https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122963 Sat, 04 Apr 2026 12:17:22 GMT 2026-04-04T12:17:22Z http://dspace.mit.edu:80/bitstream/id/bc13dd1f-53e9-4f25-86fc-511860ba5d31/ https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122963 https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/127786 Coffee Farms as Design Labs: Manifesting Equity x Design Principles in Practice Reynolds-Cuéllar, Pedro; Chong Lu Ming, Rubez New forms of co-design, as a mechanism for collaboration with historically marginalized communities, continue to emerge. From short academic experiences to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives, these programs attempt to highlight the value and importance of co-design in reducing equity gaps, producing relevant outcomes, and broadening participation across stakeholders. In doing so, these initiatives run at risk of reproducing a variety of challenges related to power, ethics, and gender among others, therefore requiring continuous examination and experimentation to address such issues. In this paper, we analyze the implementation of an interdisciplinary course in design carried out at two coffee farms in rural Colombia. Using the EquityXDesign framework, we critically analyze how the course approaches these known challenges in community-based design, and discuss modifications to the framework towards more inclusive and equity-driven design. Tue, 11 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/127786 2020-08-11T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/124702 The Design of Pseudo-Participation Palacin, Victoria; Nelimarkka, Matti; Reynolds-Cuéllar, Pedro; Becker, Christoph Participation is key to building an equitable, realistic and democratic future. Yet a lack of agency in decision making and agenda-setting is a growing phenomenon in the design of digital public services. We call this pseudo-participation by and in design. The configuration of digital artifacts and/or processes can provide an illusion of participation but lack supportive processes and affordances to allow meaningful participation to happen. This exploratory paper examines the realm of pseudo-participation in the design of public digital services through two concepts: 1) pseudo-participation by design, digital interfaces, and tools that provide the illusion of participation to the people, 2) pseudo-participation in design, processes in which those affected by the design decisions are marginalized and not given any agency. We contribute to the re-imagination of participatory design in modern societies where the role of politics has become ubiquitous and is yet to be critically scrutinized by designers. Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/124702 2020-04-16T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/124701 Community-Based Technology Co-Design: Insights on Participation, and the Value of the “Co” Reynolds-Cuéllar, Pedro; Delgado Ramos, Daniela Evidence and analysis of Community-Based Participatory Design (PD) and Co-Design programs are not abundant. Filling this gap allows for better understanding of (1) the value programs offer from a quantitative standpoint, and (2) how to formalize participation within PD. In this paper, we present evidence from a series of International Development Design Summits (IDDS), a PD-oriented program focused on low-cost technology co-design and co-production, in collaboration with local communities. The purpose is to provide opportunities for learning and practicing community-based PD in an intercultural setting. We examine data from five summits in Colombia between 2015-2018.We discuss the value of this approach across multiple groups, and how it can be understood as a measure of participation. We present evidence of participant benefits, including an exploratory analysis of self-perception using sentiment analysis. Finally, we discuss the challenges and potential directions for this work. This paper contributes to further understand the value of participation (the “co”) in the context of community-based PD. Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/124701 2020-06-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123475 Whose Death Matters? A Quantitative Analysis of Media Attention to Deaths of Black Americans in Police Confrontations, 2013–2016 Zuckerman, Ethan; Matias, J. Nathan; Bhargava, Rahul; Bermejo, Fernando; Ko, Allan Media coverage of deaths of unarmed people of color at the hands of police sharply increased after the high-profile death of Michael Brown. We analyze a novel set of media data to understand reasons for this rise and to postulate a shift in reporting that treats these deaths as part of a larger pattern, crystallized around the “key event” of Michael Brown’s death rather than as unconnected incidents. We see a “news wave” that resulted in increased coverage and sharing of stories about deaths of people of color at the hands of police that aligned with activist efforts such as the Black Lives Matter movement. Our quantitative methods suggest a mechanism for tracking effectiveness of activist efforts to change the framing of important social phenomena in the news. Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123475 2019-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123474 Gobo: A System for Exploring User Control of Invisible Algorithms in Social Media Bhargava, Rahul; Chung, Anna; Gaikwad, Neil S; Hope, Alexis; Jen, Dennis; Rubinovitz, Jasmin; Saldías-Fuentes, Belén; Zuckerman, Ethan In recent years, there has been an unprecedented growth in content that is shared and presented on social media platforms. Along with this growth, however, there is an increasing concern over the lack of control social media users have on the content they are shown by invisible algorithms. In this paper, we introduce Gobo, an open-source social media browser system that enables users to manage and filter content from multiple platforms on their own. Gobo aims to help users control what's hidden from their feeds, add perspectives from outside their network to help them break filter bubbles, and explore why they see certain content on their feed. Through an iterative design process, we've built and deployed Gobo in the wild and conducted a pilot study in the form of a survey to understand how the users respond to the shift of control from invisible algorithms to themselves. Our initial findings suggest that Gobo has potential to provide an alternate design space to enhance control, transparency, and explainability in social media. Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123474 2019-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123473 Creative Data Literacy: A Constructionist Approach to Teaching Information Visualization D'Ignazio, Catherine; Bhargava, Rahul Data visualization has rapidly become a standard approach to interrogating and understanding the world around us in domains that extend beyond the technical and scientific to arts, communications and services. In business settings the Data Scientist has become a recognized and valued role [Davenport and Patil 2012]. Journalism has re-oriented itself around data-driven storytelling as a potential saviour for an industry in peril [Howard 2014]. Governments are moving to more data-driven decision making, publishing open data portals and pondering visualization as an opportunity for citizen participation [Gurstein 2011]. This journal itself has numerous examples that use visualization tools and techniques within the digital humanities as a tool for exploration [Roberts-Smith et al. 2013] [Hoyt, Ponto, and Roy 2014] [Forlini, Hinrichs, and Moynihan 2016]. This boom in attention has led large new populations of learners into the field. Formal educational settings have rushed to create new approaches and introductions to this content, but often they fall back on traditional approaches to things such as scientific charting and graphing [Webber et al. 2014] [Calzada and Marzal 2013]. Many view data visualization as a new technology, which runs the risks of replicating old approaches without acknowledging the unique affordances and domains that data visualization relies upon. Data visualization is not simply another technology to integrate into education. It is visual argument and persuasion, far more closely associated with rhetoric and writing than spreadsheets [Zer-Aviv 2014]. In this paper we present novel approaches to learning technologies and activities, focused on novice learners entering the field of data driven storytelling. We begin with a deeper dive into the problems we see with introducing new learners into a field characterized by inequality, continue with a discussion of approaches for introducing technologies to education, and summarize the inspirational pedagogies we build on. We then offer some design principles and three activities as examples of the concept of creative data literacy. We assert that creative approaches grounded in constructionist educational theories are necessary to empower non-technical learners to be able to tell stories and argue for change with data. Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123473 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123472 The International Affiliation Network of YouTube Trends Platt, Edward; Bhargava, Rahul; Zuckerman, Ethan Online video, a ubiquitous, visual, and highly share- able medium, is well-suited to crossing geographic, cultural, and linguistic barriers. Trending videos in particular, by virtue of reaching a large number of viewers in a short span of time, are powerful as both influencers and indicators of international communication flows. In this work, we study a large set of videos trend- ing across 57 nations, collected from YouTube over a 7-month period. We consider the set as a network of content flowing between nations, then develop conditional co-affiliation, a nation-nation co-affiliation index that enables a meaningful interpretation of network path length and the application of betweenness centrality. We observe a highly-interlinked network with remarkably similar co-affiliation levels between very different nations. However, Arabic-speaking nations appear more isolated, with the U.A.E. emerging as a key bridge. By analyzing video trend lifespans, we show that nations having many globally-popular video trends are reliably not the nation where those trends are strongest: we see no evidence to support the widely discussed idea of cultural exporter or trendsetter nations. We model correlations between co-affiliation and a selection of contextual factors. We note a surprisingly complex interaction between migration and shared video trends. Consistent with existing work on video popularity, we find that long trending times within one nation do not necessarily translate to reaching a wide global audience. This work expands on previous studies of the geographic popularity of videos by incorporating trending data and extend- ing our analysis from video-nation affiliations to nation- nation co-affiliations. Characterizing these relationships is key to understanding the international cultural impact and potential of online video. Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123472 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123471 Beyond Data Literacy: Reinventing Community Engagement and Empowerment in the Age of Data Bhargava, Rahul; Deahl, Erica; Letouzé, Emmanuel; Noonan, Amanda; Sangokoya, David; Shoup, Natalie Tue, 01 Sep 2015 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123471 2015-09-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123470 Data Murals: Using the Arts to Build Data Literacy Bhargava, Rahul; Kadouaki, Ricardo; Bhargava, Emily; Castro, Guilherme; D'Ignazio, Catherine Current efforts to build data literacy focus on technology-centered approaches, overlooking creative non-digital opportunities. This case study is an example of how to implement a Popular Education-inspired approach to building participatory and impactful data literacy using a set of visual arts activities with students at an alternative school in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. As a result of the project data literacy among participants increased, and the project initiated a sustained interest within the school community in using data to tell stories and create social change. Sat, 22 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123470 2016-10-22T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123463 What We Should Do Before the Social Bots Take Over: Online Privacy Protection and the Political Economy of Our Near Future Graeff, Erhardt Direct interactions between humans and bots generally conjure up images from science fiction of Terminator robots or artificial intelligence gone rogue, like 2001's HAL or The Matrix. In reality, AI is still far from much of that sophistication, yet we are already faced with the ethical and legal ramifications of bots in our everyday lives. Drones are being used for collecting military intelligence and bombing runs. U.S. states have passed laws to address self-driving cars on public roads (Marcus 2012). And nearer the subject of this paper, the legality of search engine bots (web crawlers) has been openly questioned on grounds of intellectual property protection and trespassing (Plitch 2002). Bots inspire fear because they represent the loss of control. These fears are in some ways justified, particularly on grounds of privacy invasion. Online privacy protection is already a fraught space, comprising varied and strong positions, and existing laws and regulations that are antiquated many times over by the rapid growth and innovation of the internet in recent decades. The emergence of social bots, as means of entertainment, research, and commercial activity, poses an additional complication to online privacy protection by way of information asymmetry and failures to provide informed consent. In the U.S., the lack of an explicit right to privacy and the federal government’s predilection for laissez faire corporate regulation expose users to a risk of privacy invasion and unfair treatment when they provide personal data to websites and online services, especially those in the form of social bots. This paper argues for legislation that defines a general right to privacy for all U.S. citizens, addressing issues of both access and control of personal information and serving as the foundation for auditable industry design standards that inherently value and honor users' rights to privacy. Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123463 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123462 Tim Highfield, Social Media and Everyday Politics Graeff, Erhardt Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123462 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123461 Crowdsourcing as Reflective Political Practice: Building a Location-based Tool for Civic Learning and Engagement Graeff, Erhardt Many platforms for civic engagement, whether online or offline, are inconvenient and disconnected from the source of issues they are meant to address. They require that citizens leave the places they normally inhabit physically or virtually and commit to a separate space and set of processes. Town hall meetings are still a key point of engagement, occurring during specific times and in specific places. Online forums function similarly, in that deliberation occurs within profile-based websites for which you need to sign up and regularly return. This paper responds to the design challenge and research question: How do you address barriers to “minimum effective engagement” in community projects, and ensure that all citizens can have their voice heard on how to improve their local communities? In order to raise levels of participation in community projects and expand the range of voices heard in governmental decision-making, there is a need for civic technology that is lightweight and compelling enough to enjoy continued use and to promote civic learning. In this paper, I develop a theoretical basis for effective citizenship through crowdsourcing monitorial activity by finding connections between several theories of citizenship and learning, which point to this activity fostering civic learning through reflective political practice. Using a needs assessment of Boston-area municipalities, I reinforce my argument and concretize a set of design goals for a new socio-technical system to foster local civic learning and engagement around issues like urban planning. In the end, I respond to the research challenge and design goals by introducing a prototype for a location-based survey platform for Android smartphones called Action Path, and discuss early-stage user feedback and future work. Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123461 2014-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123460 The revolutions were tweeted: Information flows during the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions Lotan, Gilad; Graeff, Erhardt; Ananny, Mike; Gaffney, Devin; Pearce, Ian; Boyd, Danah This article details the networked production and dissemination of news on Twitter during snapshots of the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions as seen through information flows—sets of near-duplicate tweets—across activists, bloggers, journalists, mainstream media outlets, and other engaged participants. We differentiate between these user types and analyze patterns of sourcing and routing information among them. We describe the symbiotic relationship between media outlets and individuals and the distinct roles particular user types appear to play. Using this analysis, we discuss how Twitter plays a key role in amplifying and spreading timely information across the globe. Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123460 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123459 The Battle for ‘Trayvon Martin’: Mapping a Media Controversy Online and Offline Graeff, Erhardt One of the biggest news stories of 2012, the killing of Trayvon Martin, nearly disappeared from public view, initially receiving only cursory local news coverage. But the story gained attention and controversy over Martin’s death dominated headlines, airwaves, and Twitter for months, thanks to a savvy publicist working on behalf of the victim’s parents and a series of campaigns off–line and online. Using the theories of networked gatekeeping and networked framing, we map out the vast media ecosystem using quantitative data about the content generated around the Trayvon Martin story in both off–line and online media, as well as measures of engagement with the story, to trace the interrelations among mainstream media, nonprofessional and social media, and their audiences. We consider the attention and link economies among the collected media sources in order to understand who was influential when, finding that broadcast media is still important as an amplifier and gatekeeper, but that it is susceptible to media activists working through participatory or nonprofessional media to co–create the news and influence the framing of major controversies. Our findings have implications for social change organizations that seek to harness advocacy campaigns to news stories, and for scholars studying media ecology and the networked public sphere. Mon, 03 Feb 2014 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123459 2014-02-03T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123458 Caveat emptor, computational social science: Large-scale missing data in a widely-published Reddit corpus Gaffney, Devin; Matias, J. Nathan As researchers use computational methods to study complex social behaviors at scale, the validity of this computational social science depends on the integrity of the data. On July 2, 2015, Jason Baumgartner published a dataset advertised to include “every publicly available Reddit comment” which was quickly shared on Bittorrent and the Internet Archive. This data quickly became the basis of many academic papers on topics including machine learning, social behavior, politics, breaking news, and hate speech. We have discovered substantial gaps and limitations in this dataset which may contribute to bias in the findings of that research. In this paper, we document the dataset, substantial missing observations in the dataset, and the risks to research validity from those gaps. In summary, we identify strong risks to research that considers user histories or network analysis, moderate risks to research that compares counts of participation, and lesser risk to machine learning research that avoids making representative claims about behavior and participation on Reddit. Fri, 06 Jul 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123458 2018-07-06T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123457 Characterizing the Life Cycle of Online News StoriesUsing Social Media Reactions Castillo, Carlos; El-Haddad, Mohammed; Pfeffer, Jürgen; Stempeck, Matt This paper presents a study of the life cycle of news articles posted online. We describe the interplay between website visitation patterns and social media reactions to news content. We show that we can use this hybrid observation method to characterize distinct classes of articles. We also find that social media reactions can help predict future visitation patterns early and accurately.We validate our methods using qualitative analysis as well as quantitative analysis on data from a large inter-national news network, for a set of articles generating more than 3,000,000 visits and 200,000 social media re-actions. We show that it is possible to model accurately the overall traffic articles will ultimately receive by ob-serving the first ten to twenty minutes of social media reactions. Achieving the same prediction accuracy with visits alone would require to wait for three hours of data.We also describe significant improvements on the accuracy of the early prediction of shelf-life for news stories. Sat, 15 Feb 2014 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123457 2014-02-15T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123456 Actionable Auditing: Investigating the Impact of Publicly Naming Biased Performance Results of Commercial AI Products Buolamwini, Joy; Raji, Inioluwa Deborah Although algorithmic auditing has emerged as a key strategy to expose systematic biases embedded in software platforms, we struggle to understand the real-world impact of these audits, as scholarship on the impact of algorithmic audits on increasing algorithmic fairness and transparency in commercial systems is nascent. To analyze the impact of publicly naming and disclosing performance results of biased AI systems, we investigate the commercial impact of Gender Shades, the first algorithmic audit of gender and skin type performance disparities in commercial facial analysis models. This paper 1) outlines the audit design and structured disclosure procedure used in the Gender Shades study, 2) presents new performance metrics from targeted companies IBM, Microsoft and Megvii(Face++) on the Pilot Parliaments Benchmark (PPB)as of August 2018, 3) provides performance results on PPB by non-target companies Amazon and Kairos and,4) explores differences in company responses as shared through corporate communications that contextualize differences in performance on PPB. Within 7 months of the original audit, we find that all three targets released new API versions. All targets reduced accuracy disparities between males and females and darker and lighter-skinned subgroups, with the most significant up-date occurring for the darker-skinned female subgroup,that underwent a 17.7% - 30.4% reduction in error be-tween audit periods. Minimizing these disparities led to a 5.72% to 8.3% reduction in overall error on the Pi-lot Parliaments Benchmark (PPB) for target corporation APIs. The overall performance of non-targets Amazon and Kairos lags significantly behind that of the targets,with error rates of 8.66% and 6.60% overall, and error rates of 31.37% and 22.50% for the darker female sub-group, respectively. Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123456 2019-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123454 Legal and ethical issues in the use of telepresence robots:best practices and toolkit Barabas, Chelsea; Bavitz, Christopher; Matias, J. Nathan; Xie, Cecillia; Xu, Jack Fri, 27 Mar 2015 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123454 2015-03-27T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123453 Data Sculptures as a Playful and Low-Tech Introduction to Working with Data Bhargava, Rahul; D'Ignazio, Catherine There is a large and growing population of novice learners entering the field of working with data to tell stories, but they face many challenges related to process, methods and tools. This paper argues that activities focused on building physical manifestations of data, where some variable is mapped onto a physical artifact, are uniquely well-suited to scaffolding a process and exposing learners to methods so that they may take the next step in a learning journey. We introduce our pedagogical motivations as well as three principles that guide our work - use familiar materials, stay low-tech, and create a playground. Three case studies demonstrate how the playful activities we create based on these principles help novice learners explore advanced concepts very quickly. This work strongly suggests that creating data sculptures helps novices overcome initial barriers to learning, set expectations for a data storytelling process, and feel empowered to take the next step. Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123453 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123452 Designing Tools and Activities for Data Literacy Learners D'Ignazio, Catherine; Bhargava, Rahul Data-centric thinking is rapidly becoming vital to the way we work, communicate and understand in the 21st century. This has led to a proliferation of tools for novices that help them operate on data to clean, process, aggregate, and visualize it. Unfortunately, these tools have been designed to support users rather than learners that are trying to develop strong data literacy. This paper outlines a basic definition of data literacy and uses it to analyze the tools in this space. Based on this analysis, we propose a set of pedagogical design principles to guide the development of tools and activities that help learners build data literacy. We outline a rationale for these tools to be strongly focused, well guided, very inviting, and highly expandable. Based on these principles, we offer an example of a tool and accompanying activity that we created. Reviewing the tool as a case study, we outline design decisions that align it with our pedagogy. Discussing the activity that we led in academic classroom settings with undergraduate and graduate students, we show how the sketches students created while using the tool reflect their adeptness with key data literacy skills based on our definition. With these early results in mind, we suggest that to better support the growing number of people learning to read and speak with data, tool de- signers and educators must design from the start with these strong pedagogical principles in mind. Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123452 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123451 CLIFF-CLAVIN: Determining Geographic Focus for News Articles D'Ignazio, Catherine; Bhargava, Rahul; Zuckerman, Ethan; Beck, Luisa The growing diversity of news sources available online has led to a signi cant methodological change in eld of global news coverage. Studies of media attention and framing require sophisticated analytic tools to permit analysis of a large volume of content consumed by a broad readership. Geographic focus continues to be a topic of interest to media organizations, media analysts, and media consumers. De- tecting and recognizing geographic locations (toponyms) in news media is a well-established eld with many commercial and open source tools available. An evaluation is performed of various existing tools to compare their accuracy and appropriateness for use within media organizations and for media analysis. The concept of focus, indicating the location an article is primarily about, is extended into the news realm and added to an existing tool to increase relevance for the aforementioned applications. Potential applications as well as initial experiments using geoparsing for news organizations are discussed, in addition to ideas for future work building on these tools. Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123451 2014-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123450 DataBasic: Design Principles, Tools and Activities for Data Literacy Learners D'Ignazio, Catherine; Bhargava, Rahul The growing number of tools for data novices are not designed with the goal of learning in mind. This paper proposes a set of pedagogical design principles for tool development to support data literacy learners. We document their use in the creation of three digital tools and activities that help learners build data literacy, showing design decisions driven by our pedagogy. Sketches students created during the activities reflect their adeptness with key data literacy skills. Based on early results, we suggest that tool designers and educators should orient their work from the outset around strong pedagogical principles. Sat, 08 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123450 2016-10-08T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123449 Artesanos, makers y centros de innovación en Colombia Reynolds-Cuéllar, Pedro Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123449 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123448 Achieving Grassroots Innovation Through Multi-lateral Collaborations: Evidence from the Field Reynolds-Cuéllar, Pedro; Buitrago Guzmán, Silvia Collaborations with academia, international organizations, governments and civic society are both an opportunity and a challenge for grassroots associations to achieve their mission while maintaining their values and philosophy. Little research has been done on programs leveraging these collaborations to increase capacity for community-based, peer-production and innovation in economically constrained environments. This article presents the case study of a grassroots organization, C-Innova, in its leading role as organizer of two international design summits hosted in Colombia in 2015 and 2016. The goal of these summits focuses on increasing participants’ understanding of design and technical skills, while fostering aspects of self-fulfillment and psychological needs. These experiences attempt to support and catalyze the emergence of local innovation initiatives. Both summits were organized and implemented through partnerships with local government, cooperation agencies, universities both local and international and members of civic society. We analyze the success of these collaborations across three dimensions: (1) program's objectives, (2) systemic changes across partners as a result of these partnerships and (3) structural improvements and challenges for C-Innova. We find significant changes across all dimensions, suggesting this as a viable model for grassroots to achieve their goals without significantly compromising their core values and beliefs Sun, 01 Jul 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123448 2018-07-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123440 Hackathons as Participatory Design: Iterating Feminist Utopias Hope, Alexis; D'Ignazio, Catherine; Hoy, Josephine; Michelson, Rebecca; Roberts, Jennifer; Krontiris, Kate; Zuckerman, Ethan Breastfeeding is not only a public health issue, but also a matter of economic and social justice. This paper presents an iteration of a participatory design process to create spaces for re-imagining products, services, systems, and policies that support breastfeeding in the United States. Our work contributes to a growing literature around making hackathons more inclusive and accessible, designing participatory processes that center marginalized voices, and incorporating systems- and relationship-based approaches to problem solv-ing. By presenting an honest assessment of the successes and shortcomings of the first iteration of a hackathon, we explain how we re-structured the second Make the Breast Pump Not Suck hackathon in service of equity and systems design. Key to our re-imagining of conventional innovation structures is a focus on experience design, where joy and play serve as key strategies to help people and institutions build relationships across lines of difference. We conclude with a discussion of design principles applicable not only to designers of events, but to social movement researchers and HCI scholars trying to address oppression through the design of technologies and socio-technical systems. Thu, 02 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123440 2019-05-02T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123437 Three Provocations for Civic Crowdfunding Davies, Rodrigo The rapid rise of crowdfunding in the past five years, most prominently among US-based platforms such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, has begun to attract the attention of a wide range of scholars, policymakers and practitioners. This paper considers civic crowdfunding — the use of crowdfunding for projects that produce community or quasipublic assets — and argues that its emergence demands a fresh set of questions and approaches. The work draws on critical case studies constructed through fieldwork in the US, the UK and Brazil, and a discourse analysis of civic crowdfunding projects collected from platforms by the author. It offers three provocations to scholars and practitioners considering the practice, questioning the extent to which civic crowdfunding is participatory, the extent to which it addresses or contributes to social inequality, and the extent to which it augments or weakens the role of public institutions. In doing so, it finds that civic crowdfunding is capable of vastly divergent outcomes, and argues that the extent to which civic crowdfunding produces outcomes that are beneficial, rather than harmful to the public sphere, will be determined by the extent to which the full range of stakeholders in civic life participate in the practice. Note: DRAFT – NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION Thu, 08 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123437 2015-01-08T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/119921 Computational support for media ecosystems research Bell, Rebekah L This thesis summarizes the design, implementation, and evaluation of two end-user web tools for automated content analysis of online news data. The first tool is a visualization that displays neural word embeddings data, allowing a user to explore words used in similar contexts within a text corpus. The second tool is an interface that guides users through a supervised machine learning pipeline, enabling novices to train their own binary classification models to detect the presence of a specific frame within the text of a news story. The visualization and interface were evaluated in a user study and think-aloud test respectively. These tools were developed for integration into Media Cloud, an open-source platform for media analysis, which is part of a larger effort to facilitate and advance media ecosystems research. Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2018.; This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.; Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 67-71). Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/119921 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/119071 Evaluating civic technology design for citizen empowerment Graeff, Erhardt (Erhardt Charles) Civic technology should empower us as citizens. Despite its breadth as a field, civic technology often takes its lead from Silicon Valley companies that espouse design goals potentially hazardous to participatory democracy. In this dissertation, I explore: How might we design civic technologies for citizen empowerment and evaluate their impact on this goal? With their growing role as mediators of democracy, it is insufficient for civic technology designers to evaluate their designs in terms of ease of use and increased engagement with their platform. Research from political and developmental psychology shows the importance to lifelong civic engagement of learning experiences that cultivate a citizen's perception they can make change (political efficacy) and their belief in having responsibilities to the public good (civic identity). To achieve these positive feedback loops, we need a richer framework for civic technology design. This dissertation proposes two solutions: 1) empowerment-based design principles for civic technology and 2) a prototype toolkit for evaluating the impact of civic technology on political efficacy. Because empowerment is contextual, the proposals here focus on tools and platforms built to support "monitorial citizenship," an increasingly popular form of civic engagement aimed at holding institutions accountable. To see these solutions in action, I report on a case study of SeeClickFix, a civic technology company that builds tools enabling citizens to report infrastructure problems to local governments. Two surveys of political efficacy and a randomized experiment with active users of SeeClickFix, followed by interviews with SeeClickFix staff, indicate the validity and utility of evaluating political efficacy as a measure of empowerment as well as the limitations of testing for incremental improvements. Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 193-214). Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/119071 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/114068 Gender shades : intersectional phenotypic and demographic evaluation of face datasets and gender classifiers Buolamwini, Joy Adowaa This thesis (1) characterizes the gender and skin type distribution of IJB-A, a government facial recognition benchmark, and Adience, a gender classification benchmark, (2) outlines an approach for capturing images with more diverse skin types which is then applied to develop the Pilot Parliaments Benchmark (PPB), and (3) uses PPB to assess the classification accuracy of Adience, IBM, Microsoft, and Face++ gender classifiers with respect to gender, skin type, and the intersection of skin type and gender. The datasets evaluated are overwhelming lighter skinned: 79.6% - 86.24%. IJB-A includes only 24.6% female and 4.4% darker female, and features 59.4% lighter males. By construction, Adience achieves rough gender parity at 52.0% female but has only 13.76% darker skin. The Parliaments method for creating a more skin-type-balanced benchmark resulted in a dataset that is 44.39% female and 47% darker skin. An evaluation of four gender classifiers revealed a significant gap exists when comparing gender classification accuracies of females vs males (9 - 20%) and darker skin vs lighter skin (10 - 21%). Lighter males were in general the best classified group, and darker females were the worst classified group. 37% - 83% of classification errors resulted from the misclassification of darker females. Lighter males contributed the least to overall classification error (.4% - 3%). For the best performing classifier, darker females were 32 times more likely to be misclassified than lighter males. To increase the accuracy of these systems, more phenotypically diverse datasets need to be developed. Benchmark performance metrics need to be disaggregated not just by gender or skin type but by the intersection of gender and skin type. At a minimum, human-focused computer vision models should report accuracy on four subgroups: darker females, lighter females, darker males, and lighter males. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the implications of misclassification and the importance of building inclusive training sets and benchmarks. Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 103-116). Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/114068 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/98623 Mapjack : a mobile based Wiki for collaborative map making Ntabathia, Jude The internet has enabled people with few or no formal qualifications to create, share and disseminate cartographic information. One of the best platforms that has empowered citizens to create cartographic data is OpenStreetMap. It has been ten years since OpenStreetMap came into existence and despite generating a large corpus of user contributed cartographic data, significant gaps still exist between countries that have poor access to internet and computers and nations that are highly connected digitally. Mapjack is a mobile application that seeks to bring about more contributions by people who have largely been disenfranchised within this realm of volunteered geographic information. Disenfranchised not because they are not willing to participate, but because of the lack of access to tools and devices to participate. Mapjack enables communities to use mobile phones to create and modify their own spatial identities. Spatial identities refer to how communities want to be spatially represented within the digital realm. These spatial identities are maps showing what communities consider as important and fundamental in representing their geographical space therefore forming a spatial digital identity. A team of two communities that are frequent contributors to OpenStreetMap have participated in evaluating the tool. This thesis highlights that the use of offline map rendering and spatial context play a very important role in consumption and contribution to OpenStreetMap. Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2015.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 67-68). Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/98623 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/98543 Said-Huntington Discourse Analyzer : a machine-learning tool for classifying and analyzing discourse Hashmi, Muhammad Ali, S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Critical discourse analysis (CDA) aims to understand the link "between language and the social" (Mautner and Baker, 2009), and attempts to demystify social construction and power relations (Gramsci, 1999). On the other hand, corpus linguistics deals with principles and practice of understanding the language produced within large amounts of textual data (Oostdijk, 1991). In my thesis, I have aimed to combine, using machine learning, the CDA approach with corpus linguistics with the intention of deconstructing dominant discourses that create, maintain and deepen fault lines between social groups and classes. As an instance of this technological framework, I have developed a tool for understanding and defining the discourse on Islam in the global mainstream media sources. My hypothesis is that the media coverage in several mainstream news sources tends to contextualize Muslims largely as a group embroiled in conflict at a disproportionately large level. My hypothesis is based on the assumption that discourse on Islam in mainstream global media tends to lean toward the dangerous "clash of civilizations" frame. To test this hypothesis, I have developed a prototype tool "Said-Huntington Discourse Analyzer" that machine classifies news articles on a normative scale -- a scale that measures "clash of civilization" polarization in an article on the basis of conflict. The tool also extracts semantically meaningful conversations for a media source using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, allowing the users to discover frames of conversations on the basis of Said-Huntington index classification. I evaluated the classifier on human-classified articles and found that the accuracy of the classifier was very high (99.03%). Generally, text analysis tools uncover patterns and trends in the data without delineating the 'ideology' that permeates the text. The machine learning tool presented here classifies media discourse on Islam in terms of conflict and non-conflict, and attempts to put light on the 'ideology' that permeates the text. In addition, the tool provides textual analysis of news articles based on the CDA methodologies. Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2015.; This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.; Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 71-74). Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/98543 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/95604 Action path : a location-based tool for civic reflection and engagement Graeff, Erhardt (Erhardt Charles) Many platforms for civic engagement, whether online or offline, require that citizens leave the places they normally inhabit physically or virtually and commit to a separate space and set of processes. Examples include town hall meetings, occurring during specific times and in specific places, and online forums, where deliberation occurs within profile-based websites for which you need to sign up and to regularly return. This thesis responds to the design challenge and research question: How do you address barriers to minimum effective engagement in community projects, and ensure that all citizens can contribute their input on how to improve their local communities? In order to raise levels of participation in community projects and expand the range of voices heard in governmental decision-making, there is a need for a civic engagement platform that is lightweight and compelling enough to enjoy continued use. To this end, I have developed a theoretical basis for effective citizenship through monitorial actions aided by mobile computing, finding connections between various theories of citizenship and learning to fill a gap in the literature and in terms of civic technology design. My argument and design goals for such a system are reinforced by findings from a needs assessment of Boston-area municipalities that confirmed a desire to use new technologies to elicit feedback on community issues from a more diverse demographic than those who currently attend public meetings. Based my analysis of the literature and the distilled design goals, I built and completed early-stage user testing of a prototype smartphone app-based civic engagement platform called Action Path, which uses location-awareness in the form of geo-fences along with push notifications to prompt users to respond to one-item surveys dotting their urban landscape. Interviews with users suggest Action Path might help people see their communities as filled with opportunities for civic intervention, and might increase their sense of efficacy. Additionally, workshops about geo-fence design and curricular design with potential stakeholders showed how Action Path might be effectively deployed through civic technologists and in schools. Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2014.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 77-80). Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/95604 2014-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/95597 Engineering serendipity : Terra Incognita and other strange encounters with global news Kanarinka There is a significant body of research that shows that people tend to congregate with others like them and favor information that confirms their existing views. With declining global news coverage and the rise of personalized news feeds and social media, there is concern that our forms of information consumption do not support encountering sufficient information about other cultures and places to make us effective citizens of the world. This thesis reviews these arguments and proposes a design intervention called "Terra Incognita: 1000 Cities of the World" to help address the geographic dimension of information diversity. Terra Incognita brings together aspects of serendipitous information discovery, personal informatics and "nudge" applications to provide users with multiple daily opportunities to explore faraway cities by reading global news recommendations. This study shows that while Terra Incognita did not shift user behavior in aggregate towards reading about more diverse places, it did make them curious about new places, prompted them to reflect and broadened their horizons. The final chapter offers guidance for designers who might aspire to create applications at the intersection of personal behavior change and news media. Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2014.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references. Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/95597 2014-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/92660 Conflicting Frames : the dispute over the meaning of rolezinhos in Brazilian media Goncalves, Alexandre A This research analyzes the battle of frames in the controversy surrounding rolezinhos- flashmobs organized by low-income youth in Brazilian shopping malls. To analyze the framing of these events, a corpus of 4,523 online articles was compiled. These articles, published between December 7th, 2013, and February 23 rd, 2014, were investigated using Media Cloud-the system for large scale content analysis developed by the Berkman Center at Harvard and the MIT Center for Civic Media. Data from Facebook indicated which articles received more attention on the social network. A framing analysis was performed to describe the conflicting frames in the debate. The 60 most popular texts--those that attracted 55% of the social media attention in the corpus-were content analyzed. They served as an input for a hierarchical cluster analysis algorithm that grouped articles with similar frame elements. The result of the cluster analysis led to the identification of three frames: one that criminalized rolezinhos or at least tried to discourage them (arrastdo frame), another that acquitted the youth and blamed police, government, State, or society for discriminating poor citizens (apartheid frame), and a third frame that criticized both conservatives and progressives for using the controversy to push their particular agendas (middle ground frame). After finding the keywords that singled out each frame, natural language processing methods helped to describe the genesis and evolution of those frames in the overall corpus as well as the framing strategies of the main actors. Thesis: S.M. in Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, Graduate Program in Science Writing, 2014.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 83-104). Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/92660 2014-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/91432 InterTwinkles : online tools for non-hierarchical, consensus-oriented decision making DeTar, Charles (Charles Frederick) Non-hierarchical, participatory, consensus-based decision making has seen an explosion in popularity in recent years. The traditional techniques of formal consensus, however, are limited to face-to-face meetings, which can limit organizations' capacity due to their time and cost. InterTwinkles is a set of integrated but composable online tools designed to assist small and medium-sized groups in engaging in formal group decision making processes online. In this thesis, I present a thorough investigation of the ethical and practical motivations for consensus decision making, and relate these to concerns of control and autonomy in the design of online systems. I describe the participatory and iterative design process for building an online platform for consensus, with particular attention to the practical constraints of real-world groups with mixed technical aptitude. I present the results of a three month field trial with six cooperative groups in the Boston area, and evaluate the results through the lens of adaptive structuration theory, with particular attention on the fit between the ethical motivations and performance outcomes. Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2013.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages [165]-173). Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/91432 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/89954 Civic crowdfunding : participatory communities, entrepreneurs and the political economy of place Davies, Rodrigo Crowdfunding, the raising of capital from a large and diverse pool of donors via online platforms, has grown exponentially in the past five years, spurred by the rise of Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. While legislative attention in the US has turned to the potential to use crowdfunding as a means of raising capital for companies, less attention has been paid to the use of crowdfunding for civic projects - projects involving either directly or indirectly, the use of government funds, assets or sponsorship, which may include the development of public assets. This project analyzes the subgenre of civic crowdfunding from three perspectives. First, it provides a comprehensive quantitative overview of the subgenre of civic crowdfunding, its most common project types and its geographic distribution. Second, it describes three edge cases, projects that, while uncommon, demonstrate the current limits, aspirations and potential future path of the subgenre. Third, it analyzes the historical and intellectual paradigms within which civic crowdfunding projects and platforms are operating: whether they are best located within the historical context of community fundraising, participatory planning, entrepreneurial culture or a combination of the three. In addressing these questions, the thesis will explore the potential benefits and challenges of using crowdfunding as a means of executing community-oriented projects in the built environment, and offer proposals for how public and non-profit institutions can engage with crowdfunding to realize civic outcomes. Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies, 2014.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 151-173). Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/89954 2014-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/82434 Participatory aid marketplace : designing online channels for digital humanitarians Stempeck, Matt (Matt Kelly) Recent years have seen an increase in natural and man-made crises. Information and communication technologies are enabling citizens to contribute creative solutions and participate in crisis response in myriad new ways, but coordination of participatory aid projects remains an unsolved challenge. I present a wide-ranging case library of creative participatory aid responses and a framework to support investigation of this space. I then co-design a Marketplace platform with leading Volunteer & Technical Communities to aggregate participatory aid projects, connect skilled volunteers with relevant ways to help, and prevent fragmentation of efforts. The result is a prototype to support the growth of participatory aid, and a case library to improve understanding of the space. As the networked public takes a more active role in its recovery from crisis, this work will help guide the way forward with specific designs and general guidelines. Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2013.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 215-236). Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/82434 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/82429 Networked tactics for gender representation in the news Matias, J. Nathan (Jorge Nathan) This thesis presents research on gender disparities in online news, followed with three open source designs that attempt to address those disparities. Open Gender Tracker is a platform that applies automated gender analysis to electronic content sources. FollowBias is a behavioral experiment on the effectiveness of personal trackers to manage the biases of journalists and curators. Passing On uses data and stories to attract and coordinate participants to expand the visibility of women in Wikipedia. These three designs are offered as inspirations for a paradigm of technologies to measure and change women's representation in the news. Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2013.; Page 108 blank. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 102-107). Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/82429 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/55187 Merry Miser DeTar, Charles (Charles Frederick) This thesis describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of Merry Miser, a persuasive mobile phone application intended to help people to spend less and save more. The application uses the context provided by users' location (obtained using the phone's GPS) and financial histories to provide personalized interventions when the user is near an opportunity to spend. The interventions, which are motivated by prior research in positive psychology, persuasive technology and shopping psychology, consist of informational displays about context-relevant spending history, subjective assessments of purchases, personal spending limit contracts, and a glanceable display of the user's current financial status and savings goals. The application was tested with four users over a period of four weeks. The test results are described, and additional steps to improve the application are suggested. Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2009.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-71). Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/55187 2009-01-01T00:00:00Z