Carl DiSalvo

As AI and data systems often falter when encountering queer identities and knowledge, reinforcing existing oppressions, queer people have resisted such systems and their normalizing tendencies. This pictorial explores tactics of queering AI through a collaborative zine-making project (i.e. zineography) that challenges generative AI and data systems. We share how we workshopped and materialized queering tactics in zine spreads; analyzed these spreads according to materials, content, and tone; and visualized our analysis as thematic collages. We contribute: (1) tangible characteristics of queering AI and data systems (i.e. materials, tones, and aesthetics); and (2) design opportunities for using zineographies as a radical method for building and collectively sharing knowledge about a marginalized community, including recommendations for enacting queer zineographies. By materializing queering tactics through zine-making, we invite embodied, action-oriented critiques that question dominant techno-solutionist movements and trace queer possibilities outside of their normalizing narratives.

As civic data typically involves multiple stakeholders and institutions, data work often happens across seamful spaces. We use seams as an analytical lens to examine data production in a civic data project mapping extreme heat islands to promote environmental and climate justice. Our analysis calls attention to the work of aligning multiple infrastructures as well as the temporal and political qualities of seamful arrangements. Throughout our participation in planning and executing this civic data project, our attention was consistently called to the seams during moments of breakdown. Examining the conditions of these misalignments, we argue that seams decay as underlying infrastructures shift over time through product development, personnel turnover, and institutional change. Further analyzing the responses and maintenance work needed to sustain or re-create alignment reveals how power dynamics are reinforced or asserted at the seams. Civic design interventions must attend to these temporal and political aspects of seamful spaces when working in collaboration with other city stakeholders.

LinkedIn is central to salaried job search and professional networking. In a career development program for adults seeking upward socioeconomic mobility through middle-wage computing work, we aimed to use LinkedIn to find and develop new social ties. However, we could not use the platform for this purpose. Through a participatory research approach, we formed a research team with diverse positionalities to understand why LinkedIn was difficult to use and how it could be better for our program. We analyzed recorded walk-throughs and confirmed our findings with two years of ethnographic field notes and written reflections. Our findings demonstrate that LinkedIn's embedded algorithms and interface design prioritize users with large networks who can afford a LinkedIn Premium subscription. We argue that such platform-embedded power differentials lead to platform-delivered microaggressions. Non-Premium users and users with small networks must endure microaggressions to participate in the salaried labor market. We argue the politics of LinkedIn as a platform are such that its embedded power differentials are beyond our control and unlikely to change. Therefore, we recommend sociotechnical coping and mitigation strategies for career development programs in lieu of design implications for LinkedIn or similar platforms. We contribute a detailed example of how a technology reinforces pre-existing privilege without users' knowledge.

Bird collisions with man-made structures pose a significant threat to bird populations. In the U.S. South, a small group of dedicated volunteers track these deaths with hopes of advocating for local policy requiring the use of bird-safe building materials. In addition to recording observations in a mobile application, volunteers log their efforts and collect the bodies of birds they find to add to university specimen collections. We offer a detailed empirical account of the work done by volunteers to produce (1) a digital record of local bird strikes (2) a log of volunteer monitoring efforts and (3) a collection of bird specimens. Unpacking the multiple forms of data produced by volunteer efforts, we examine how Safe Flight produced data oriented towards advocacy work. We end by discussing implications for data activism, highlighting the link between materiality and charismatic data, and proposing next steps for action citizen science.