C. Estelle Smith

C. Estelle Smith, Zachary Levonian, Haiwei Ma et al.

Online Health Communities (OHCs) are known to provide substantial emotional and informational support to patients and family caregivers facing life-threatening diagnoses like cancer and other illnesses, injuries, or chronic conditions. Yet little work explores how OHCs facilitate other vital forms of social support, especially instrumental support. We partner with CaringBridge.org---a prominent OHC for journaling about health crises---to complete a two-phase study focused on instrumental support. Phase one involves a content analysis of 641 CaringBridge updates. Phase two is a survey of 991 CaringBridge users. Results show that patients and family caregivers diverge from their support networks in their preferences for specific instrumental support types. Furthermore, ``prayer support'' emerged as the most prominent support category across both phases. We discuss design implications to accommodate divergent preferences and to expand the instrumental support network. We also discuss the need for future work to empower family caregivers and to support spirituality.

C. Estelle Smith, Eduardo Nevarez, Haiyi Zhu

Mass media afford researchers critical opportunities to disseminate research findings and trends to the general public. Yet researchers also perceive that their work can be miscommunicated in mass media, thus generating unintended understandings of HCI research by the general public. We conduct a Grounded Theory analysis of interviews with 12 HCI researchers and find that miscommunication can occur at four origins along the socio-technical infrastructure known as the Media Production Pipeline (MPP) for science news. Results yield researchers' perceived hazards of disseminating their work through mass media, as well as strategies for fostering effective communication of research. We conclude with implications for augmenting or innovating new MPP technologies.

C. Estelle Smith, Bowen Yu, Anjali Srivastava et al.

On Wikipedia, sophisticated algorithmic tools are used to assess the quality of edits and take corrective actions. However, algorithms can fail to solve the problems they were designed for if they conflict with the values of communities who use them. In this study, we take a Value-Sensitive Algorithm Design approach to understanding a community-created and -maintained machine learning-based algorithm called the Objective Revision Evaluation System (ORES)---a quality prediction system used in numerous Wikipedia applications and contexts. Five major values converged across stakeholder groups that ORES (and its dependent applications) should: (1) reduce the effort of community maintenance, (2) maintain human judgement as the final authority, (3) support differing peoples' differing workflows, (4) encourage positive engagement with diverse editor groups, and (5) establish trustworthiness of people and algorithms within the community. We reveal tensions between these values and discuss implications for future research to improve algorithms like ORES.