ACM SIGDOC 2025 Conference
Lubbock, TX | October 24-25, 2025
Registration for each workshop is $25.
Two of the workshops will be conducted on the first day of the conference, concurrently with the Lightning Talks (Friday, October 24 at 4:00-6:00 p.m.). The third workshop will be held online, a few weeks prior to the conference.
You can register for workshops when you register for the conference.
Rebecca Schneider, Avenue CX
October 9, 2025, 2:00-4:00 p.m. (You can register for this workshop as well as one of the two below.)
As organizations focus on improving content experiences, taxonomies have become a key element in creating frictionless interactions on digital platforms. Taxonomies provide a common language that is relevant to customers – helping them to find, choose, use, buy and get support for products or services.
This workshop will focus on the basics of taxonomy development. We’ll discuss what taxonomies are and how they relate to metadata and tagging. The session will dive deep into the techniques used to build, test, and refine taxonomies.
From a project perspective, you’ll also learn about the steps required to properly plan, implement, and measure the impact of taxonomic efforts. You’ll also gain insights into the lessons learned by others, including pitfalls to avoid and suggestions for getting started.
Finally, we’ll discuss the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as some contend that AI negates the need for a taxonomy as AI has the ability to crawl very large data and/or content repositories and draw relationships between concepts. The workshop will outline how taxonomies and ontologies can inform AI systems and ensure the proper breadth, depth, and consistency of an AI application across content sets. It will also provide a recommended approach to leverage taxonomies as part of AI or machine learning projects.
Huiling Ding, North Carolina State University
Recruiting has been largely automated today, with different AI systems screening resumes, evaluating candidate performance and organizational “fit” in automated video interviews, and scraping the web to build comprehensive social profiles for individual candidates. As an emerging technology, algorithmic video interview evaluators are opaque yet high-stakes black boxes that process interview recordings radically differently from their human counterparts.
This workshop will examine how biometrics, i.e., facial recognition and voice recognition, are used in automated video interviews to cut down the costs of interviews, speed up the interview processes, and reach out to larger pools of candidates.
We will start with a quick overview of traditional interviews, video interviews, one-way video interviews, and automated video interviews to understand the different functions of these interview formats. We will introduce biometrics, AI ethics such as transparency, privacy, and accountability, and potential biases and discrimination introduced by the use of biometrics (Diakopoulos, 2016; Eubanks, 2018; Gallagher, 2020).
Then we will simulate AVIs by walking participants through the setup of the AVIs before sending them to record their video interviews via Zoom or phone while responding to predefined questions.
Participants will work in small groups to evaluate one another’s video interviews using the metrics of biometric algorithms, share their experiences and struggles doing AVIs, and explore possible ways biases and discrimination can creep into and get augmented in this automated process.
Derek Ross and Kayleigh Pears-Keating, Auburn University
Friday, October 24, 4:00-6:00 p.m. (runs concurrently with lightning talks)
The ability to create physical, interactive designs that exist outside of the digital world is a critical skill in technical and professional communication. Zines can be an effective and fun way to teach physical design in the technical communication classroom. Because zines can take so many forms and are so deeply embedded in activist cultures from so many different areas, they lend themselves particularly well to our classrooms.
In this workshop we will introduce the audience to zines, zineing, and teaching TPC through zines through a multi-modal, hands-on approach.