This is sort of a marginal update, but recently I was a little annoyed that there wasn’t some obvious place to import all of the CHI papers into a single bibtex file. So I went and downloaded them.
You can download them here:
I went to the ACM’s digital library and searched for everything matching * at each conference. here’s an example of what that would look like.
Then I exported the search results to bibtex.
So you’re probably realizing that you could do this for other conferences (like CSCW or UIST or UbiComp), and indeed I could too, but it’s not a super high priority for me right now. If you’re interested in doing that, by all means do it. If you want to be super cool, submit a pull request to my papers repository.
If there’s a lot of interest, I might have to spin that repository off so people don’t have to download my drafts as I’m working on them, but I’m still pretty committed to the idea of this radical transparency of papers and presentations. You can see the history of the piecework paper, which was absolutely trashed by reviewers the first time around at CSCW before getting an honorable mention at CHI, and you can see how the keynote presentation for that paper (meant for CHI as well) went from garbage to being a relatively not too terrible beamer/LaTeX presentation.
I guess the point is, everything I do starts out kind of shitty. Hopefully everything everyone starts out doing begins life kind of shitty. The point is that you keep working on it, and it gets better. Eventually.
Where are things going now?
With CHI behind me and (almost) all of the presentation stuff online, I’m focusing on getting summer projects in shape. I need to write a proper post about this if only so I can point people to it when I want to explain what the idea is, but the short version is that we’re working on an external qualification system for Mechanical Turk, that’ll allow workers and requesters to make their own work communities that others can reference as a qualification filter. So if you have a list of Turkers who have all proven they own VR gear, you can have a qualification group of workers with VR gear. And others can use that group as well. Or if you want to use workers who are all part of some community that guarantees high quality work with minimal need for oversight, then you can use that (instead of the fairly arbitrary and opaque Masters Qualification, for instance).
The longer term plan is that this would span multiple work platforms and make it possible/easy for workers to move from one platform to another (whether as part of career growth or just because).
It’s exciting work partly because this is inspired to some extent by the piecework paper, but also because I have three undergrads joining the project for the summer. I’m really excited because I reviewed all of their applications and they’re just really impressive people, so it’ll be cool to see where their perspectives help take this project.
Some other projects include:
- beginning this YouTuber ethnography fieldwork as previously discussed
- brainstorming more projects (is that ever not on the horizon?)