Prior to submitting my ethics forms for this study, I had taken on a teaching assistant (TA) position with one undergraduate HCI course and another undergraduate ethics in computing course12. The HCI course ran during Michaelmas term of 2015 (October to December), and the other course ran during Lent term of 2016 (January to March). Three established HCI researchers (i.e. one early stage researcher, and two senior researchers) led the courses, and I shared my TAing duties with five other HCI-focused postgraduate students. During labs, while students worked on assignments, the established researchers, other TAs and I would occasionally share stories about our experiences thus far in academia. I heard these stories months before I conducted my first interview in March 2016. They gave me glimpses into how the HCI community operated, how careers started and flourished—or floundered—and some of the ways the field had changed over time.
Similarly, as I was searching for potential interviewees in early 2016, I also—largely by accident—found myself involved with the design and development of a daylong workshop
10I am aware that feeling isolated is often part of the PhD journey[194].
11I am also aware that having "a sense of community" is still a hotly contested issue within psychology [33], and that I am in no position to resolve that debate.
12I had done this without making any intentional connection to my PhD research; I had done this for the experience of teaching and merely felt most qualified to assist with these courses.
3.2 Field study: timeline, methods, and immersion 33
for HCI graduate students. The workshop itself came out of several in-person and online conversations with friends and colleagues in the UK. I had met these friends and colleagues through the EPSRC’s Digital Economy Network (DEN)13, which happened to be organising an HCI-focused summer school at Newcastle University’s OpenLab. The organisers wanted graduate students to gain experience designing and developing workshops with and for their peers from other universities. There was a workshop proposal process, and from the [unknown number of] submissions, the organisers selected seven day-long workshops, including our own [188]. We put together a call for participants, we advertised our workshop online, we met several times in-person and via Skype to plan out the daylong schedule of events, and we ultimately delivered the workshop during the DEN Summer School in mid-July. Although this process was not identical to that of organising a workshop for a major conference (e.g. CHI or DIS), the process offered me a glimpse into the unstated labour involved with planning and organising academic events.
There were, of course, other ways I participated in the HCI community, too. I reviewed papers for DIS 2016 and 2017, CHI 2016 and 2017, and alt.chi 2017. I attended the HCI Across Borders (HCIxB) workshop during CHI2016. I recently sat on the Program Committees for the ISS 2016 Posters Program [245] and the HCIxB Symposium for CHI2017 [146], each of which involved reviewing several papers. I contributed to the first International Fictional Conference on Design Fiction’s Futures ’16 (FCDFF), a fictional conference with very real activities underpinning its design and planning [138]. I coordinated HCI talks and events for my peers at HighWire. I co-supervised an intern’s summer project in 2016. I co-organised a very different reflexivity workshop during Tiree Tech Wave in the fall of 2016. I wrote papers for HCI venues. I had discussions about HCI topics on Twitter14. These experiences, and my increasing sense of “belonging” within the HCI community, have made their way into my write-up in this chapter. In some cases, I explicitly reference my experiences in the description of HCI research practices. In other cases, I cite primary interview data and secondary published sources that align with my experiences.
I mention my immersion in the academic HCI community here and now—before pre- senting my discussion and analysis of HCI research practices—for transparency. As I briefly mentioned above, I believe my immersion in the HCI community has almost certainly in- fluenced my research. By that I mean I suspect it influenced the tone, candour, and content
13HighWire CDT belongs to the EPSRC’s DEN, “a national network supporting activities of postgraduate research students and Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) within the Research Councils UK Digital Economy theme” [48].
14This discussion about my distaste for the phrase "in the wild" [253] was a personal favourite; I REALLY. TRULY. appreciated having an established academic explain to me that it’s “good to ground [my] problems with ‘ITW’ in concrete instances”, as if I wasn’t aware of that.
34 HCI research practices
of several of my interviews15. I suspect it has also influenced some aspects of my analysis and write-up16. I become aware of this during the transcription and write-up process, and have since found other researchers who identified similar issues in the work of academics writing about their own community practices. For example, Reed-Danaha highlighted that researchers writing about their academic community have to navigate “the issues of insider versus outsider perspectives, and the construction of the [researcher] as both participant and observer” [209]. Although I was not aware of these issues at the outset of my research, I have worked hard to openly address them here, in my write-up.
A keen reader might note that I have not labeled my work as “ethnographic” or “com- munity action” research, despite my immersion in the HCI research community. This is intentional. My work does not—and did not originally—set out to meet the strict criteria of either ethnographic or community action research projects, and it would be inappropriate for me to adopt either label. I kept a reflective research journal throughout my PhD—and this has informed some of my reflections and write-up—but I did not make strict and regular observations or field notes to such a degree that my work could be considered ethnographic. In retrospect, I wish that I had written strict and regular field notes, and I wish that I could have foreseen the depth of my immersion in the HCI community. But that is simply not what happened, nor was it how I planned and intended my research to unfold when I crafted this topic in August 2015.