skip to main content
10.1145/1166324.1166336acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesdocConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

Chains and ecologies: methodological notes toward a communicative-mediational model of technologically mediated writing

Published: 18 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Studies of knowledge work tend to take one of two research foci: either on communication (the transactional, intersubjective exchange of information, thoughts, writing, or speech among participants, performed in serial chains) or mediation (the nonsequential, implicit aspects of artifacts that serve to guide and constrain workers' activities). In this paper, we propose a methodological framework that coordinates the perspectives.

References

[1]
ALLEN, D. Getting things done: The art of stress-free productivity. Penguin Books, New York, 2003.
[2]
BATESON, G. Mind and nature: A necessary unity. E.P. Dutton, New York, 1979.
[3]
BAZERMAN, C. Systems of genre and the enactment of social intentions. In Genre and the new rhetoric, A. Freedman and P. Medway, Eds. Taylor & Francis, London; Bristol, PA, 1994, pp. 79¿-99.
[4]
BEYER, H., AND HOLTZBLATT, K. Contextual design: Defining customer-centered systems. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, 1998.
[5]
BØDKER, S., AND ANDERSEN, P.B. Complex mediation. Human-Computer Interaction 20 (2005), 353-¿402.
[6]
CALLON, M. Writing and (re)writing devices as tools for managing complexity. In Complexities: Social studies of knowledge practices, J. Law and A. Mol, Eds. Duke University Press, Durham, 2002, pp. 191¿-217.
[7]
COLE, M. Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996.
[8]
COVEY, S.R. The seven habits of highly effective people. Free Press, New York, 1990.
[9]
DELEUZE, G., AND GUATTARI, F. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987.
[10]
DEVITT, A.J. Intertextuality in tax accounting: Generic, referential, and functional. In Textual dynamics of the professions: Historical and contemporary studies of writing in professional communities, C. Bazerman and J.G. Paradis, Eds. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1991, pp. 336¿-357.
[11]
EHN, P. Work-oriented design of computer artifacts. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, 1989.
[12]
ENGESTRÖM, Y. Interobjectivity, ideality, and dialectics. Mind, Culture, and Activity 3, 4 (1996), 259¿-265.
[13]
ENGESTRÖM, Y., ENGESTRÖM, R., AND KÄRKKÄINEN, M. Polycontextuality and boundary crossing in expert cognition: Learning and problem solving in complex work activities. Learning and Instruction 5 (1995), 319¿-336.
[14]
ENGESTRÖM, Y., ENGESTRÖM, R., AND VÄHÄÄHO, T. When the center does not hold: The importance of knotworking. In Activity theory and social practice, S. Chaiklin, M. Hedegaard, and U. J. Jensen, Eds. Aarhus University Press, Aarhus, 1999, pp. 345¿-374.
[15]
FREEDMAN, A., AND SMART, G. Navigating the current of economic policy: Written genres and the distribution of cognitive work at a financial institution. Mind, Culture, and Activity 4, 4 (1997), 238¿-255.
[16]
GEISLER, C., BAZERMAN, C., DOHENY-FARINA, S., GURAK, L., HAAS, C., JOHNSON-EILOLA, J., KAUFER, D. S., LUNSFORD, A., MILLER, C. R., WINSOR, D., AND YATES, J. Itext: Further directions for research on the relationship between information technology and writing. Journal of Business and Technical Communication 15, 3 (2001), 269--308.
[17]
GLESNE, C. Becoming qualitative researchers: An introduction, vol. 2nd. Allyn & Bacon, New York, 1998.
[18]
HAAS, C. On the relationship between old and new technologies. Computers and Composition 16, 2 (1999), 209¿-228.
[19]
HARRISON, T.M., AND ZAPPEN, J. Methodological and theoretical frameworks for the design of community information systems. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 8, 3 (April 2003).
[20]
HART-DAVIDSON, W. Modeling document-mediated interaction. In ACM SIGDOC 2002 Conference Proceedings. ACM, Inc., New York, 2002, pp. 60¿-71.
[21]
HART-DAVIDSON, W. Seeing the project: Mapping patterns of intra-team communication events. In ACM SIGDOC 2003 Conference Proceedings. ACM, Inc., New York, 2003, pp. 28¿-34.
[22]
JOHNSON-EILOLA, J. Datacloud: Expanding the roles and locations of information. In Proceedings of the 19th annual international conference on Computer documentation (2001), ACM Press, pp. 47¿-54.
[23]
JOHNSON-EILOLA, J. Datacloud: Toward a new theory of online work. Hampton Press, Cresskill, NJ, 2005.
[24]
LATOUR, B. Pandora's hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999.
[25]
LATOUR, B., MAUGUIN, P., AND TEIL, G. A note on sociotechnical graphs. Social Studies of Science 22 (1992), 33¿-57.
[26]
LAW, J. After method: Mess in social science research. Routledge, New York, 2004.
[27]
MILLER, C.R. Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984), 157¿-178.
[28]
MIREL, B. Writing and database technology: Extending the definition of writing in the workplace. In Electronic literacies in the workplace: Technologies of writing, P. Sullivan and J. Dautermann, Eds. National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, Ill., 1996, pp. 91¿-112.
[29]
MOL, A. The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice. Duke University Press, Durham, 2002.
[30]
NARDI, B.A., AND O'DAY, V.L. Information ecologies: Using technology with heart. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999.
[31]
NARDI, B.A., WHITTAKER, S., AND SCHWARZ, H. NetWORKers and their activity in intensional networks. Computer Supported Cooperative Work 11 (2002), 205¿-242.
[32]
PRIOR, P., AND SHIPKA, J. Chronotopic lamination: Tracing the contours of literate activity, 2003.
[33]
RUSSELL, D.R. Rethinking genre in school and society: An activity theory analysis. Written Communication 14, 4 (1997), 504¿-554.
[34]
SLATTERY, S. Technical writing as textual coordination: An argument for the value of writers' skill with information technology. Technical Communication 52, 3 (August 2005), 353¿-360.
[35]
SPINUZZI, C. Modeling genre ecologies. In Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on computer documentation (2002), ACM Press, pp. 200--207.
[36]
SPINUZZI, C. Toward a hermeneutic understanding of programming languages. Currents in Electronic Literacy 6. Available: http://currents.cwrl.utexas.edu/spring02/spinuzzi.html (2002).
[37]
SPINUZZI, C. Compound mediation in software development: Using genre ecologies to study textual artifacts, 2003.
[38]
SPINUZZI, C. Knowledge circulation in a telecommunications company: A preliminary survey. In Proceedings of the 21st annual international conference on Documentation (2003), ACM Press, pp. 178¿-183.
[39]
SPINUZZI, C. Tracing genres through organizations: A sociocultural approach to information design. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003.
[40]
SPINUZZI, C. Four ways to investigate assemblages of texts: Genre sets, systems, repertoires, and ecologies. In SIGDOC '04: Proceedings of the 22nd annual international conference on Design of communication (New York, NY, USA, 2004), ACM Press, pp. 110¿-116.
[41]
SPINUZZI, C. Lost in the translation: Shifting claims in the migration of a research technique. Technical Communication Quarterly 14, 4 (2005), 411¿-446.
[42]
SPINUZZI, C. The methodology of participatory design. Technical Communication 52, 2 (2005), 163¿-174.
[43]
SPINUZZI, C., AND ZACHRY, M. Genre ecologies: An opensystem approach to understanding and constructing documentation. ACM J. Comput. Doc. 24, 3 (2000), 169¿-181.
[44]
SUCHMAN, L.A. Making work visible. Communications of the ACM 38, 9 (1995), 56¿-64.
[45]
SULLIVAN, P., AND PORTER, J.E. Opening spaces: Writing technologies and critical research practices. New directions in computers and composition studies. Ablex Pub. Corp., Greenwich, CT, 1997.
[46]
SWARTS, J. Textual grounding: How people turn texts into tools. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 34, 1&2 (2004), 67-¿89.
[47]
VYGOTSKY, L.S. Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1978.
[48]
WITTE, S.P. Context, text, intertext: Toward a constructivist semiotic of writing. Written Communication (1992), 237¿- 308.
[49]
WOLFE, J. Annotation technologies: A software and research review. Computers and Composition, 19 (2002), 471¿-497.
[50]
YATES, J., AND ORLIKOWSKI, W. Genre systems: Structuring interaction through communicative norms. Journal of Business Communication 39, 1 (2002), 13¿-35.
[51]
ZACHRY, M. Communicative practices in the workplace: A historical examination of genre development. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2000), 57¿-79.
[52]
ZACHRY, M. The ecology of an online education site in professional communication. In Proceedings of IEEE professional communication society international professional communication conference and Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM international conference on Computer documentation (2000), IEEE Educational Activities Department, pp. 433¿-442.
[53]
ZUBOFF, S., AND MAXMIN, J. The support economy: Why corporations are failing individuals and the next episode of capitalism. Penguin Books, New York, 2004.

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Reflections-on-Action: Using Critical Disability Studies to Reconceptualize the Net Work of Social Work Students in Interprofessional SimulationsWritten Communication10.1177/07410883241303919Online publication date: 5-Feb-2025
  • (2020)Identifying Motives for Implementing eHealth by using Activity TheorySustainability10.3390/su1204129812:4(1298)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2020
  • (2018)Connect with your patients, not the screenCommunication Design Quarterly10.1145/3282665.32826696:2(31-40)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2018
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
SIGDOC '06: Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
October 2006
224 pages
ISBN:1595935231
DOI:10.1145/1166324
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]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 October 2006

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. communicative event models
  2. genre ecologies
  3. qualitative research
  4. writing

Qualifiers

  • Article

Conference

SIGDOC06
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 355 of 582 submissions, 61%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)9
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 15 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Reflections-on-Action: Using Critical Disability Studies to Reconceptualize the Net Work of Social Work Students in Interprofessional SimulationsWritten Communication10.1177/07410883241303919Online publication date: 5-Feb-2025
  • (2020)Identifying Motives for Implementing eHealth by using Activity TheorySustainability10.3390/su1204129812:4(1298)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2020
  • (2018)Connect with your patients, not the screenCommunication Design Quarterly10.1145/3282665.32826696:2(31-40)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2018
  • (2018)Rhetorically Defining 'Information' For Designers and Technical CommunicatorsProceedings of the 36th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication10.1145/3233756.3233945(1-7)Online publication date: 3-Aug-2018
  • (2017)Introduction Discussion Board Forums in Online Writing Courses Are EssentialHandbook of Research on Writing and Composing in the Age of MOOCs10.4018/978-1-5225-1718-4.ch018(294-316)Online publication date: 2017
  • (2014)All of the ThingsProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on The Design of Communication CD-ROM10.1145/2666216.2666222(1-10)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2014
  • (2014)Contemporary Research Methodologies in Technical CommunicationTechnical Communication Quarterly10.1080/10572252.2015.97595824:1(1-13)Online publication date: 24-Dec-2014
  • (2013)Constrained Agency in Corporate Social Media PolicyJournal of Technical Writing and Communication10.2190/TW.43.3.d43:3(289-315)Online publication date: 29-Jul-2013
  • (2012)A qualitative metasynthesis of activity theory in SIGDOC proceedings 2001-2011Proceedings of the 30th ACM international conference on Design of communication10.1145/2379057.2379120(341-348)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2012
  • (2012)Participatory design in the development of a web-based technology for visualizing writing activity as knowledge workProceedings of the 30th ACM international conference on Design of communication10.1145/2379057.2379119(333-340)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2012
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media