Biography

John Seberger, PhD is an assistant professor in Drexel's College of Computing & Informatics (CCI) and is an interdisciplinary scholar whose human-centered work crosses boundaries between Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), social informatics, information studies and humanistic psychology. Using quantitative, qualitative and conceptual analysis, his work focuses on how people experience their daily worlds through and by means of computational technologies (e.g., apps, IoT devices, AI agents) and how such experience relates to contemporary transformations in historical discourses, such as "privacy," "the self," and "the human." He is passionate about dignity, equity, emerging ontologies and hopeful futures grounded in human resilience.

He holds a PhD in Information and Computer Science from University of California, Irvine (UCI), an MLIS from University of Pittsburgh, an MSc in Research Methods in the Psychology of Music from Keele University, and a BA in Psychology from Kenyon College. Prior to joining Drexel CCI, John has worked as a postdoctoral fellow at University of California Irvine Department of Informatics, Indiana University (Informatics) and Michigan State University (Communications) in addition to working as a senior fellow in the Faculty of Media at Bauhaus University Weimar. He is a core member of the Re:Enlightenment research collective and a former graduate fellow of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing. He publishes award-winning work across a range of communities, including the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) and the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative work and Social Computing (CSCW).

Research Areas

• Human-Centered Computing
• Data Science

Research Interests

Academic Distinctions

• PhD in Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine (UCI)
• MLIS, University of Pittsburgh
• MSc Research Methods in the Psychology of Music, Keele University
• BA Psychology, Kenyon College

Select Publications

Select Publications

• Seberger, J. S. (2021). Into the Archive of Ubiquitous Computing: The Data Perfect Tense and the Historicization of the Present. Journal of Documentation. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-11-2020-0195
• John S. Seberger, Ike Obi, Mariem Loukil, William Liao, David J. Wild, and Sameer Patil. 2022. Speculative Vulnerability: Uncovering the Temporalities of Vulnerability in People’s Experiences of the Pandemic. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CSCW2, Article 495 (November 2022), 27 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555596
• John S. Seberger, Irina Shklovski, Emily Swiatek, and Sameer Patil. 2022. Still Creepy After All These Years:The Normalization of Affective Discomfort in App Use. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 159, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3502112
• John S. Seberger, Marissel Llavore, Nicholas Nye Wyant, Irina Shklovski, and Sameer Patil. 2021. Empowering Resignation: There’s an App for That. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 552, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445293
• John S. Seberger and Sameer Patil. 2021. Us and Them (and It): Social Orientation, Privacy Concerns, and Expected Use of Pandemic-Tracking Apps in the United States. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 65, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445485

Awards & Recognition

• Best Paper Award, CHI 2022
• Top Paper Award, AEJMC 2022
• Best Paper Honorable Mention, CHI 2021
• Best Paper Award, ASIS&T SIG SI 2021

Professional Activities & Associations

• Senior Fellow, NOMIS Project: "The New Real," Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (2021-2023)
• Core Member, Re:Enlightenment Project (2014-Present)
• Associate Chair, CSCW'23
• Associate Chair, CSCW'21
• Member, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Member, ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI)