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Spirituality: there's an app for that! (but not a lot of research)

Published: 27 April 2013 Publication History

Abstract

The iTunes App Store contains over six thousand apps related to spirituality and religion. The ACM digital library, however, contains only 98 works that address this topic from an HCI perspective. Despite high-profile calls for research in the area, the HCI community has produced only 19 research papers focused on the topic, almost half of which are the work of one person and her colleagues. In this paper we provide an overview of the relevant HCI research in this area, a partial inventory of spiritually oriented apps in the iTunes US App Store, and a comparison of research and real-world developments. We discuss the gaps in the HCI literature on techno-spiritual practices and speculate about some of the difficulties and challenges that face the HCI community in conducting research in this area.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI EA '13: CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2013
    3360 pages
    ISBN:9781450319522
    DOI:10.1145/2468356
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 27 April 2013

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    1. religion
    2. spirituality
    3. techno-spirituality

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    • (2024)A Topic Modeling Approach Towards Understanding the Discourse between Religion and Videogames on RedditProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36770548:CHI PLAY(1-44)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
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    • (2024)Mediating the Sacred: Configuring a Design Space for Religious and Spiritual Tangible Interactive ArtifactsProceedings of the Eighteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3623509.3633353(1-22)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2024
    • (2024)Still Not a Lot of Research? Re-Examining HCI Research on Religion and SpiritualityExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3651058(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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