West meets East: Adapting Activity Theory for HCI & CSCW applications?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is the introduction to a set of seven commentary papers. Activity Theory, with its roots in Soviet Communist society, is introduced and the relevant, critical concept of a three level hierarchy of human activity is summarised, along with a key proposal that for Western HCI and CSCW applications the utility of this hierarchy would be improved by the introduction of a new, intermediate level, called either ‘working spheres’ or ‘engagements’. A thumbnail sketch of each commentary paper is then provided. Analysis of these papers reveals a set of five ‘convergences’, ideas and conclusions that occur in at least two of the papers. This introduction concludes that while the problems of migrating and adapting Activity Theory to Western HCI and CSCW applications are here made visible, very similar issues arise when attempts are made using linguistically and culturally closer theories, methods and practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".