welcome to the DRP-reading group on digital civics! in this reading group, we'll survey literature from the growing field of digital civics; an interdiciplinary field at the intersection of computer science, urban studies, political science, and data science. each week, there will be 1-2 readings from top conferences and journals in the field to explore different aspects of digital civics. participants will be given the opportunity to present and give their thoughts on papers in a seminar-style presentation. at the end of the reading group, participants will come up with a general set of design guidelines for digital civic technologies, and have the chance to create wireframes and prototype civic technologies with the group using modern design tools (i.e. Figma). i hope you learn something from this and have fun!
- anthony
| week | reading(s) | learnings | presenter |
|---|---|---|---|
| week 1: introduction to digital civics | Patrick Olivier and Peter Wright. 2015. Digital civics: taking a local turn. interactions 22, 4 (June 2015), 61-63. https://doi.org/10.1145/2776885 | get to know eachother, understand what "digital civics" is | anthony |
| week 2: participatory action research in HCI |
2A: Gillian R. Hayes. 2014. Knowing by Doing: Action Research as an Approach to HCI. In Ways of Knowing in HCI, Judith S. Olson and Wendy A. Kellogg (eds.). Springer, New York, NY, 49-68. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0378-8_3 2B: Ned Cooper, Tiffanie Horne, Gillian R Hayes, Courtney Heldreth, Michal Lahav, Jess Holbrook, and Lauren Wilcox. 2022. A Systematic Review and Thematic Analysis of Community-Collaborative Approaches to Computing Research. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 27, 2022. ACM, New Orleans LA USA, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517716 |
understand what participatory research is in HCI |
2A: anthony 2B: (no presenter) |
| week 3: trust and digital civics |
3A: Eric Corbett and Christopher A. Le Dantec. 2018. Exploring Trust in Digital Civics. In Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '18), June 08, 2018. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 9-20. https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196715 3B: Eric Corbett and Christopher Le Dantec. 2019. Towards a Design Framework for Trust in Digital Civics. In Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '19), June 18, 2019. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1145-1156. https://doi.org/10.1145/3322276.3322296 |
understand how trust plays a role in digital civics |
3A: angela 3B: (no presenter) |
| week 4: smart cities and platform urbanism |
4A: Eric Corbett and Graham Dove. 2024. Signs of the Smart City: Exploring the Limits and Opportunities of Transparency. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24), May 11, 2024. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3641931 4B: Federico Caprotti, I.-Chun Catherine Chang, and Simon Joss. 2022. Beyond the smart city: a typology of platform urbanism. Urban Transform 4, 1 (December 2022), 4. https://doi.org/10.1186/s42854-022-00033-9 |
understand how technologies are integrated in cities |
4A: (no presenter) 4B: erin |
| week 5: citizen data science |
5A: Ashley Boone, Aparna Arul, James Kemerait, Ian Wood, Jaeri Suh, Carl DiSalvo, and Christopher A Le Dantec. 2025. Designing Tools for Data Advocacy. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, July 05, 2025. ACM, Madeira Portugal, 2130-2142. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735801 5B: Ashley Boone, Annabel Rothschild, Xander Koo, Grace Pfohl, Alyssa Sheehan, Betsy DiSalvo, Christopher A Le Dantec, and Carl DiSalvo. 2024. Reimagining Meaningful Data Work through Citizen Science. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 8, CSCW2 (November 2024), 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1145/3687049 |
understand what "open data" and community data initiatives are |
5A: alexandra 5B: (no presenter) |
| week 6: deliberation and democracy |
6A: Tzu-Sheng Kuo, Quan Ze Chen, Amy X. Zhang, Jane Hsieh, Haiyi Zhu, and Kenneth Holstein. 2025. PolicyCraft: Supporting Collaborative and Participatory Policy Design through Case-Grounded Deliberation. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25), April 25, 2025. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713865 6B: Michael Henry Tessler, Michiel A. Bakker, Daniel Jarrett, Hannah Sheahan, Martin J. Chadwick, Raphael Koster, Georgina Evans, Lucy Campbell-Gillingham, Tantum Collins, David C. Parkes, Matthew Botvinick, and Christopher Summerfield. 2024. AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation. Science 386, 6719 (October 2024), eadq2852. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adq2852 |
understand how technology can be used for public policy |
6A: (no presenter) 6B: erin |
| week 7: activism and organizing |
7A: Mariam Asad and Christopher A. Le Dantec. 2015. Illegitimate Civic Participation: Supporting Community Activists on the Ground. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '15), February 28, 2015. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1694-1703. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675156 7B: Ashique Ali Thuppilikkat, Dipsita Dhar, and Priyank Chandra. 2024. Union Makes Us Strong: Space, Technology, and On-Demand Ridesourcing Digital Labour Platforms. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 8, CSCW2 (November 2024), 1-36. https://doi.org/10.1145/3687002 |
understand how technology can be used for organizing groups |
7A: alexandra 7B: angela |
| week 8: community research outside of HCI | Switzer, S., Nsobya, A., Wong, V., Kufner, L., Azmila, A., Areguy, F., Berg, L., and Short, K. (2023). Aligning Diverse Community Needs for a Youth Harm Reduction Program Model. A Community-Based Evaluation of Trip!. Waterloo, Ontario: Centre for Community Based Research. https://pqwchc.org/publications-resources/research-videos-and-evaluation-reports/aligning-diverse-community-needs-for-a-youth-harm-reduction-program-model/ | understand the field of community-based research | (no presenter, just open discussion) |
| week 9: design basics and creating guidelines |
sign up for a Figma Education account look back at paper for inspriation: Eric Corbett and Christopher Le Dantec. 2019. Towards a Design Framework for Trust in Digital Civics. In Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '19), June 18, 2019. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1145-1156. https://doi.org/10.1145/3322276.3322296 |
understand what design guidelines look like in HCI | anthony |
| week 10: design guidelines work period | generate design guidelines based off of your learnings | n/a | |
| week 11: design guidelines work period | generate design guidelines based off of your learnings | n/a | |
| week 12: design guidelines presentation | present your findings! | all |