Unpublished Queer HCI Work and Survivorship Bias

Ascertain which Queer HCI works do not get published and characterize the resulting survivorship bias in the field’s literature by identifying and analyzing research that remains unpublished and how these absences shape the published record.

Background

The authors caution that analyzing only published texts risks survivorship bias and that the public record may omit important Queer HCI research, especially before 2014 when few papers centered LGBTQ+ people explicitly.

They propose future historical and archival approaches to distinguish between what remains unsaid and what could not be said in published venues, motivating a systematic investigation of unpublished work.