By Will Sutherland, HCDE PhD student
November 2023
At this conference I was attending the doctoral colloquium as well as the rest of the sessions. The doctoral colloquium was my first, and it ended up being a wonderful experience. The format was a little strange because they required us to record a video and then we watched them collectively while we were sitting there in the room. This actually turned out to be a good system, because it allowed us to sit and watch the other presentations without worrying about having to get up in front of others and what we would say. It was also good to see professors in an interdisciplinary field, who do work in very different areas, interacting in a collegial way. It seemed to give a strong impression that there is a cohesive community in the field.
The sessions were also interesting, and it reminded me of the interests and perspectives of information science, which I used to interact with more than I had been in the last few years. It was good to remember that there is another whole area of research programs out there that might be able to contribute to understanding specific issues or that I could be in conversations with. The sessions on social informatics was particularly interesting, and there I again got this sense that there is a cohesive field there, except this time with more narrowly shared interests. The sessions on data curation were also interesting because I had been taking a very different perspective on data work in my own research and it was good to be reminded of different perspectives on data as an object of research.
The last thing to mention is that this was the first time that I had a lot of person-to-person meetings with other people at a conference (mostly other Ph.D. students). This was great because it constituted an entirely different dimension of interaction at the conference, and those more informal interactions were a good complement to the formal presentations. It was also much appreciated after the long period of the pandemic.
Give to support HCDE student travel
The Mary B. Coney Endowed Fund, named in honor of Emeritus Professor Mary Coney, supports HCDE students by funding costs associated with travel to conferences and international workshops. Your support of this fund enriches the HCDE student experience and enhances HCDE's influence in the field.