Conferences, Publications, and Congratulations

This year was packed with things we’re excited about and want to celebrate and share. Great things happened to Community Data Science Collective members within our schools and the wider research community.

Academic Successes

Sohyeon Hwang (Northwestern) and Wm Salt Hale (University of Washington) earned their master’s degrees. You can read Salt’s paper, “Resilience in FLOSS,” online.

Charlie Kiene and Regina Cheng completed their comprehensive exams and are now PhD candidates!

Nate TeBlunthuis defended his dissertation and started a post-doctoral fellowship at Northwestern. Jim Maddock defended his dissertation on December 16th.

Congratulations to everyone!

Teaching and Workshop Participation

Floor Fiers and Sohyeon ran a workshop at Computing Everywhere, a Northwestern initiative to help students build computational literacy. Sohyeon and Charlie participated in Yale SMGI Community Driven Governance Workshop. We also had standout attendance at Social Computing Systems Summer Camp, with Sneha Narayan, Stefania Druga, Charlie, Regina, Salt, and Sohyeon participating.

Regina was a teaching assistant for senior undergraduate students on their capstone projects. Regina’s mentees won Best Design and Best Engineering awards.

Conference Presentations

Sohyeon and Jeremy Foote presented together at CSCW (Computer Supported Co-operative Work) where they earned a Best Paper Honorable Mention award. Nick Vincent had two presentations at CSCW, one relating to Wikipedia links in search engine results and one on conscious data contribution. Benjamin Mako Hill and Nate presented on algorithmic flagging on Wikipedia.

Salt was interviewed on the FOSS and Crafts podcast. His conference presentations included Linux App Summit, SeaGL and DebConf. Kaylea Champion spoke at SeaGL and DebConf. Kaylea’s DebConf present was on her research on detecting at-risk projects in Debian.

Kaylea and Mako also presented at Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, an IEEE conference.

Emilia Gan, Mako, Regina, and Stef organized the “Imagining Future Design of Tools for Youth Data Literacies” workshop at the 2021 Connected Learning Summit.

Our 2021 publications include:

• Champion, Kaylea. 2021. “Underproduction: An approach for measuring risk in open source software.” 28th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER). pp. 388-399, doi: 10.1109/SANER50967.2021.00043.
• Fiers, Floor , Aaron Shaw , and Eszter Hargittai. 2021. “Generous Attitudes and Online Participation.” Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, 1. https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2021.008
• Hill, Benjamin Mako , and Aaron Shaw , 2021. “The hidden costs of requiring accounts: Quasi-experimental evidence from peer production.” Communication Research 48(6): 771-795. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0093650220910345.
• Hwang, Sohyeon and Jeremy Foote . 2021. “Why do people participate in small online communities?”. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW2), 462:1-462:25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479606
• Shaw, Aaron and Eszter Hargittai. 2021. “Do the Online Activities of Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers Mirror Those of the General Population? A Comparison of Two Survey Samples.” International Journal of Communication 15: 4383–4398. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/16942
• TeBlunthuis, Nathan , Benjamin Mako Hill , and Aaron Halfaker. 2021. “Effects of Algorithmic Flagging on Fairness: Quasi-experimental Evidence from Wikipedia.” Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 5, CSCW1, Article 56 (April 2021), 27 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3449130
• TeBlunthuis, Nathan. 2021 “Measuring Wikipedia Article Quality in One Dimension.” In Proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym ’21). Online: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479986.3479991.