Brian J. McNely

Backchannel persistence and collaborative meaning-making

Digital backchannel communication has become an increasingly important area of study for researchers and practitioners in several fields. From the emergence of wifi-enabled Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to contemporary instances of microblogging and SMS messaging, the role of digital backchannels in enabling collaborative affordances has received much recent attention. As backchannel communication continues to become more prevalent at professional conferences, in educational curricula, and in organizational settings, robust frameworks for understanding the role of backchannel environments in collaborative meaning-making are needed. Drawing upon cultural-historical activity theory and actor network theory, this paper explores the development of backchannel persistence through microblogging platforms, and suggests an approach to studying the collaborative affordances of backchannel communication by focusing on the related concepts of mobilization and recursive writing collaboration.

Contemporary Research Methodologies in Technical Communication

At the time of publication B. McNely was at The University of Kentucky, C. Spinuzzi was at The University of Texas at Austin, and C. Teston was at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.

Shaping organizational image-power through images: Case histories of Instagram

Popular genres of social software increasingly act as regularized discourse within organizations. Recently, image-intensive social software applications have seen rapid adoption as another communicative genre within the ecology of the contemporary organizations social software strategy. These social software genre ecologies may help organizations actively shape what Faber calls image-power, the organizations self-conscious, self-reflective management of public perception and the concomitant shaping of patron identities. This paper proposes and then explores a qualitative coding schema for understanding organizational implementations of Instagram within a prominent news organization, a non-profit, and a for-profit retailer.

Learning analytics for collaborative writing: a prototype and case study

This paper explores the ways in which participants in writing intensive environments might use learning analytics to make productive interventions during, rather than after, the collaborative construction of written artifacts. Specifically, our work considered how university students learning in a knowledge work model---one that is collaborative, project-based, and that relies on consistent peer-to-peer interaction and feedback---might leverage learning analytics as formative assessment to foster metacognition and improve final deliverables. We describe Uatu, a system designed to visualize the real time contribution and edit history of collaboratively written documents. After briefly describing the technical details of this system, we offer initial findings from a fifteen week qualitative case study of 8 computer science students who used Uatu in conjunction with Google Docs while collaborating on a variety of writing and programming tasks. These findings indicate both the challenges and promise of delivering useful metrics for collaborative writing scenarios in academe and industry.

Exploring a sustainable and public information ecology

This article explores the design and execution of an intentionally public information ecology by focusing on three of the primary communication activities (blogging, videos, and microblogging) taking place immediately before, during, and after a small international conference of digital media professionals. Drawing on an activity theory framework for analyzing data collected via an exploratory version of contextual inquiry, the author describes two interrelated categories of stabilizing moves for fomenting a public information ecology: those driven by the organization to maintain and publicize a coherent organizational identity narrative, and those driven by conference participants that sometimes diverge from that organizational narrative. Analyzing these two broad categories of stabilizing moves yields insights into how online writing practices may help foster effective and sustainable information ecologies.

Big data, situated people: humane approaches to communication design

In his 2005 book Ambient Findability, Peter Morville argued that what we find changes who we become. In 2012 and beyond---in an information environment of filter bubbles, contextual advertising, and friend-of-friend chains that push ordinary folks well beyond the Dunbar number---perhaps Morville is in need of some updating: what finds us changes who we become.

All of the Things: Engaging Complex Assemblages in Communication Design

In this paper, we compare sociocultural theories of communication and user experience design to scholarship from associative and new materialist approaches. We argue for a more expansive and symmetrical perspective on communication design---one that broadens the scope of potential actors that affect user experiences, and that more strongly considers their effects on communicative activities. We posit three ways in which this perspective may be operationalized: (a) accounting for the missing masses, (b) designing for flat ontologies and radical symmetry, and (c) designing for interagentivity. Finally, we offer an initial heuristic for deploying such approaches and discuss scenarios in which they may prove fruitful.

Visual research methods and communication design

Visual research methods include a variety of empirical approaches to studying social life and social processes, including communication and documentation. Developed largely in anthropology and sociology, visual methods typically involve the use of photography, videography, and drawing in qualitative studies of lived experience. Despite the use of visual methods in related fields such as CSCW, HCI, and computer science education, such approaches are underdeveloped in studies of communication design. In this paper, the author provides a historical and theoretical overview of visual research methods before detailing three interrelated approaches that may be productively applied to work in communication design. The author then illustrates how these approaches were adapted to communication design studies in industry and academe before describing implications for future work in this area.

Informal communication, sustainability, and the public writing work of organizations

Distributed work via social software increasingly functions as regularized discourse within organizations. Social software supports a kind of interstitial organizational writing practice, where knowledge workers publicly enact both personal and organizational discourses that foster and help sustain both personal and professional relationships. This paper details findings from two qualitative studies of social software as organizational, public writing work, exploring the role of microblogging in seeding knowledge assets and extending organizational relationships. I argue based on findings from these studies that informal communication via public, interstitial writing practices plays an important role in fostering the distribution and sustainability of organizational knowledge work.

A qualitative metasynthesis of activity theory in SIGDOC proceedings 2001-2011

Activity theory has become an increasingly important theoretical framework for practitioners and researchers in a wide variety of fields. Offering a set of tools for exploring and theorizing everyday practice, activity theory has proven to be a useful lens for exploring how various artifacts and genres mediate social practices. This article systematically analyzes the use of activity theory by researchers publishing work in the ACM SIGDOC proceedings between 2001 and 2011. By paying attention to the cultural-historical situatedness of a given author, his or her terminology, and the ostensible function of activity theory within each piece, a more comprehensive understanding of the adaptive nature of activity theoretical approaches to design of communication emerges. And as activity theory continues to be used within disciplines relevant to design of communication, a framework for understanding both the previous and potential roles of activity theory in the scholarly literature is needed and is provided, in part, by our analysis.