What do we study when studying politics and democracy? A semantic analysis of how politics and democracy are treated in SIGCHI conference papers
<|reference_start|>What do we study when studying politics and democracy? A semantic analysis of how politics and democracy are treated in SIGCHI conference papers: Human-computer interaction scholars are increasingly touching on topics related to politics or democracy. As these concepts are ambiguous, an examination of concepts' invoked meanings aids in the self-reflection of our research efforts. We conduct a thematic analysis of all papers with the word `politics' in abstract, title or keywords ($n$=378) and likewise 152 papers with the word `democracy.' We observe that these words are increasingly being used in human-computer interaction, both in absolute and relative terms. At the same time, we show that researchers invoke these words with diverse levels of analysis in mind: the early research focused on mezzo-level (i.e., small groups), but more recently the work has begun to include macro-level analysis (i.e., society and politics as played in the public sphere). After the increasing focus on the macro-level, we see a transition towards more normative and activist research, in some areas it replaces observational and empirical research. These differences indicate semantic differences, which -- in the worst case -- may limit scientific progress. We bring these differences visible to help in further exchanges of ideas and human-computer interaction community to explore how it orients itself to politics and democracy.<|reference_end|>
@article{nelimarkka2024what,
    title={What do we study when studying politics and democracy? A semantic
  analysis of how politics and democracy are treated in SIGCHI conference
  papers},
    author={Matti Nelimarkka, Ville Vuorenmaa},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.02579},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2407.02579},
    primaryClass={cs.HC}
}