Jacki O'Neill

Text chat in action

Synchronous text communication is becoming recognized as a valuable workplace communication medium yet some studies of group text chat indicate that its properties can lead to interactional incoherence. We consider this issue through a detailed analytic examination of text chat transcripts by showing how participants manage their interactions through considering multiple threads, turn taking and topic change. We reveal the routine practices that participants employ to create and manage coherent interaction. These practices arise from the turn taking system in operation, which facilitates straightforward repair of misunderstandings. We conclude by considering the implications of this for design and for the organisation and management of interactions of various forms.

Being a turker

Crowdsourcing is a key current topic in CSCW. We build upon findings of a few qualitative studies of crowdworkers. We conducted an ethnomethodological analysis of publicly available content on Turker Nation, a general forum for Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) users. Using forum data we provide novel depth and detail on how the Turker Nation members operate as economic actors, working out which Requesters and jobs are worthwhile to them. We show some of the key ways Turker Nation functions as a community and also look further into Turker-Requester relationships from the Turker perspective -- considering practical, emotional and moral aspects. Finally, following Star and Strauss [25] we analyse Turking as a form of invisible work. We do this to illustrate practical and ethical issues relating to working with Turkers and AMT, and to promote design directions to support Turkers and their relationships with Requesters.

The times they are a-changin': mobile payments in india

We report on an ethnographic study of payment and banking practices in India. Currently a mobile payment mechanism is being developed in India and we were interested to see how it would fit with various current payment systems for various types of users. Therefore we studied a variety of current payment situations and gained an understanding of the banking and payment practices and needs of a diverse community. Our aim was to inform the development of interface elements, applications and services that would support the needs we uncovered. We describe our findings and the design ideas they provoked.

Timing in the art of integration: 'that's how the bastille got stormed'

This paper uses a long term ethnographic study of the design and implementation of an electronic patient records (EPR) system in a UK hospital Trust to consider issues arising in the multi-faceted process of integration when a customizable-off-the-shelf (COTS) system is configured and deployed in a complex setting. The process involves trying to artfully work out how disparate technologies integrate with existing and evolving patterns of work within developing regulatory requirements. We conclude by suggesting ways in which ethnographic interventions and user involvement may be timed and targeted to aid in achieving this process.

The practical indispensability of articulation work to immediate and remote help-giving

This paper argues that the design of remote help-giving systems should be grounded in articulation work and the methodical ways in which help-givers and help-seekers coordinate their problem solving activities. We provide examples from ethnographic studies of both immediate and remote help-giving to explicate what we mean by articulation work and to tease out common and characteristic methods involved in help-seeking and the giving of expert advice. We then outline how emerging technologies might best be used to support articulation work in the design and development of systems for remote troubleshooting of devices with embedded computing capabilities.

KrishiPustak: A Social Networking System for Low-Literate Farmers

With the wide penetration of mobile internet, social networking (SN) systems are becoming increasingly popular in the developing world. However, most SN sites are text heavy, and are therefore unusable by low-literate populations. Here we ask what would an SN application for low-literate users look like and how would it be used? We designed and deployed KrishiPustak, an audio-visual SN mobile application for low-literate farming populations in rural India. Over a four month deployment, 306 farmers registered through the phones of eight agricultural mediators making 514 posts and 180 replies. We conducted interviews with farmers and mediators and analyzed the content to understand system usage and to drive iterative design. The context of mediated use and agricultural framing had a powerful impact on system understanding (what it was for) and usage. Overall, KrishiPustak was useful and usable, but none-the-less we identify a number of design recommendations for similar SN systems.

How Can I Help You? Call Centres, Classification Work and Coordination

As a comparatively novel but increasingly pervasive organizational arrangement, call centres have been a focus for much recent research. This paper identifies lessons for organizational and technological design through an examination of call centres and ‘classification work’ – explicating what Star [1992, Systems/Practice vol. 5, pp. 395–410] terms the ‘open black box’. Classification is a central means by which organizations standardize procedure, assess productivity, develop services and re-organize their business. Nevertheless, as Bowker and Star [1999, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge MA: MIT Press] have pointed out, we know relatively little about the work that goes into making classification schema what they are. We will suggest that a focus on classification ‘work’ in this context is a useful exemplar of the need for some kind of ‘meta-analysis’ in ethnographic work also. If standardization is a major ambition for organizations under late capitalism, then comparison might be seen as a related but as-yet unrealized one for ethnographers. In this paper, we attempt an initial cut at a comparative approach, focusing on classification because it seemed to be the primary issue that emerged when we compared studies. Moreover, if technology is the principal means through which procedure and practice is implemented and if, as we believe, classifications are becoming ever more explicitly embedded within it (for instance with the development of so-called ‘semantic web’ and associated approaches to ontology-based design), then there is clearly a case for identifying some themes which might underpin classification work in a given domain.

From ethnographic study to mixed reality: a remote collaborative troubleshooting system

In this paper we describe how we moved from ethnographic study to design and testing of a Mixed Reality (MR) system, supporting collaborative troubleshooting of office copiers and printers. A key CSCW topic is how remotely situated people can collaborate around physical objects which are not mutually shared, without introducing new interactional problems. Our approach, grounded in an ethnographic study of a troubleshooting call centre, was to create a MR system centred on a shared 3D problem representation, rather than to use video or Augmented Reality (AR)-based systems. The key drivers for this choice were that given the devices are sensor equipped and networked, such a representation can create reciprocal viewpoints onto the current state of this particular machine without requiring additional hardware. Testing showed that troubleshooters and customers could mutually orient around the problem representation and found it a useful troubleshooting resource.

Designing Technology as an Embedded Resource for Troubleshooting

In this paper we describe a number of technologies which we designed to provide support for customers troubleshooting problems with their office devices. The technologies aim to support both self-conducted and expert-supported troubleshooting and to provide a seamless route from one type of support to another. The designs are grounded in the findings of an ethnographic study of a troubleshooting call centre for office devices. We examine the properties of different assemblies of people, resources, technologies and spaces to inspire design for the different troubleshooting situations. Through our fieldwork and our technology envisionments we uncovered a number of dislocations between various aspects of the troubleshooting assemblies: (1) a physical dislocation between the site of the problem and the site of problem resolution; (2) a conceptual dislocation between the users’ knowledge and the troubleshooting resources and (3) a logical dislocation between the support resources and the status of the ailing device itself. The technologies that we propose attempt to address these dislocations by embedding the troubleshooting resources in the device itself, thus harmonizing the various elements and capturing, where possible, the haecceities—the ‘just thisness’—of each particular troubleshooting situation.

Blended Learning in Indian Colleges with Massively Empowered Classroom

Students in the developing world are frequently cited as being among the most important beneficiaries of online education initiatives such as massive open online courses (MOOCs). While some predict that online classrooms will replace physical classrooms, our experience suggests that blending online and in-person instruction is more likely to succeed in developing regions. However, very little research has actually been done on the effects of online education or blended learning in these environments. In this paper we describe a blended learning initiative that combines videos from a large online course with peer-led sessions for undergraduate technical education in India. We performed a randomized controlled trial (RCT) that indicates our intervention was associated with a small but significant improvement in performance on a summative exam. We discuss the results of the RCT and an ethnographic study of the intervention to make recommendations for future, scalable blended learning initiatives for places such as India.