The effects of social media platform usage on users' well-being have been a topic of significant discussion. Some evidence suggests that users sharing about themselves in ways that are perceived by themselves and others as ''authentic'' may benefit their well-being. BeReal is a social media platform that aims to encourage more authentic online behavior by constraining users' ability to selectively share content via a daily prompt to post whatever they are doing at that time. This rigid operationalization of authenticity, however, may be at odds with the rich and nuanced notions of authenticity observed in practice. Through an analysis of interviews with 25 BeReal users, we find that participants experienced two facets of authenticity that often did not align with BeReal's operationalization. Moreover, we find that participants' desire for authenticity was often in tension with their competing desires for privacy and autonomy, and their desire to reflect back on significant moments. We discuss how these tensions illustrate the challenges of designing for authenticity and add nuance to our understanding of authenticity on social media platforms.

Disclosing sensitive information online, such as an LGBTQ+ identity or potentially stigmatized behavior, can be necessary for many reasons, especially for those who identify as LGBTQ+ and may rely on social platforms for meeting others and social support. At the same time, these disclosures can lead to harassment and stigmatization. Evidence suggests that today's social platforms provide many more options and opportunities for sensitive disclosure than are possible offline, but we lack a taxonomy of disclosure strategies. Drawing on Goffman's self-presentation framework, we examined two types of sensitive disclosure within the cisgender male adolescent gay, bisexual, and/or queer (GBQ) population: revealing one's GBQ identity on social media and revealing the use of an anti-HIV medication, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), on both social media and dating apps. We find that today's online environment, with its different affordances, provides new opportunities for disclosure, such as the use of associations, repeated over time. Participants had distinct ideas about what disclosures were normative and relevant to particular social platforms and audiences. Lastly, we discuss suggestions for how platform design might promote sensitive disclosure.

Dating platform research often focuses on people's decisions about when to reveal certain aspects of themselves to others, or self-disclosure. One example is deciding what to include in one's profile and what to reveal in chat conversations or in person. Transgender people face a particularly acute challenge in self-disclosure, but we know little about how they experience it on dating platforms. Revealing trans status can result in physical or emotional harm, but is also often considered necessary for a successful relationship and for self-fulfillment. To better understand disclosure of sensitive information, we interviewed 20 transgender dating platform users in the U.S. We find that direct, proactive disclosure of trans status was motivated by desires for safety and certainty, though this could involve tension. Physical separation and one-to-many communication surface as key affordances that facilitated disclosure. These results help us better understand motivations behind disclosure decisions.

Self-presentation is a process that is significantly complicated by the rise of algorithmic social media feeds, which obscure information about one's audience and environment. User understandings of these systems, and therefore user ability to adapt to them, are limited, and have recently been explored through the lens of folk theories. To date, little is understood of how these theories are formed, and how they tie to the self-presentation process in social media. This paper presents an exploratory look at the folk theory formation process and the interplay between folk theories and self-presentation via a 28-participant interview study. Results suggest that people draw from diverse sources of information when forming folk theories, and that folk theories are more complex, multifaceted and malleable than previously assumed. This highlights the need to integrate folk theories into both social media systems and theories of self-presentation.

Mobile devices and social media have made it possible to share photos, often selfies, nearly instantaneously with potentially large networks of contacts and followers. Selfies have become a frequent component of young people's online self-presentations and shirtless male selfies, a common trope among some gay Instagram users, present an interesting self-presentation dilemma. Images of shirtless males, normatively appropriate, attractive and innocuous in some contexts, can also be vulnerable to misinterpretation or unintended sexualization in ways that can negatively impact others' impressions. This paper reports on an interview study of 15-24 year-old gay and bisexual Instagram users' attitudes toward and experiences with shirtless selfies. Results suggest that they see a clear tension between these images conveying attractiveness and possible negative connotations such as promiscuity, and have different strategies for navigating this tension. The results have implications for consideration of the contexts in which mobile social media content is produced and consumed.

Most US social media users engage regularly with multiple platforms. For LGBTQ+ people, this means making self-presentation decisions not just on one platform, but many. These choices are made in the face of sometimes-overlapping platform environments, which can have consequentially different norms, audiences, and affordances. Moreover, many LGBTQ+ users face high stakes in online self-presentation, due to the risk of stigmatization of their LGBTQ+ identity, increasing the importance of self-presentation decisions that enable them to achieve their goals and avoid stigmatization. This combination of environmental complexity and high stakes is not adequately accounted for in existing work on self-presentation, but doing so is important to support and understand the experiences of LGBTQ+ and other potentially stigmatized users. We adopt an ecological approach to an interview and cognitive mapping study of 20 LGBTQ+ social media users. We find that participants employ the platforms, audiences, affordances, and norms within what we call their "personal social media ecosystems" to avoid stigmatization while still allowing for expression of their LGBTQ+ identity and the flexibility to adjust their presentation over time.

As algorithmically-driven content curation has become an increasingly common feature of social media platforms, user resistance to algorithmic change has become more frequent and visible. These incidents of user backlash point to larger issues such as inaccurate understandings of how algorithmic systems work as well as mismatches between designer and user intent. Using a content analysis of 102,827 tweets from #RIPTwitter, a recent hashtag-based backlash to rumors about introducing algorithmic curation to Twitter's timeline, this study addresses the nature of user resistance in the form of the complaints being expressed, folk theories of the algorithmic system espoused by users, and how these folk theories potentially frame user reactions. We find that resistance to algorithmic change largely revolves around expectation violation, with folk theories acting as frames for reactions such that more detailed folk theories are expressed through more specific reactions to algorithmic change.

The popularity of social media platforms today makes them an important venue for self-presentation, but the unique affordances of these platforms challenge our existing models for understanding self-presentation behavior. In particular, social media provide multiple platforms on which the self may be presented, expand the role other individuals can play in one's own self-presentation, and expand the audience while often simultaneously providing less information about who is in that audience. This paper presents an affordance-based approach to self-presentation on social media platforms rooted in these three challenges and presents a systematic taxonomy for considering aspects of platforms that affect self-presentation. Results from an exploratory study of 193 users suggest significant variation in user perception of our proposed affordances across social media platforms, participant experience levels, and participant personality traits.

Social media platforms and mobile applications increasingly include geographic features and services. While previous research has looked into how people perceive, interpret, and act on information available about a person, the spatial self, an individual's display of mobility through space for identity performance, is underexplored, especially in encounters with strangers. Strangers themselves offer a unique potential for exploring relational contexts and how those may relate to interpreting and reacting to the spatial self. We ran a 3 (map: personal, social, and task) x 3 (relationship: date, friend, coworker) x 2 (gender of participant: female, male) laboratory experiment with a mixed model design to see if and how the spatial self affects interest in future interaction. We find that maps, relationship, and gender all affect the ways in which people interpret and act on expressing interest in an individual. We discuss theoretical and design implications of how spatial selves affect this process.

People have long sought answers to questions online, typically using either anonymous or pseudonymous forums or social network platforms that primarily use real names. Systems that allow anonymous communication afford freedom to explore identity and discuss taboo topics, but can result in negative disinhibited behavior such as cyberbullying. Identifiable communication systems allows one to reach a known audience and avoid negative disinhibition, but can constrain behavior with concerns about privacy and reputation. One persistent design issue is understanding how to leverage the benefits of anonymity without suffering its drawbacks. This paper presents a case study analysis of question asking on Facebook confession boards (FCBs), a tool popular on some college campuses. FCBs present a unique configuration in which members of an offline community (e.g., a university) anonymously submit content to a moderator who posts it to a Facebook page where others in the community can view it and respond. Response is via identifiable Facebook comments and likes. Our results show users asking about taboo and stigmatized topics with local others, and receiving relevant responses with little cyberbullying or negativity.

The ubiquity of mobile devices has resulted in more opportunities to interact with more people than ever before. Given a finite capacity for interaction with others, people commonly manage their availability by limiting others' access to them. Prior work has demonstrated the importance of doing so in a relationally sensitive way and identified the butler lie, in which deception is used to manage availability, as a common linguistic strategy. Two key limitations of existing exploratory work, however, are limited samples of primarily students and a focus on media properties in understanding ambiguity that enables butler lies to be plausible. This paper aims to address these issues via a broad field study of deception and butler lies using a novel message-sampling method employed via a custom mobile app. Results show clear evidence of butler lies occurring in a broader population, with some gender differences; and urge adoption of a multi-level framework for understanding ambiguity that also includes private information and infrastructure-level attributes of interaction media.

Providing the initiator of a conversation with awareness information about their target's availability can improve interruption timing. Providing this information, however, can be particularly challenging with mobile devices, which are carried by users in a range contexts and have limited audible and visual display possibilities due to possible background noise and small screen size. Haptic or tactile displays present a potentially useful alternative, as interaction with mobile devices is often by touch. This paper reports on a dual-task comparison of awareness information usage on a mobile variable-friction tactile display vs. a visual display under conditions that varied in task type and task workload. Participants using the tactile display performed marginally better on the primary task, but were less accurate and slower on the awareness task. However, there is evidence that some of the awareness task differences dissipated over time. Self-report data also suggests that people's experience with the tactile display was generally positive and improved over time.

Ubiquitous mobile usage provides more opportunities to interact with more people than ever, but with the constraint that people's capacity for attention to others is limited. People manage demands on their attention by limiting their availability to others, and this may cause failure in attempts to reach others. In today's always-connected world, we know very little about how people manage their own availability, maintain awareness of others, and adapt their strategies for reaching others in the face of failure. This paper draws on results from a qualitative field study to present an integrative, joint action approach to attention management. Results suggest that mobile devices play a large part in assessing ambient awareness of others and signaling availability, but are rarely used in isolation. Attention is a continuum that spans multiple devices and channels involving actions and choices learned over time.

While we tend to think of self-presentation as a process executed by the self, reputation management on social network sites, like Facebook, is increasingly viewed as a collective endeavor. The information users share about one another can have significant impacts on impression formation, and at times this other-generated content may be face threatening, or challenging to one's desired self-presentation. However, we know little about the nature of these other-generated face threats and the ways that people perceive them. Using an online survey of 150 Facebook users, we report on what these users consider to be other-generated face threats and how they feel after experiencing them. Results suggest that many face threats result from other Facebook users neglecting or misunderstanding a target's audience and/or self-presentation goals, as well as a target's fear of creating an unwanted association with another Facebook user. Experience of these threats is affected by both individual and situational factors. We also report on a new unique measure capturing Facebook skills.

Location-aware mobile applications have become extremely common, with a recent wave of mobile dating applications that provide relatively sparse profiles to connect nearby individuals who may not know each other for immediate social or sexual encounters. These applications have become particularly popular among men who have sex with men (MSM) and raise a range of questions about self-presentation, visibility to others, and impression formation, as traditional geographic boundaries and social circles are crossed. In this paper we address two key questions around how people manage potentially stigmatized identities in using these apps and what types of information they use to self-present in the absence of a detailed profile or rich social cues. To do so, we draw on profile data observed in twelve locations on Grindr, a location-aware social application for MSM. Results suggest clear use of language to manage stigma associated with casual sex, and that users draw regularly on location information and other descriptive language to present concisely to others nearby.

Motivating students to be active learners is a perennial problem in education, and is particularly challenging in lectures where instructors typically prepare content in ad-vance with little direct student participation. We describe our experience using Twitter as a tool for student "co-construction" of lecture materials. Students were required to post a tweet prior to each lecture related to that day's topic, and these tweets -- consisting of questions, examples and reflections -- were incorporated into the lecture slides and notes. Students reported that they found lectures including their tweets in the class slides to be engaging, interactive and relevant, and nearly 90% of them recommended we use our co-construction approach again.

Writing documents together using collaborative editing tools has become extremely common with the widespread availability of tools such as Google Docs. The design of such tools, rooted in early CSCW research, has historically been focused on providing awareness of the presence and activities of one's collaborators. Evidence from a recent qualitative study, however, suggests that people are also concerned about how their behaviors -- and they themselves -- will be perceived by others; and take steps to mitigate possible negative perceptions. We present an experimental study of dyads composing documents together, focusing in particular on group maintenance, impression management and relationship-focused behavior. Results suggest that communication is positively related to social relations, but only for synchronous writing in a shared space; the reverse can be true in asynchronous commenting and editing.

In an always-connected world, managing one's unavailability for interaction with others can be as important and difficult as coordinating mutual availability. Prior studies have identified the butler lie, a linguistic strategy commonly used to manage unavailability, and examined message-level data to examine how message senders' use of butler lies varies across media and situations. This study is the first to examine how butler lies are perceived by those who receive them. Pairs of student participants provided messages sent to each other in real conversations and indicated whether these messages were deceptive or not. These messages were then passed to the partner, who indicated perceived deception and provided an explanation. Results suggest that participants expect butler lies regularly although not as often as they are actually produced, and participants are not very accurate in identifying butler lies. Moreover, detailed analysis of messages and explanations suggests that butler lies play a relational role that is expected by both parties in a dialog.

Location based social networking applications enable people to share their location with friends for social purposes by "checking in" to places they visit. Prior research suggests that both privacy and impression management motivate location disclosure concerns. In this interview study of foursquare users, we explore the ways people think about location sharing and its effects on impression management and formation. Results indicate that location-sharing decisions depend on the perceived visibility of the check-in, blur boundaries between public and private venues, and can initiate tensions within the foursquare friend network. We introduce the concept of "check-in transience" to explain factors contributing to impression management and argue that sharing location is often used as a signaling strategy to achieve social objectives.

Team science and collaboration have become crucial to addressing key research questions confronting society. Institutions that are spread across multiple geographic locations face additional challenges. To better understand the nature of cross‐campus collaboration within a single institution and the effects of institutional efforts to spark collaboration, we conducted a case study of collaboration atCornellUniversity using scientometric and network analyses. Results suggest that cross‐campus collaboration is increasingly common, but is accounted for primarily by a relatively small number of departments and individual researchers. Specific researchers involved in many collaborative projects are identified, and their unique characteristics are described. Institutional efforts, such as seed grants and topical retreats, have some effect for researchers who are central in the collaboration network, but were less clearly effective for others.

Informal interactions are a key element of group work, and many theoretical frameworks and systems have been developed to understand and support these conversations in distributed workgroups. In particular, systems used in several recent experiments provided information about others' current activities so that their availability for conversation could be assessed, and interruptions could be timed strategically. One issue with these experimental systems, though, is that many do not notify the observed party that these observations are taking place. There is reason to believe that such notification could be valuable to users, and that it could alter observers' behavior. Moreover, factors such as the perceived urgency of the interruption could affect willingness to violate social norms in gathering information. We report on an experiment assessing the impact of perceived visibility and task urgency on awareness checking behavior. Results suggest that people check more often when they believe their partners do not know they are checking, and more often when the task is time-constrained than when it is not.

Chronic pain is an illness that affects nearly a third of senior citizens. Uncontrolled chronic pain can manifest constantly and/or intermittently, and can disrupt seniors' ability to plan or to maintain synchronous and scheduled contact with others. Such disruptions can expose seniors to stigma from others who do not understand this illness, social isolation, and a range of challenges to their social autonomy. We present results from an interview study of 27 seniors with chronic pain exploring how they mitigate and manage these disruptions in their lives. Drawing on Goffman's theory of impression management, we found that participants invested significant effort into controlling both the context of interactions and others' expectations, in order to mitigate the potential negative social consequences of disruptions. In performing this work, seniors were selective about what information they revealed to others about their chronic pain and availability. Given such efforts, seniors with chronic pain have unique needs for technologies to support their social interactions.

Systems for collaborative writing have long captured the attention of CSCW researchers, but have only recently come into widespread use. One issue in designing and understanding these systems is awareness of others' actions in a document. On the one hand, making edits and changes visible can improve collaborators' knowledge of who has made edits and what has changed in a document. On the other hand, studies of large scale editing systems such as Wikipedia have suggested that the visibility of certain edits can incite social conflict in groups. In this interview study, we aim to understand how people perceive and consider the potential impacts of their own and others' edits as they write together. Results suggest that edits embody not just changes to a document, but also social messages that have group maintenance implications. Many participants reported that they carefully consider how to make and explain edits so as to minimize social conflict.

The proliferation of communication technology has led to potential stratification of contacts across different media, which has important implications for interpersonal dynamics, such as deception. The present study examines how two text-based communication media, BBM and SMS, involve different kinds of social contact networks, and how these differences lead to changes in the frequency and nature of lies. The results reveal that BBM social contacts are relationally closer and include more friends but fewer family and acquaintances than SMS. More deception was also observed in BBM, which included more lies about managing social interactions. The results have important implications for the impact of design features, such as PIN exchange, in text messaging.

The developing world faces infrastructural challenges in providing Western-style educational computing technologies, but on the other hand observes very high cell phone penetration. However, the use of mobile technology has not been extensively explored in the context of collaborative learning. New projection and display technologies for mobile devices raise the important question of whether to use single or multiple displays in these environments. In this paper, we explore two mobile-based techniques for using co-located collaborative game-play to supplement ESL (English as a Second Language) education in a developing region: (1) Mobile Single Display Groupware: a pico-projector connected to a cell phone, with a handheld controller for each child to interact, and (2) Mobile Multiple Display Groupware: a phone for each child. We explore the types of interaction that occur in both of these conditions and the impact on learning outcomes.

As America's baby boom population gets older, aging in place -- the idea that seniors can remain independent in a comfortable home environment while being monitored and receiving care from family and caregivers living elsewhere -- has received significant attention. Fostering a sense of independence while simultaneously enabling monitoring and frequent interaction can seem paradoxical, however. This raises questions of how we can design technologies that help seniors retain their independence and a sense of comfort, while still interacting with and being monitored regularly by others. We present results from an interview study of 30 seniors, caregivers and relatives in which we sought to understand how they managed their interactions, availability, privacy and independence. Results suggest that they rely on attributes of the physical environment, temporal structures such as routine conversations and activities, and technological mediation.

Managing one's availability for interaction with others is an increasingly complex act, involving multiple media and the sharing of many types of information. In this paper we draw on a field study of 183 SMS users to introduce the idea of the "interpersonal awareness narrative" -- the coherent, plausible and sometimes deceptive stories that people tell each other about their availability and activities. We examine participants' use of deception in these accounts, and focus in particular on "butler lies," those lies told to enter or exit conversations or to arrange other interactions. We argue that participants use this type of deception in SMS strategically, drawing on the inherent ambiguities of SMS while maintaining plausible narratives.

One possibility presented by novel communication technologies is the ability for remotely located experts to provide guidance to others who are performing difficult technical tasks in the real world, such as medical procedures or engine repair. In these scenarios, video views and other visual information seem likely to be useful in the ongoing negotiation of shared understanding, or common ground, but actual results with experimental systems have been mixed. One difficulty in designing these systems is achieving a balance between close-up shots that allow for discussion of detail and wide shots that allow for orientation or establishing a mutual point of focus in a larger space. Achieving this balance can be difficult without disorienting or overloading task participants. In this article we present results from two experiments involving three automated camera control systems for remote repair tasks. Results show that a system providing both detailed and overview information was superior to systems providing only one or the other in terms of performance but that some participants preferred the detail-only system.

Instant messaging (IM) is a common and popular way for co-workers, friends, and family to stay in touch, but its"always-on properties can sometimes lead people to feel overexposed or too readily available to others for conversation. This, in turn, may lead people to deceive others about their actual status or availability. In this paper, we introduce the notion of the "butler lie to describe lies that allow for polite initiation and termination of conversations. We present results from a field study of 50 IM users, in which participants rated each of their messages at the time of sending to indicate whether or not it was deceptive. About one tenth of all IM messages were rated as lies and, of these, about one fifth were butler lies. These results suggest that butler lies are an important social practice in IM, and that existing approaches to interpersonal awareness, which focus on accurate assessment of availability, may need to take deception and other social practices into account.

While most collaboration technologies are concerned with supporting particular tasks such as workflows or meetings, many work groups do not have the teamwork skills essential to effective collaboration. One way to improve teamwork is to provide dynamic feedback generated by automated analyses of behavior, such as language use. Such feedback can lead members to reflect on and subsequently improve their collaborative behavior, but might also distract from the task at hand. We have experimented with GroupMeter - a chat-based system that presents visual feedback on team members' language use. Feedback on proportion of agreement words and overall word count was presented using two different designs. When receiving feedback, teams in our study expressed more agreement in their conversations and reported greater focus on language use as compared to when not receiving feedback. This suggests that automated, real-time linguistic feedback can elicit behavioral changes, offering opportunities for future research.

The initiation of interaction in face-to-face environments is a gradual process, and takes place in a rich information landscape of awareness, attention, and social signals. One of the main benefits of this process is that people can be more sensitive to issues of privacy and interruption while they are moving towards interaction. However, on-line communication tools do not provide this subtlety, and often lead to unwanted interruptions. We have developed a prototype message system called OpenMessenger (OM) that adds the idea of gradual initiation of interaction to on-line communication. OpenMessenger provides multiple levels of awareness about people, and provides notification to those about whom information is being gathered. OpenMessenger allows people to negotiate interaction in a richer fashion than is possible with any other current messaging system. Preliminary evaluation data suggest the utility of the approach, but also shows that there are a number of issues yet to be resolved in this area.

Instructor/student interaction in e-learning environments can positively impact both student learning and instructor satisfaction. In online webcast lectures, however, interaction can be difficult because instructors lack basic awareness information about their remote students. Our goal is to better understand the kinds of awareness information that instructors should have if they are to interact frequently and effectively with their students in e-learning environments. We conducted an exploratory study -- via interviews and observations -- of instructor attention in face-to-face classrooms at a large university. Our results imply that a webcast system should provide instructors with overview and detailed data about their students, but that this detailed information should not be displayed publicly.

Video recordings of meetings are often monotonous and tedious to watch. In this paper, we report on the design, implementation and evaluation of an automated meeting capture system that applies television production principles to capture and present videos of small group meetings in a compelling manner. The system uses inputs from a motion capture system and microphones to drive multiple pan-tilt-zoom cameras and uses heuristics to frame shots and cut between them. An evaluation of the system indicates that its performance approaches that of a professional crew while requiring significantly fewer human resources.

Individuals with cognitive deficits and their families are prime examples of collaborative "systems" that seek to perform everyday tasks together. Yet there has been little investigation into how these families communicate and coordinate in basic tasks like remembering appointments. In this paper we take a distributed cognition approach to studying ten families struggling with amnesia through nonparticipant observation and interviews. Our data show that the families work closely together as cognitive systems that must compensate for memory volatility in one of the members. We explore our participants' strategies for overcoming these difficulties and present lessons for the design of assistive technologies, highlighting the need for redundancy, easy and frequent synchronization, and awareness of updates. We conclude with implications for distributed cognition theory.

Coordinating goals, schedules, and tasks among collaborators is difficult, and made even more so when there are disciplinary, geographic and institutional boundaries that must be spanned. Designing CSCW tools to support coordination in these settings, however, requires an improved under-standing of the constraints and conflicts that impede effective collaboration. We present findings from a study of distributed collaborations between academic surgeons and biomedical engineering researchers. These two groups differ significantly in their work priorities and institutional contexts, but are nonetheless able to work together and co-ordinate effectively. They accomplish this via human mediation, frequent ad hoc communication, and optimizing the use of their limited face-to-face interaction opportunities.

This paper reports on an exploratory study of the effects of input configuration on group behavior and performance in a collaborative task performed by a collocated group using a large display. Twelve groups completed a mixed-motive negotiation task under two conditions: a single, shared mouse and one mouse per person. Results suggest that the multiple mouse condition allowed for more parallel work, but the quality of discussion was higher in the single mouse condition. Moreover, participants were more likely to act in their own best interest in the multiple mouse condition.

We present an experimental study of automatic camera control in the performance of collaborative remote repair tasks using video-mediated communication. Twelve pairs of participants, one "helper" and one "worker," completed a series of Lego puzzle tasks using both a static camera and an automatic camera system that was guided in part by tracking the worker's hand position. Results show substantial performance benefits for the automatic system, particularly for complex tasks. The implications of these results are discussed, along with some lessons for the use of motion tracking as a driver for camera control.

The tension between privacy and awareness has been a persistent difficulty in distributed environments that support opportunistic and informal interaction. For example, many awareness systems that display 'always-on' video links or PC screen contents have been perceived as too invasive, even though functional real-world analogues, like open-plan offices, may provide even less privacy than their online counterparts. In this paper we explore the notion of privacy in open-plan real-world environments, in order to learn more about how it might be supported in distributed systems. From interviews and observations in four open-plan offices, we found that attention plays an important role in the management of both confidentiality and solitude. The public nature of paying attention allows people to build understandings of what objects in a space are legitimate targets for attention and allows people to advertise their interest in interaction. Our results add to what is known about how privacy works in real-world spaces, and suggest valuable design ideas that can help improve support for natural privacy control and interaction in distributed awareness systems.

Abstract This exploratory study compares two approaches to understanding the “collaboration propensity” of individual researchers. On the one hand, social comparisons of disciplines would suggest that collaboration is a function of orientation toward individual versus collective responsibility for discovery. A contrasting approach would hold that collaboration depends on the work researchers are engaged in—when it is useful to collaborate, they will do so regardless of the social climate. Results presented here suggest that this latter approach is potentially more powerful but that there are complexities in measurement and operationalization that urge a more nuanced treatment of collaboration propensity.

This paper presents an observational study of face-to-face university classrooms and provides preliminary design principles for improving interactivity in webcast presentations. Despite the fact that participation and interaction patterns appear to depend heavily on presentation style and class size, useful patterns were observed and analyzed. Design principles presented include the need to support rapid changes in floor control, multiple types of presentation technologies, and the subtleties of awareness between the audience and presenter.

This paper reports on an exploratory experimental study of the relationships between physical movement and desired visual information in the performance of video-mediated collaborative tasks in the real world by geographically distributed groups. Twenty-three pairs of participants (one "helper" and one "worker") linked only by video and audio participated in a Lego construction task in one of three experimental conditions: a fixed scene camera, a helper-controlled pan-tilt-zoom camera, and a dedicated operator-controlled camera. "Worker" motion was tracked in 3-D space for all three conditions, as were all camera movements. Results suggest performance benefits for the operator-controlled condition, and the relationships between camera position/movement and worker action are explored to generate preliminary theoretical and design implications.

Abstract In this article, I draw on interview data gathered in the High Energy Physics (HEP) community to address recent problems stemming from collaborative research activity that stretches the boundaries of the traditional scientific authorship model. While authorship historically has been attributed to individuals and small groups, thereby making it relatively easy to tell who made major contributions to the work, recent collaborations have involved hundreds or thousands of individuals. Printing all of these names in the author list on articles can mean difficulties in discerning the nature or extent of individual contributions, which has significant implications for hiring and promotion procedures. This also can make collaborative research less attractive to scientists at the outset of a project. I discuss the issues that physicists are considering as they grapple with what it means to be “an author,” in addition to suggesting that future work in this area draw on the emerging economics literature on “mechanism design” in considering how credit can be attributed in ways that both ensure proper attribution and induce scientists to put forth their best effort.

This paper reports on the emergent use of lightweight text chat to provide important grounding and facilitation information in a large, distributed, ad-hoc group of researchers participating in a live experiment. The success of chat in this setting suggests a critical re-examination and extension of Clark and Brennan's work on grounding in communication. Specifically, it is argued that there are some settings characterized by reduced information and clarification needs, where the use of extremely lightweight tools (such as basic text chat) can be sufficient for achieving common ground - even when conversational participants are unknown to each other. Theoretical and design implications are then presented.

This panel will provide a forum for a discussion of important and timely issues surrounding the global deployment of cyberinfrastructure to support science and engineering research activities. Representatives of funding agencies, existing cyberinfrastructure projects, specific technologies and social scientists involved in the evaluation of these technologies will be brought together to address questions about the key obstacles to the operational deployment of cyberinfrastructure, whether or not cyberinfrastructure will improve research, and what the role of the CSCW community is and can or should be in this deployment.

In this paper, we describe the evolution and impact of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) research through social network analysis of coauthorship data. A network of authors as nodes and shared papers as links is used to compare patterns of growth and collaboration in CSCW with other domains, such as high-energy physics and computer science. Further, the coauthorship network data are used to depict dynamic changes in the structure of CSCW collaborations over time. Examination of these changes shows high volatility in the composition of the CSCW research community over decade-long time spans. These data are augmented by a brief citation analysis of recent CSCW conferences. We discuss the implications of the CSCW findings in terms of the influence of CSCW research on the larger field of HCI research as well as the general utility of social network analysis for understanding patterns of collaboration.

Data are a fundamental component of science and engineering work, and the ability to share data is critical to the validation and progress of science. Data sharing and reuse in some fields, however, has proven to be a difficult problem. This paper argues that the development of effective CSCW systems to support data sharing in work groups requires a better understanding of the use of data in practice. Drawing on our work with three scientific disciplines, we show that data play two general roles in scientific communities: 1) they serve as evidence to support scientific inquiry, and 2) they make a social contribution to the establishment and maintenance of communities of practice. A clearer consideration and understanding of these roles can contribute to the design of more effective data sharing systems. We suggest that this can be achieved through supporting social interaction around data abstractions, reaching beyond current metadata models, and supporting the social roles of data.