Online platforms have become a key avenue for forming new relationships, especially for queer individuals. However, some individuals, such as those in asexual and aromantic communities (A-Spec), seek forms of relationships that trouble existing frameworks assumed by online platforms, such as dating apps. To investigate A-Spec needs, we conducted an 8-week ARC study with 38 A-Spec participants who have used online platforms for developing relationships. Participants described a mismatch between the design of dating apps and their approach to building relationships, suggesting platform design that combines affordances of dating apps and other social platforms. We thus outline a “process-oriented” paradigm for relationship-building platforms inspired by community design suggestions, supporting participants’ process of first establishing a low-stakes relationship and then co-constructing its properties. We also argue for a “pluralized” approach to defining identity and relationship in the design of online systems, upsetting default assumptions surrounding any given label.

Chinese transformative fandom has had to adapt to increasing censorship and surveillance on the Chinese internet in recent years, working around censorship on domestic platforms in order to continue participating in fandom. To investigate this phenomenon from a privacy perspective, we interviewed 10 overseas members of Chinese transformative fandom about their experiences with privacy and censorship, and we supplemented this with 153 social media comments from Weibo and Xiaohongshu (RedNote) on the same topic. We found that our data perceived the current state of Chinese online fandom as, at best, frustrating, and at worst unsafe. Fans could be discouraged as the platform prevented them from sharing their fanworks while within-fandom disagreements led some fans to silence or report each other. The censored state of Chinese platforms, however, could also make it difficult for the community to learn how to move to a blocked overseas platform. They responded to risks from both the state and their peers by leveraging precarious techniques of obscurity and anonymity, seeking strategies that would still allow engagement with fandom. We identify three key takeaways for privacy scholarship: the harms of censorship were felt at a community level, which created a tension with expected privacy solutions; faced with inevitable surveillance, fans nonetheless actively modeled threats as a community to inform their behaviors; and the sociotechnical environment of fans influenced how blocking and reporting other fans seemed necessary for curation, contributing to why they might expose each other to state-level harm.

The privacy practices of transformative fandom are of interest to HCI researchers both for the community’s high proportion of queer members and for the community’s sophisticated privacy norms and behaviors. We investigated fans’ use of single-serving websites on Carrd.co (“Carrds”) as personal profiles linked from Twitter accounts. We scraped Twitter to gather 5252 Carrds from fans in a variety of fandoms, which we analyzed using a combination of keyword searches and hand-coding. Fans’ Carrds frequently disclose queer identity, and articulate a complex system of community values and boundary management. Inspired by how these findings aren’t well-explained by individual theories of privacy, we articulate first steps towards a theory of collective privacy based in a communal process of values construction, trust building, and personal disclosure that we believe helps us to understand the sophisticated nature of fans’ observed behaviors.

SUMMARY: Our increasing ability to resolve fine details using light microscopy is matched by an increasing need to quantify images in order to detect and measure phenotypes. Despite their central role in cell biology, many image analysis tools require a financial investment, are released as proprietary software, or are implemented in languages not friendly for beginners, and thus are used as black boxes. To overcome these limitations, we have developed PyJAMAS, an open-source tool for image processing and analysis written in Python. PyJAMAS provides a variety of segmentation tools, including watershed and machine learning-based methods; takes advantage of Jupyter notebooks for the display and reproducibility of data analyses; and can be used through a cross-platform graphical user interface or as part of Python scripts via a comprehensive application programming interface. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: PyJAMAS is open-source and available at https://bitbucket.org/rfg_lab/pyjamas. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

We interact with dozens of web interfaces on a daily basis, making inclusive web design practices more important than ever. This paper investigates the impacts of web interface design on ambient belonging, or the sense of belonging to a community or culture. Our experiment deployed two content-identical webpages for an introductory computer science course, differing only in aesthetic features such that one was perceived as masculine while the other was gender-neutral. Our results confirm that young women exposed to the masculine page are negatively affected, reporting significantly less ambient belonging, interest in the course and in studying computer science broadly. They also experience significantly more concern about others' perception of their gender relative to young women exposed to the neutral page, while no similar effect is seen in young men. These results suggest that gender biases can be triggered by web design, highlighting the need for inclusive user interface design for the web.