setting.

Disasters affect not only the welfare of individuals and family groups, but also the well-being of communities, and can serve as a catalyst for innovative uses of information and communication technology (ICT). In this paper, we present evidence of ICT use for re-orientation toward the community and for the production of public goods in the form of information dissemination during disasters. Results from this study of information seeking practices by members of the public during the October 2007 Southern California wildfires suggest that ICT use provides a means for communicating community-relevant information especially when members become geographically dispersed, leveraging and even building community resources in the process. In the presence of pervasive ICT, people are developing new practices for emergency response by using ICT to address problems that arise from information dearth and geographical dispersion. In doing so, they find community by reconnecting with others who share their concern for the locale threatened by the hazard.

Recent world-wide crisis events have drawn new attention to the role information communication technology (ICT) can play in warning and response activities. Drawing on disaster social science, we consider a critical aspect of post-impact disaster response that does not yet receive much information science research attention. Public participation is an emerging, large-scale arena for computer-mediated interaction that has implications for both informal and formal response. With a focus on persistent citizen communications as one form of interaction in this arena, we describe their spatial and temporal arrangements, and how the emerging information pathways that result serve different post-impact functions. However, command-and-control models do not easily adapt to the expanding data-generating and -seeking activities by the public. ICT in disaster contexts will give further rise to improvised activities and temporary organizations with which formal response organizations need to align.

We describe our research-its approach, results and products-on Danish emergency medical service (EMS) field or "pre-hospital" work in minor and major incidents. We discuss how commitments to participatory design and attention to the qualitative differences between minor and major incidents address challenges identified by disaster sociolo-gists when designing for major incidents. Through qualitative research and participatory design, we have examined the features of EMS work and technology use in different emergency situations from the perspective of multiple actors. We conceptualize victims in incidents-and particularly in major incidents, where on-site medical as-sessments is highly incomplete-as boundary objects over which the complex and imperfect work of coordination is done. As an outcome of our participatory design approach, we describe a set of designs in support of future EMS work.

We report on the results of an ethnographic study of how elders manage their medication with the objective of informing the de-sign of in-home assistive health technology to support "medication adherence." We describe the methods by which elders organize and remember to take their medication-methods that leverage a kind of distributed cognition. Elders devise medication manage-ment systems that rely on the spatial features of their homes, the temporal rhythms of their days, as well as the routines that occa-sion these places and times to help recall and prospective remem-bering. We show how mobile health care workers participate in the development and execution of these systems, and "read" them to infer an elder's state of health and ability to manage medication. From this analysis, we present five principles for the design of assistive technology that support the enhanced but on-going use of personalized medication management systems, and that also allow for remote health care assistance as it becomes needed.

In the last few years, teenagers have been on the forefront of adopting short message service (SMS), a mobile phone-based text messaging system, and instant messaging (IM), a computer-based text chat system. However, while teenage adoption of SMS had led to a series of studies examining the reasons for its popularity, IM use in the teenage population remains understudied. This omission becomes significant given the increasing interest in domestic computing among human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) researchers. Further, because of the dearth of empirical work on teenage use of IM, we find that IM and SMS are sometimes incorrectly assumed to share the same features of use. To address these concerns, we revisit our own studies of SMS and IM use and reexamine them in tandem with other published studies on teenage chat. We consider similarities and differences in styles of SMS and IM use and how chat technologies enable the pursuit of teenage independence. We examine how differences are born out of technological differences and financial cost structures. We discuss how SMS and IM are used in concert to provide increased awareness and to coordinate inter-household communications, and how privacy is regulated within the individual household as a means of maintaining these communications.

Although privacy is broadly recognized as a dominant concern for the development of novel interactive technologies, our ability to reason analytically about privacy in real settings is limited. A lack of conceptual interpretive frameworks makes it difficult to unpack interrelated privacy issues in settings where information technology is also present. Building on theory developed by social psychologist Irwin Altman, we outline a model of privacy as a dynamic, dialectic process. We discuss three tensions that govern interpersonal privacy management in everyday life, and use these to explore select technology case studies drawn from the research literature. These suggest new ways for thinking about privacy in socio-technical environments as a practical matter.

Instant Messaging (IM) is being widely adopted by teenagers. In a study of 16 teenage IM users, we explore IM as an emerging feature of teen life, focusing our questions on its support of interpersonal communication and its role and salience in everyday life. We qualitatively describe the teens' IM use interpersonally, as well as its place in the domestic ecology. We also identify technology adoption conditions and discuss behaviors around privacy management. In this initial investigation, we found differences in the nature of use between high school and college teens, differences we propose are accounted for by teens' degree of autonomy as a function of domestic and scholastic obligations, the development of independent work practices, Internet connectivity access, and even transportation access. Moreover, while teen IM use is in part characterized as an optimizing choice between multiple communications media, practice is also tied to concerns around peer pressure, peer group membership and creating additional opportunities to socialize.

Mobile technology requires new methods for studying its use under realistic conditions "in the field." Reflexively, mobile technology also creates new opportunities for data collection while participants are remotely located. We report on our experiences with a variation on the paper-based diary study technique, which we extend by using voice-mail paired with mobile and landline telephony to more easily collect data in natural situations. We discuss lessons learned from experiences with voice-mail diary studies in two investigations of different scope. We also present suggestions for tailoring the technique to different research objectives, garnering high subject participation, and configuring the voice-mail system for data collection.

Service-based wireless devices like wireless telephones require users to interact with aspects of the technology beyond the hardware and software of the handset. By entering into contractual relationships with service-providers, and by using network-based services, users interact with a larger system ---one that has social and technological components. The operation of the wireless telephone requires the assimilation of heterogeneous sources of information from the device manufacturer, sales people, customer service representatives, marketing people, and members of the popular media, among others, which can easily confound users' understanding of this new class of technology. Opportunities for usability problems therefore scale beyond the handset, as do opportunities for better design. We report the results of a study of 19 novice wireless phone users who were closely tracked for the first 6 weeks after service acquisition. Taking a technology-as-system analytical approach, we describe the wireless telephony system as four socio-technical components: hardware, software, "netware," and "bizware." This particular organization of the system is intended for the practical application of designing for usability.

We report on the results of a study in which 19 new mobile phone users were closely tracked for the first six weeks after service acquisition. Results show that new users tend to rapidly modify their perceptions of social appropriateness around mobile phone use, that actual nature of use frequently differs from what users initially predict, and that comprehension of service-oriented technologies can be problematic. We describe instances and features of mobile telephony practice. When in use, mobile phones occupy multiple social spaces simultaneously, spaces with norms that sometimes conflict: the physical space of the mobile phone user and the virtual space of the conversation.

Designing and deploying groupware is difficult. Groupware evaluation and design are often approached from a single perspective, with a technologically-, individually-, or socially-centered focus. A study of Groupware Calendar Systems (GCSs) highlights the need for a synthesis of these multiple perspectives to fully understand the adoption challenges these systems face. First, GCSs often replace existing calendar artifacts, which can impact users calendaring habits and in turn influence technology adoption decisions. Second, electronic calendars have the potential to easily share contextualized information publicly over the computer network, creating opportunities for peer judgment about time allocation and raising concerns about privacy regulation. However, this situation may also support coordination by allowing others to make useful inferences about ones schedule. Third, the technology and the social environment are in a reciprocal, co-evolutionary relationship: the use context is affected by the constraints and affordances of the technology, and the technology also co-adapts to the environment in important ways. Finally, GCSs, despite being below the horizon of everyday notice, can affect the nature of temporal coordination beyond the expected meeting scheduling practice.

Article "I'll get that off the audio": a case study of salvaging multimedia meeting records Share on Authors: Thomas P. Moran Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Leysia Palen Department of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, CA Department of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, CAView Profile , Steve Harrison Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Patrick Chiu Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Don Kimber Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Scott Minneman Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , William van Melle Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Polle Zellweger Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '97: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human factors in computing systemsMarch 1997 Pages 202–209https://doi.org/10.1145/258549.258704Online:27 March 1997Publication History 89citation868DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations89Total Downloads868Last 12 Months22Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

If Computer-Supported Cooperative W o r k (CSCW) systems are to be successful over time, it will be necessary to promote ongoing and continuing activity, not just initial adoption.In this paper, we consider what technical and social affordances are required to encourage the continued use of a CSCW system.To explore these issues, we exanaine a'chat-like system, the Zephyr Help Instance, which is used extensively at MIT.The Help Instance facilitates users asking questions of one another, and is an example of a distributed help and problem-solving system.We provide an overview of the system's use as well as those mechanisms, both technical and social, that facilitate continuing its use over time.