[Petit Fours #449] On positionality, storytelling, and the accessibility paradox
Hi, everyone! I’m back in Stockholm, about to dive into the final week of teaching this semester. Here’s what I’ve got for you:
#1 From the session I chaired at CSCW, I want to highlight a paper by Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, Allison Woodruff, and Jed R. Brubaker: How Data Workers Shape Datasets: The Role of Positionality in Data Collection and Annotation for Computer Vision. Here’s the abstract: “Data workers play a key role in the big data industry. Clients hire data workers to collect and annotate data with human identity concepts, like demographic categories or clothing items. Often, such workers are treated as computational-they are expected to quickly and objectively conduct their work, with the goal of having huge, unbiased datasets for training models. Computer vision is especially interested in fair and impartial data due to biases and unethical practices in the field. However, far from impartial, data workers imbue computer vision data with ''biases'' beyond correct versus incorrect answers. Data workers embed their own specific positional perspectives about identity concepts in both collection and annotation processes. Through interviews and ethnographic observations of data workers (freelance and business process outsourcing (BPO) employees), we show how worker positionality influences decisions during data work. We also show the unintended outcomes, like social biases, that occur when positionality is not explicitly attended to in client instructions. We discuss how employing a lens of positionality in data work reveals the gulfs between data worker perspectives and client expectations, which are colored by a web of positional actors beyond isolated data workers. We propose positional (il)legibility as an approach to data work that embraces the reality of positionality in classification practices and addresses the failures of positivist bias mitigation practices.“
#2 I also really enjoyed this award-winning paper by Aparajita S. Marathe and Anne Marie Piper, with direct relevance to some of the research we are doing with Marzia Alizada: The Accessibility Paradox: How Blind and Low Vision Employees Experience and Negotiate Accessibility in the Technology Industry. Here’s the abstract: “Many technology companies aim to improve access and inclusion not only by making their products accessible but also by bringing people with disabilities into the tech workforce. We know less about how accessibility is experienced and negotiated by disabled workers within these organizations. Through interviews with 20 BLV workers across various tech companies, we uncover a persistent misalignment between organizational attempts at accessibility and the current realities of these employees. We introduce the concept of the accessibility paradox, which we define as the inherent tension between the productivity- and profit-driven nature of tech companies and their desire to hire and retain disabled workers. Focusing on the experiences of BLV workers, we show how the accessibility paradox manifests in their everyday workplace interactions, including digital infrastructure, accommodations processes and policies, ability assumptions, and competing priorities. We offer recommendations for future research and practice to understand and improve workplace accessibility and inclusion.“
#3 As a third paper, I want to highlight this year’s Lasting Impact Award winner: Published in 2013, Hollaback!: the role of storytelling online in a social movement organization by Jill P. Dimond, Michaelanne Thomas (formerly Dye), Daphne Larose, and Amy S. Bruckman very much continues to be worth a read: “CSCW systems are playing an increasing role in activism. How can new communications technologies support social movements? The possibilities are intriguing, but as yet not fully understood. One key technique traditionally leveraged by social movements is storytelling. In this paper, we examine the use of collective storytelling online in the context of a social movement organization called Hollaback, an organization working to stop street harassment. Can sharing a story of experienced harassment really make a difference to an individual or a community? Using Emancipatory Action Research and qualitative methods, we interviewed people who contributed stories of harassment online. We found that sharing stories shifted participants' cognitive and emotional orientation towards their experience. The theory of "framing" from social movement research explains the surprising power of this experience for Hollaback participants. We contribute a way of looking at activism online using social movement theory. Our work illustrates that technology can help crowd-sourced framing processes that have traditionally been done by social movement organizations.“
#4 And it wouldn’t really be a CSCW round-up without something relating to Wikipedia! This time, though, I want to point you not to more research papers but to this recent interview with Jimmy Wales: The Culture Wars Came for Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales Is Staying the Course. There are some great quotes in there: “At the same time, we’re designing everything for the long haul, and the only way we can last that long is not by pandering to this raging mob of the moment but by maintaining our values, maintaining our trustworthiness. We’re just going to do our thing, and we’re going to do it as well as we can. I don’t know what else we can do.”
-A