“Just Roll Your Mouse Over Me”: Designing Virtual Women for Customer Service on the Web

Zdenek, Sean

doi:10.1080/10572250701380766

Cited by 20 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Software (Albers, 2011;de Jong & Lentz, 2001;Smart & Whiting, 2002;Wolfe & Neuwirth, 2001) . Web 2.0 Interfaces (Potts & Jones, 2011;Rawlins & Wilson, 2014;Sherlock, 2009;Zdenek, 2007) . Instructions/Manuals (Catanio & Catanio, 2010;Friess, 2010Friess, , 2011Ganier, 2009;Longo, Weinert, & Fountain, 2007;Tebeaux, 2008;Willerton & Hereford, 2011) .…”

Section: Situating Design Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Roles of Technical Communication Researchers in Design Scholarship

Sánchez

2016

Journal of Technical Writing and Communication

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Design has come to be understood as an essential aspect of the work that technical communicators claim. As a result, research in the field of technical communication has approached studies of design in numerous ways. This article showcases how technical communication researchers assume the roles of observers, testers, critics, creators, and consultants in their handling of design artifacts. Such a model regarding these roles may help us to better understand the design relationships researchers presume as they further knowledge of design within our field. This article offers a framework to leverage into a comprehensive and integrated model for explaining our work on design to others outside of technical communication. Keywords research in technical communication, design research, design, disciplinarityWithin the last few decades, visual design has become a commonplace skill that technical communicators have explicitly been expected to understand and implement in their work. As a result, technical communication researchers have devoted much attention to the study of design and its elements. In fact, in her review of the literature from over 10 years ago, Portewig (2004) noted that the technical communication scholarship on design at the time argued, in part, that we should pay attention to visuals and visualization in order to respond to their ascendance and to teach our students how to expand their role from authors to

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Section: Situating Design Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Roles of Technical Communication Researchers in Design Scholarship

Sánchez

2016

Journal of Technical Writing and Communication

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“…Algorithmic oppressions can be traced across space and time, from early voice recognition systems calibrated such that women's voices were often, quite literally, unheard, to associations between early face recognition systems and principles of physiognomy (Gates, 2011). Where women are recognized by AI systems, they often are situated in positions with relatively little power, such as the overwhelming use of female characters for virtual assistants since the early 2000s in ways that replicate gendered stereotypes about women in positions of servitude (Zdenek, 2007;Steele, 2018;Sweeney, 2018;UNESCO, 2019).…”

Section: Discrimination In the History Of Aimentioning

confidence: 99%

Redistribution and Rekognition

West

2020

Catalyst

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Computer scientists, and artificial intelligence researchers in particular, have a predisposition for adopting precise, fixed definitions to serve as classifiers (Agre, 1997; Broussard, 2018). But classification is an enactment of power; it orders human interaction in ways that produce advantage or suffering (Bowker & Star, 1999). In so doing, it obscures the messiness of human life, masking the work of the people involved in training machine learning systems, and hiding the uneven distribution of its impacts on communities (Taylor, 2018; Gray, 2019; Roberts, 2019). Feminist scholars, and particularly feminist scholars of color, have made powerful critiques of the ways in which artificial intelligence systems formalize, classify, and amplify historical forms of discrimination and act to reify and amplify existing forms of social inequality (Eubanks, 2017; Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018). In response, the machine learning community has begun to address claims of algorithmic bias under the rubric of fairness, accountability, and transparency. But in doing so, it has largely dealt with these issues in familiar terms, using statistical methods aimed at achieving parity and deploying fairness ‘toolkits’. Yet actually existing inequality is reflected and amplified in algorithmic systems in ways that exceed the capacity of statistical methods alone. This article outlines a feminist critique of extant methods of dealing with algorithmic discrimination. I outline the ways in which gender discrimination and erasure are built into the field of AI at a foundational level; the product of a community that largely represents a small, privileged, and male segment of the global population (Author, 2019). In so doing, I illustrate how a situated mode of inquiry enables us to more closely examine a feedback loop between discriminatory workplaces and discriminatory systems.

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“…Many scholars have noted that virtual assistants are deeply feminized in a variety of ways that tend to draw on gendered (and racialized) stereotypes (Brahnam et al 2011;Sweeney B 2016;Zdenek 2007). These sexist stereotypes about women's' 'natural' capacity for service work, as well as affective and emotional labor (Sweeney B 2016).…”

Section: A (User-) Friendly Workermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Virtual assistant technologies are overwhelmingly represented as women (e.g., Siri, Alexa, Cortana), conforming to gendered labor roles that position women as "ideal" for service and helping industries (Zdenek 2007). Additionally, virtual assistants (in the United States) are commonly represented as white, Anglo, middle-class women (Sweeney 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing the “good citizen” through Latina identity in USCIS’s virtual assistant “Emma”

Villa-Nicholas

Sweeney

2019

Feminist Media Studies

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Virtual assistants are increasingly integrated as 'user-friendly' interfaces for e-government services. This research investigates the case study of the virtual assistant, 'Emma,' that is integrated into the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) website. We conduct an interface analysis of Emma, along with the USCIS website, and related promotional materials, to explore the cultural affordances of Latina identity as a strategic design for this virtual assistant. We argue that the Emma interface makes normative claims about citizenship and inclusion in an attempt to 'hail' Latinx users as ideal citizens. We find that the 'ideal' citizen is defined through the Emma interface as an assimilated citizen-consumer that engages with digital technologies in ways that produce them as informationally 'legible' to the state.

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“Just Roll Your Mouse Over Me”: Designing Virtual Women for Customer Service on the Web

Cited by 20 publications

References 36 publications

The Roles of Technical Communication Researchers in Design Scholarship

The Roles of Technical Communication Researchers in Design Scholarship

Redistribution and Rekognition

Designing the “good citizen” through Latina identity in USCIS’s virtual assistant “Emma”

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