The Human Computer Interaction Consortium (HCIC) is a collection of members of the human-computer interaction (HCI) community from 23 member organizations, who convene once a year to exchange research results with each other. The Consortium was created over 20 years ago in order to counter the typical conference short paper presentations with no follow-on discussion. The HCIC has become a marvelous place that is both intellectually and socially rich; this year the group is moving to a new, larger venue, which will allow them to open up membership to a larger set of people without reducing the quality of the interaction. Last year HCIC attendees voted to break with tradition and include tutorials on the variety of methods in HCI, which range from ethnographies to laboratory studies to analyses of masses of data captured on the Web. The idea was to teach the audience how to be knowledgeable in the methods with which they did not have deep experience, enough so that they could judge whether a research paper using that method was done well or not. The attendees rated most of these tutorials as excellent, and urged the organizers to find a way to make their content available to more people.
This is funding to support the video recording and distribution of five of these tutorials on the topics of "Design Research," "Large Data Set Analysis," "Ethnography," "Content and Conversation Analysis," and "Crowdsourcing." Three of these tutorials have been accepted for presentation at the ACM 2011 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011), which will be held May 7-12 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. (The annual CHI conference is the leading international forum for the presentation and discussion of HCI research and practice, and is attended by approximately 2,500 HCI professionals from around the world; more information about the conference is available at www.chi2011.org.) The other two will be recorded at the speakers' home institutions. NSF funding will cover the cost of sending a videographer to these venues to record and later edit the videos, which will then be made available to the general public online. In addition, the talks will be professionally transcribed to serve as first drafts of chapters in a timely and much-needed book tentatively entitled "Handbook of Methods for HCI."
Broader Impacts: This effort will expose a substantial number of people to new and sophisticated methods for investigating how people interact with computing. The video tutorials on the Web and the book to follow will enable researchers and students everywhere to learn some of the latest, state-of-the-art methods, which they can then exploit in their research.
In this project, several of us are attempting to bring the research field of "Human Computer Interaction" (HCI) up to a level where all participants understand, respect, and can judge the quality of the variety of research methods being used. We do not aspire to make everyone an expert in these methods, but rather bring them to a point where they can judge whether a method was done well, and the conclusions fit the findings. The project began with video recording a number of presentations by experts in methods. These recordings were made at a number of venues, but were good at capturing expert lectures on these topics. These videos have been edited and now will be made accessible on a public site, likely the public arm of the Human Computer Interaction Consortium site. In addition, some of these experts and other experts in the field were asked to write chapters to appear in an edited book called Ways of Knowing in Human Computer Interaction. This book is being edited by myself (Judith Olson) and my colleague at IBM, Wendy Kellogg. The chapters span the topics from Ethnography to Design to System research to Eye tracking. All chapters have been submitted, edited and finalized for publication, with one exception. We expect the book to be complete and submitted to the publisher (Springer) by the middle of the summer. Students and faculty will benefit from these materials by having a clearer understanding of both the breadth of methods used in HCI and the details of how to read an article that uses a method, enough to judge whether it was done well or not. This has an indirect on the general population, in that the more people who use methods well, the more quickly good research will be available for impact.
