College of Engineering

Join the Department of Human Centered Design for our spring Preliminary Exam presentations.

HCDE doctoral students in their second year of the PhD program will overview their research project, discuss research methods and any results thus far, and describe how this research contributes to the field. Presentations will be about 15 minutes with time for a brief Q&A after each talk.

The Latinx diaspora in the United States is a rapidly growing and complex demographic whose members face intersectional harms and marginalizations in sociotechnical systems and are currently underserved in CSCW research. While the field understands that algorithms and digital content are experienced differently by marginalized populations, more investigation is needed about how Latinx people experience social media and, in particular, visual media. In this paper, we focus on how Latinx people experience the algorithmic system of the video-sharing platform TikTok. Through a bilingual interview and visual elicitation study of 19 Latinx TikTok users and 59 survey participants, we explore how Latinx individuals experience TikTok and its Latinx content. Latinx TikTok users actively use platform affordances to create positive and affirming identity content feeds. However, these are interrupted by platform affordances that have unique consequences for Latinx diaspora users, such as promoting explicit and violent imagery about Latinx people, making linguistic assumptions, and only showing creators of certain identities. We discuss these implications on Latinx identity and representation, introduce the concept of algorithmic identity compression, and explore how Latinx individuals are particularly vulnerable to this in sociotechnical systems, such as, but not limited to, TikTok.
 

• 1:30 p.m. | Nisha Devasia, "The Role of Narrative in Misinformation Education Games"
• 2 p.m. | Nina Lutz, “'We’re not all construction workers': Algorithmic Compression of Latinidad on TikTok"
• 2:30 p.m. | Adiza Awwal, "Polarizing Black masculine on YouTube: Influencer pedestalization, information sharing and misogyny"
• 3 p.m. | Anoolia Gakhokidze, "Chokepoints in the Cloud: Generative Potential of Breakdown in Cloud Infrastructures"
• 3:30 p.m. | McKane Andrus, "From Data Activism to Activism in a Time of Dataism: Affirming Epistemological Heterogeneity in Social Movements"

• 1:30 p.m. | Adrian Rodriguez, "Towards Gamified Crafting for Blind and Low-Vision Players"    
• 2 p.m. | Claire Florence Weizenegger, "Everyday Surveillance and Consumer Smart Products: Investigating Privacy, Power, and Interpersonal Dynamics between Primary and Adjacent Users"