What is democracy and politics in the context of human-computer interaction?
Quite many years ago, I started to shift my research focus from more traditional collaborative computing to political aspects in human-computer interaction. I don’t recall what was the driving motivation for such shift; did I observe that people were speaking more and more about politics or did I try to bring in something from my previous background as political scientists into human-computer interaction.
Work that I started and re-wrote quite many times is finally out: What Do We Study When Studying Politics and Democracy? A Semantic Analysis of How Politics and Democracy Are Used in SIGCHI Conference Papers (open access) was published at the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. Here are my highlights on what I learned while doing this research:
HCI community uses words politics and democracy more than expected in work-in-progress forms, such as late-breaking work or conference panels and workshops. However, these terms do not make it as often to the final ready works; this opens a question - which I am unable to answer - what happens. Maybe people move to more specific terms after this work, maybe people move to alternative framing for their final work or maybe people just don’t push it beyond the initial work.
Overall, we find 13 different categories of use; some in substantive domains such as media or civic society - where words like politics and democracy draw connection between the domain and these ideas; works on research methodology either discussing politics in design work or working with political data (such as social media posts from elections), or exploring professional themes such as policy making. We also show that the publication volume on these topics is increasing, with politics accounting 1% of publications in 2015-2020; showing that my initial interested was warranted.
Temporally, we see shifts in the focus; for example in the context of social movements research has shifted from more observational studies to action oriented or even activist approaches. At the same time we observe how human-computer interaction community has become more engaged at politics in a national level, moving away from its early 1980s focus on politics in organizations and workplaces.
I was particularly interested on the emerge of political communication in digital means as an human-computer interaction topic: it took of only off in 2010’s; clearly behind (a small number of) studies in political science studying political talk in MUDs, IRC and newslists. I have always seen one benefit of human-computer interaction research as oriented towards the future of technology (and political scientists often lagging behind), but more political and democratic perspective on media consumption still emerged years behind actual practices; speaking on some limitations on human-computer interaction community to see and talk about politics.