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Being early career as an academic researcher, publications are the biggest metric of success (or failure). The saying does go, “publish or perish.” I wanted to share how I keep track of my own publications. This system used to be analog, but I’ve finally gotten to the point in my career where I have too many projects and other floating responsibilities to rely on notebooks or paper calendars alone. This is where Trello has been a life saver. I’ve moved all my project management exclusively to Trello. In this blog, I would like to share my “Papers Pipeline.”
For those who don’t know, Trello is a project management platform
that consists of “boards.” Boards are then made up of “lists” and the columns
contain “cards.” Both lists and cards are moveable within a board. They can
just be picked up and dragged to a new location. This makes for really easy
task management. Imagine a board for writing a research paper. You might have 4
lists: to do, doing, done, and additional resources, notes, and information. To
do list might contain cards labeled things like “draft lit review” or “finish
introduction.” As these get completed, you can then move them along the lists
from doing (as you’re doing them) and done (when they are done). These boards
can have multiple users, so you can imagine the possibilities as multiple
coauthors organize themselves around the task of completing a paper. (Yes,
tasks can be assigned and there’s a commenting ability, etc.) I plan on having
my students use this as a way to keep us all in communication for various
research projects.
So, my paper pipeline is a board that I have starred and is
at the top of my list whenever I log into Trello. My lists are as follows:
Ideas (things that might lead to good papers or
seeds for future projects, essentially my “promise box”)
Needs reviewing and reworking
Data Collection
Data Analysis
Draft on Deck
With Coauthors
Out for Feedback (from labmates, etc)
Under Review
R&R (Revise and Resubmit)
Camera Ready (Final version prep)
Published (This is a good time to add to your
CV!)
Dust Bin (Graveyard of papers/ideas that didn’t
pan out)
Then within each of these lists, I have cards. There are cards
for the start of a potential idea or something I want to come back to after I
have finished current work. I rename cards as I go along and the paper becomes
more coherent. I add labels for the papers I am lead author on or mentoring
students on (thanks, Jen Nicholas for that great suggestion!). I can add notes
or links to documents. I also attach other Trello boards that specifically are
dedicated to each paper (with those to do, doing, done lists mentioned above).
In this image you can see the different columns or “lists” with each “card” as a different paper.
This method gives a really nice visual layout of the work.
You can see right away if there is a backlog of papers on my desk that I need
to get out for feedback or to coauthors. I can also quickly assess what’s
currently under review (and potentially get a sense for what is coming back
soon).
I highly recommend this method for getting organized. What
have you found that helps? Are there other great tools that early career
researchers should know about?
This is a continuation of my series of blogs recapping CHI
2019. You can catch up
with the first blog, if you missed it, and the second blog on self-care
at conferences, and the third blog on the social impact of our
research. In this final blog of my CHI 2019 series, I wanted to answer a
Frequently Asked Question: “How are you managing being at CHI with kids?”
The short answer: Not easily. It’s hard. It’s expensive. I have to make tough choices.
The longer answer: I was fortunate enough to be one of the inaugural postdocs to get a grant from Northwestern that helped cover the cost of my mother’s plane ticket. This grant was to help postdocs who have dependents still attend conferences. It’s meant to cover costs such as a caregiver at home or for a child or caregiver to travel with. My daughter is still nursing and has never taken a bottle, no matter how much convincing we try to do. So, we made the choice that she comes with me on my overnight trips until she’s ready to not do that anymore.
What does this mean, really? That every time I want to
travel, my daughter comes with. But if I am presenting or trying to network, I’m
also looking for childcare. It’s difficult to be watching a running toddler
while networking at cocktail hours or staying out late at dinners or
after-dinner drinks. So, for a long international trip like CHI in Glasgow, I
bring my mother who gets to spend time with her granddaughter while I’m off
networking, going to workshops, and giving presentations. I will be real and
tell you that this wasn’t an ideal set-up, but compared to the wrangling and horrible
experiences of going to onsite job interviews with her as a 5 month old, CHI
looked like cake.
I’ve learned to make tough choices. Do I go to this dinner or
an afternoon session? Do I skip the morning in order to be able to stay out
later that night? Do I bring the toddler to the poster session in order to give
my mother a break? Much like other people who have accessibility issues or
other needs, I have to prioritize what is most important to get out of a conference
and not feel guilty or like I missed out on all the rest. And this is above and
beyond the fact that I do have my own
set of physical needs and accessibility issues. I learned very early on in my
PhD that taking care of myself was the most important part and then
prioritizing everything else after that.
I’ve also come to rely on the support not just of my own
family, but of the wider network of Academic Mamas. I’m part of a large
Facebook group, and many smaller groups as well. These women have really helped
me figure out how to navigate the sometimes challenging and strange waters that
is academic life.
My daughter is going to be done nursing soon. There will be a
time, probably in the not so distant future, that I will miss these moments I
got to spend with my children while they were young. While doing my research well
and hopefully getting a job this coming year are important to me, I do have to
stop and recognize that these moments will not be here forever.
And I also would like to take this moment to recognize that
this is very hard. Being a full time
postdoc, going on the academic job market again, and being a mom to two young
children is supremely challenging. I relish the challenge. But I want to say to
other Academic Moms who might be reading this: I see you. This is hard work.
Take a moment to appreciate yourself and all that you do for your little ones.
But on a more positive note, this year at CHI, my advisor,
Gillian Hayes, won the social impact award. You can and I highly recommend
watching the full speech about doing socially impactful work in the CHI
community.
As researchers, we are in an enormous place of privilege to be able to do the work we are doing. This privilege did not necessarily come easily and those that are more junior have to work harder than ever to earn that privilege. We have worked hard to educate ourselves. Speaking of which, if you want the list of recommended books from Gillian Hayes’s talk check it out here. However, the number of articles coming out about grad student mental health (as in, they are not healthy) is growing. Young scholars coming from marginalized groups are finding it more challenging to stay in academia, with many leaving altogether. How can we leverage the privilege we have not only to help the communities we work with, but elevate them? How do we elevate those within our own walls that get discounted or even out-right oppressed? This work is hard, but we do not need to make it so very hard, especially if we have any hopes of increasing diversity.
Social impact in research means building relationships in the communities we work in. And relationships means building trust and a true understanding what people need. My own Autcraft work is an example of how I worked closely with a community to help them understand their practices and they were able to leverage my work to help them reach their own goals.
The road ahead is for you to choose, but remember the choices you make impact everyone.
As a sneak peek: Along with my cousin, the wonderful Annie Forsman-Adams, I am in the process of co-founding a nonprofit organization, The Kaina Institute for Equitable Research, to continue some of my community-based work. There are many paths to doing research that has a positive impact on communities and still furthers one’s own research agenda. Let’s all keep up the good work and push ourselves even further. Let’s see what kind of force for good we can be in the world.
Gillian Hayes won the CHI 2019 Social Impact Award and gave a wonderful speech, which you can now watch from the convenience of your own device.
In this talk she gives a number of great book recommendations. I decided to pull all the titles and provide links to everyone can add to their own libraries. I’ve tried to provide links to all the items.
This is a continuation of my series of blogs recapping CHI 2019. You can catch up with the first blog, if you missed it. For this week’s blog, I am focusing on the importance of care. This takes many forms, but for this short blog, I’ll be honing in on self-care and community care. Both of these are about taking care of the individual, but one (self-care) implies the individual is taking care of themselves and the other (community care) implies that the group as a whole is making space and watching out for the individuals.
Self-Care
Conferences are hard. They are taxing on the body both
physically and emotionally. CHI 2019 took place in Glasgow, Scotland. This
means that many of the community experienced some kind of jet lag. And this is
the case for every conference. Some people will be experiencing jet lag and the
other effects of having to travel long distances. Then when you get to the
conference, there are thousands of people. Rooms are crowded, halls are noisy,
many people are consuming alcohol at evening functions. Through all of this,
early career scholars are expected to show up, be engaging, and network like
mad. Conferences are hard.
My advisor, Gillian Hayes, gave the best advice before my
first conference. It’s okay to not go to every session. It’s okay to skip
certain events. Quality over quantity. Take care of yourself. Save your energy
for those key interactions that you need to further your career, your research,
or your learning. As is the case with all of academia, learn to say no to things.
To that end, I’ve learned that I would rather save a bit more money at home in
order to be able to stay at a hotel closer to the conference or to be able to
order in room service for a night when I just can’t face going out to eat one
more time. I realize that that is steeped in privilege. Conferences are not
only hard, but they are expensive – CHI especially so. My only rationale is
that my moments at CHI, having quality interactions with people, will help
further my career in incalculable ways. I’m banking on it, and whether this
will actually pay off in a tenure track job in the long run remains to be seen.
In summary: Take care of yourself before, during, and after a big (or small) conference. Listen to your body. Focus on quality interactions over quantity.
Bonus tip for students: Make a list of 5-10 people you would really like to meet or touch-base with while at the conference. Focus on that list and make those your quality interactions. You’ll thank your tired self later.
Community Care
This one is a little trickier. As I’ve said, conferences are hard. We can all help make each other’s conference experience better. I will get into the larger, organizational issues of these big conferences like CHI in my next blog post, but for now I will focus on the community-on-the-ground. This could be simple things like, if you’re chatting with people, try to get out of the way so you can all hear each other and you aren’t in the way of those trying to get through. Maybe this looks like simply not guilting people into going to the late parties or finding safe spaces for women and other marginalized community members. This also means accepting help when others offer it (an important part of self-care!). I’ve seen a lot of positive movement in this area, especially at CHI. But, of course, there is always room for improvement and we should strive to find ways to help each other out.
CHI can be a wonderful experience if done right. I have had
conference experiences where I’ve just felt ill the entire time and ended up
not getting much out of it. I then I have to ask myself why I spent money to
even go in the first place (because let’s be real, as a student or postdoc, you’re
losing money even if you’re getting reimbursed). But I’m happy to say that prioritizing my own
self-care and looking out for others has really improved my overall CHI
experience. I hope these tips are helpful for you as you plan your next
conference trip!
Given that I’ve recently returned from CHI, I thought I would write up a few of my thoughts in a little mini-series of blog posts. Some, like this one, will be related to research, while others will be related more to going to the conference and my reflections on academia and HCI more broadly given my experiences in Glasgow.
One of the opportunities I had this year, as a newly minted PhD,
was to chair a session (that is, run the session of paper presentation,
introduce the speakers, hand out the best paper awards, ask questions if the
audience is shy, and, most importantly, keep to time). It was a fun job and
gave me a chance to engage with the speakers for some great papers! So, I
thought I would recap some of the highlights about play and technology that
piqued my interest during the conference.
These papers give a us a road map forward in terms of understanding children’s play in the 21st Century. What most excites me about this work is I can see the opportunity here to be inclusive. Children with disabilities can benefit from augmenting environments with technology. I have seen this in my own work and I can see the natural extensions of some of the work above to move into disability spaces. In fact, Microsoft seems to also be moving a similar direction with the announcement of augmented reality Minecraft. This space is new and exciting, and I think with a little forethought and care we can make this inclusive for everyone.
“The concept of community is ever-evolving. With the influx of technology and the change in the ways we interact, this discussion is relevant today more than ever. What is equally true is that we carefully construct the communities around us, because in most cases, we need them to survive. They are places where we can form our ideas and dreams. Places we can go for advice and support. People we can look to when we are feeling conflicted. We can rely on our community members to challenge us, support us, love us. When these spaces are safe, they help us to flourish and achieve our goals. And when they are toxic, they severely limit our human potential. Annie remembers first joining the Dwarf Fortress family, and how it wasn’t the complexity of the game that really fascinated her, but rather the massive fan base that really took her breath away. “
The (Dis)Abled Embodied Experience for Autistic Children in Online Spaces
Preview: Play is an important part of childhood that is often inaccessible for children with disabilities. This work looks at how Autcraft, an online community for autistic children, uses different social media and games platforms to enable access to social play. First, the spaces the Autcraft community uses make the place that is Autcraft possible. Second, these spaces, though some of them are digital, are no more or less “real” than the physical spaces making up a schoolyard or playground.
Social play is an important part of childhood. It is how children develop and practice their social skills. Children engage in a wide range of playful practice roles and test the boundaries of social rules. These playful interactions are vital not only for children to grow into competent, functioning adults, but also to discover who they are and what kind of adults they want to become.
Disabilities and Access to Play
Disability is created when a person is trying to interact with the world and are not accommodated by their environment. An example of this would be a child who wants to play on a playground, but they cannot roll their wheelchair into the space. Access and disability are inextricably linked. Access, in general, is not a given experience for any single individual. Disability is created in the moment that access is faulty or denied to a person. What this means is that disability is not created within a person.
Because a person’s body and their environment are constantly changing, disability is not happening all the time, but rather, a person is disabled by the context with which they are trying to engage. As disability scholar Tanya Titchkosky states, “While we all have bodies — bodies that we act, sense, feel, or move in and through — only some bodies, only some of the time and only in some places, are understood as disabled ones.” Access, therefore, is dynamic and ever shifting.
Accessibility signs in front of rough, grassy terrain.
For children with disabilities, including autistic children, access to play is often limited or of low quality. One way to help autistic children gain access to play and socialization is through online spaces, such as social media, games, and virtual worlds. This paper extends previous work in this area, by exploring the disabled experience and how that affects access to play.
Access is really only noticeable when it is not available and creates disability. The disabled body becomes the oppressed body, when they are denied access (advertently or inadvertently), not only in a social sense, but also in a literal, physical sense. Children who do not conform to “normal” and “normal play,” then, are not invited to the game. This is done both literally and through the making play objects that a disabled child cannot use.
Among other activities, individuals with disabilities use online spaces to socialize — empowering themselves to do what they may not be able to in the physical world. Online spaces have different ways of creating access from physical spaces. In this ethnographic work, I explore how one community uses the sense of place and the digital experience in Minecraft specifically to give autistic children access to play with their peers. In this sense, they are using Minecraft to mediate their play experience, just like a physical world playground mediates another kind of play experience. One type of mediated experience is not better (or less mediated) than another. Rather, these experiences, from face-to-face to text to avatars on a computer screen, are diverse kinds of experiences. Simply put, playing in Minecraft with friends is still social play, even though it might look different from playing in a physical playground.
For this work, I studied Autcraft. Autcraft is a Minecraft community for children with autism and their allies run by parent volunteers. The goal of the Autcraft community is to have a safe space for children with autism to play Minecraft free from harassment and bullying (for more information visit the Autcraft website). As part of this study, I have been conducting an on-going ethnography within the community (see my paper for details). This study included analysis of activity within the Minecraft server, forums, website, Twitter, Facebook group, YouTube, and Twitch.
The Different “Spaces” of Autcraft
In this work, I found the Autcraft community actively creates access to social play using a variety of social media and other technology. By looking at the entire constellation of social media in the Autcraft ecosystem, we can understand how community members are engaging in a variety of social play experiences.
Access to the Autcraft community happens through three layers of interconnected environments: physical, liminal, and virtual. The physical space includes computer hardware and the environment in which players access the computer. This would be things like a bedroom, home office, or computer lab in the library. The liminal space includes the installation and configuration of the software, as well as user authentication. Finally, the virtual space includes the various social media.
When combined, these spaces allow play to happen because the children have access to play in a context in which they “fit.” When educators, therapists, parents, and researchers privilege face-to-face interactions, they are, in effect, creating disability in children who cannot or will not play in that way. In the Autcraft community, members can recreate the playground in an environment that is more comfortable for them. Community members leverage technology to create a playground where children are most able to play. And, having done this, autistic children engage in social play of which people thought them incapable.
The Autcraft community has used a constellation of platforms to enable social play for autistic children. Here the Autcraft community is using the constellation of technological platforms to help create the sense of place. These platforms cross into physical, liminal, and virtual spaces, working together to create access to play. Here the Autcraft community have leveraged virtual worlds to their advantage — in essence, transforming the disabled play experience into an enabled one.
How someone interacts with others is meaningful, regardless whether that interaction is online or offline. For the autistic children of Autcraft, playing in online spaces is preferable to physical-world, face-to-face interactions. The Autcraft community has defied the conventions set out by many educators, parents, researchers, and therapists by creating a space that privileges digital engagements over physical-world ones. In doing so, they have made a playground that is more comfortable for many autistic children.
Children need a place to play. There are two things to consider: creating a sense of place and allowing for both the real and unreal in these places. Therapists, educators, parents, and researchers tend to privilege the physical realm over all others for mediating sociality. Members of the Autcraft community turn this notion on its head, instead privileging virtual interactions over physical ones. But further still, I have shown how all these spaces — physical, liminal, and virtual — must work together to make play possible. The spaces the Autcraft community uses make the place that is Autcraft possible. These spaces, though some of them are digital, are no more or less “real” than the physical spaces making up a schoolyard or playground. Ultimately, it the sense of place in Autcraft that gives children access to social play.
A Minecraft sheep with hearts around its head.
For more details about my methods and findings, please see my paper that has been accepted to CHI 2019 (to appear in May 2019). I am pleased to announce that this has received Honorable Mention (top 20% of all papers) Full citation and link to the pdf:
Kathryn E. Ringland. 2019. A Place to Play: The (Dis)Abled Embodied Experience for Autistic Children in Online Spaces. In CHI 2019. [PDF]
Acknowledgements
I thank the members of Autcraft for the warm welcome to their community. Thank you to Chris Wolf, LouAnne Boyd, and Oliver Haimson and other members of LUCI for their feedback on various iterations of this work. Special thanks to Severn Ringland for his diligent editing and Kyle Lee for insights while writing this up. Shout out to my dissertation committee who helped me shape my thoughts: Gillian Hayes, Tom Boellstorff, Mimi Ito, and Aaron Trammell. I would also like to thank Robert and Barbara Kleist for their support, as well as the ARCS Foundation. This work is supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (T32MH115882). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH. This work is covered by human subjects protocol #2014–1079 at the University of California, Irvine.
Players hanging out together in the Autcraft virtual world.
