I am a computer scientist and design researcher focused on the area of Digital Civics. I received my PhD in Human-Centered Computing from the Georgia Institute of Technology and have long focused on how the social and organizational settings of civic work need to shape computing technologies that enable governance and advocacy. It is not just that civic work is a downstream application of research in computer science, but that the settings of public and community-based organizations necessarily shapes the kinds of questions computing research needs to address.
I tackle these problems by employing qualitative and design research methods to understand current organizational practices in civic settings; and then through participatory design approaches to design and deploy test-bed systems that support collective action through the production and use of civic data. Through my research I am seeking to understand how novel computing interfaces enable new forms of public participation and data-based governance within municipal institutions and agencies; I also work closely with community and grass-roots organizations to express local civic priorities through the design and strategic deployment of interactive computing systems to advance equity and address city-scale issues on transportation, food security, and climate resilience.
My work in Human-Centered Computing challenges the assumptions we have about how interactive computing systems and data-intensive applications need to work to support collaboration within and between civic organizations. The outcomes of my research have real-world impact on issues of sustainability and community resilience through urban planning, policy development, and community organizing.
My research regularly appears the ACM conferences CHI, CSCW, and DIS, and I am the author of Designing Publics (MIT Press, 2016).
Research/Publications Highlights
Book:
C. A. Le Dantec (2016) Designing Publics. MIT Press.
Recent Journal & Conference articles:
A. Boone, C. A. Le Dantec, C. DiSalvo. 2024. Embodied Traces: Multispecies Entanglement in Urban Spaces. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’24). July 1–5, 2024, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. ACM.
I. Chordia, J. Kim, Z. Liu, H. Park, L. Garret, S. Erete, C. A. Le Dantec, J. Yip, and A. Hiniker. 2024. Tuning into the World: Designing Community Safety Technologies to Reduce Dysfunctional Fear of Crime. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’24), July 1–5, 2024, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. ACM.
I. Chordia, L. Breanna Baltaxe-Admony, A. Boone, A. Sheehan, L. Dombrowski, C. A. Le Dantec, K. E. Ringland, and A. D. R. Smith. 2024. Social Justice in HCI: A Systematic Literature Review. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), May 11–16, 2024, Honolulu, HI, USA. ACM.
A. Alvarado Garcia, W. Wong-Villacres, B. Hernández, and C. A. Le Dantec. 2024. Bitacora: A Toolkit for Supporting Non-Profits to Critically Reflect on Social Media Data Use. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), May 11–16, 2024, Honolulu, HI, USA. ACM.
A. Alvarado Garcia, W. Wong-Villacres, M. Miceli, B. Hernández, and C. A. Le Dantec. 2023. Mobilizing Social Media Data: Reflections of a Researcher Mediating between Data and Organization. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23), April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM.
A. Sheehan & C. A. Le Dantec. 2023. Making Meaning from the Digitalization of Blue-Collar Work. Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact, 7, CSCW2, Article 345 (October 2023)
(CSCW ’23: Best Paper)
S. Lee & C. A. Le Dantec. 2023. More Than a Property: Place-based Meaning Making and Mobilization on Social Media to Resist Gentrification. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 7, CSCW1, Article 75 (April 2023).
A. Tran, A. Boone, C. A. Le Dantec, C. DiSalvo. 2022. Careful Data Tinkering. In Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact, 6, CSCW2, Article 431 (November 2022).
C.A. Le Dantec, A. Alvarado Garcia, C. Connelly, and A. Meng. Resisting Resolution: Enterprise Civic Systems Meet Community Organizing. Multimodal Technology and Interaction, 5(20), 2021.
Departments
Art + Design
Education
- Ph.D. Human-Centered Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
- B.S. Computer Engineering, University of Arizona