8/9/2019 Sophia B Liu - CSST 2010

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Sophia B. Liu Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society InstitutePhD Candidate University of Colorado at Boulder

CSST 2010 Summer Research Institute

How will my research contribute to advancing our scientific understanding

of socio-technical systems?

What legacies are we choosing to pass down (or rather upload) for posterity in anetworked world? What kinds of heritage values and practices are emerging from social mediause particularly in the crisis context? How is the HCI community shaping this legacy through the

design of socio-technical systems? In asking these research questions, I define socio-technical tomean studying social behavior in technologically-supported settings. I specifically study how

people share crisis information online, and how social media tools support or can supportcuratorial activity. To this end, I conduct research by using ethnographic methods as well as

cultural probes to direct the course of technology design.

Heritage topics in HCI are nascent. My interdisciplinary research opens up new ways of

understanding heritage issues in the online world for past and recent crises (i.e. 1984 Bhopal

tragedy, 2001 September 11 attacks, 2005 Hurricane Katrina, 2007 Virginia Tech universityshooting, 2009 Iranian election protests, 2010 Haiti earthquake, climate change). Heritage is aliving social system that involves the negotiation of our identities and value systems and

reconstructs them in ways that are relevant to our present conditions and future visions [3]. Newmedia can be a force and stimulus for evolving heritage practices, meanings and values [1].

My investigations of crisis-related social media use are touchstones for a critical understandingof heritage in the digital milieu.

We are inundated with information online and faced with the problem of curatorialoverload: too much information, too difficult to organize and retrieve [4]. Curatorial tools can

help people make sense of massive information repositories and decide what to share for

posterity. Socially-distributed curation, an adaptation of socially-distributed cognition [2], is acuratorial activity that takes place between people and artifacts on the Web. Multiple duties areassociated with curation (i.e. collecting, organizing, preserving, filtering, storytelling,

exhibiting). I offer new directions and approaches for designing systems that support sociallydistributed curation, where members of civil society can collaboratively curate content for the

purposes of documenting and commemorating crisis events.

[1] Giaccardi, E., Champion, E. and Kalay, Y. (eds) 2008. Sense of Place: New Media, CulturalHeritage and Place-making.International Journal of Heritage Studies, 14, 3, 195-196.

[2] Hollan, J., Hutchins, E., and Kirsh, D. 2000. Distributed cognition: Toward a newfoundation for human-computer interaction research.ACM Transactions on Computer-

Human Interaction (TOCHI), 7, 2, 174-196.

[3] Smith, L. 2006. Uses of Heritage. Routledge.

[4] Van House, N. and Churchill, E.F. 2008. Technologies of Memory: Key Issues and CriticalPerspectives. Memory Studies, 1,3, 295-310.