William Hart-Davidson

Coming to Content Management: Inventing Infrastructure for Organizational Knowledge Work

Two project profiles depict content management as inquiry-driven practice. The first profile reflects on a project for a national professional organization that began with a deceptively simple request to improve the organizations website, but ended with recommendations that ran to the very core mission of the organization. The second profile focuses on an organizations current authoring practices and tools in order to prepare for a significant change: allowing users to develop and organize content.

Content management in the workplace: Community, context, and a new way to organize writing

The authors report on a multiyear study designed to reveal how introducing a content management system (CMS) in an administrative office at a large organization affects the office’s writing and work practices. Their study found that users implemented the CMS in new and creative ways that the designers did not anticipate and that the choices users made in using the CMS were often driven not by technology but by the social implications the CMS held for their office. By contrasting how writers negotiated specific genres of writing before and after the CMS was introduced, the authors argue for increased attention to providing flexible technologies that enable writers to innovate new tools in response to the social needs of their writing environments. This approach must be driven by research on the implications of technology in workplace communities.

Visualizing writing activity as knowledge work: challenges & opportunities

Digital environments enable distributed work. Though they pose challenges for research, they also provide affordances for addressing these difficulties including opportunities to capture and visualize writing activity in significant detail. This paper surveys sources of visualizations of writing processes and practices, focusing on attempts to deal with writing as a distributed activity. We then ask: what qualities of visualizations seem desirable and help to render writing visible as knowledge work for the purpose of providing mediational support to writers

Grassroots: Supporting the Knowledge Work of Everyday Life

This article introduces a simple mapping tool called Grassroots, a software product from a longitudinal study examining the use of information communication technologies and knowledge work in communities. Grassroots is an asset-based mapping tool made possible by the Web 2.0 movement, a movement which allows for the creation of more adaptable interfaces by making data and underlying database structures more openly available via syndication and open source software. This article forwards three arguments. First is an argument about the nature of the knowledge work of everyday life, or an argument about the complex technological and rhetorical tasks necessary to solve commonplace problems through writing. Second is an argument about specific technologies and genres of community-based knowledge work, about why making maps is such an essential genre, and about why making asset maps is potentially transformative. Third is an argument about the making of Grassroots itself; a statement about how we should best express, test, and verify our theories about writing and knowledge work.

Capturing & visualizing knowledge work: results & implications of a pilot study of proposal writing activity

Chania,.

Seeing the project: mapping patterns of intra-team communication events

This paper reports the results of a qualitative study of the communication patterns of two student teams engaged in a design and documentation task. All communication events for each team are recorded and analyzed to produce displays that show how well-coordinated each team was throughout the project. The sorting and mapping methods presented suggest a new class of features for groupware applications, features designed to allow members of collaborative teams to monitor and adjust their communication patterns during the lifecycle of a project.

A method for measuring helpfulness in online peer review

This paper describes an original method for evaluating peer review in online systems by calculating the helpfulness of an individual reviewers response. We focus on the development of specific and machine scoreable indicators for quality in online peer review.

Researching proposal development: accounting for the complexity of designing persuasive texts

Formal accounts of how proposals are prepared in the contemporary workplace are scarce. In particular, researchers have published very few reports based on structured studies of proposal writing. This paper offers an overview of the current state of our knowledge about proposal writing in the contemporary workplace. Drawing upon data from a case study, the paper then advances an argument for the field to develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of proposal development as a complex information gathering and design activity

Binding the material and the discursive with a relational approach of affordances

As Normans vision of affordances developed twenty-six years ago is unable to address complex challenges faced by todays designers, we outline a view of affordances as discursive relations in HCI design. This argument is framed in the discussion of a larger trend of work beyond the HCI field, the scholarship on relational affordances from the fields of communication and organization studies. Through comparison and interrogation, we maintain a relational approach of affordances that bind the material and the discursive will help us to address design issues such as discursive power, cultural values, performed identities, mediated agency, and articulated voices in this increasingly globalized world and design culturally sensitive technology for transformation and emancipation. With a few cases, this paper deciphers the hidden power relationship of interaction design and suggests ways of we should design for social affordances.

Modeling document-mediated interaction

Current approaches to modeling texts create text structures based on semantic representations of authorial intention or a pre-determined information structure. This paper considers an alternative to these two approaches - modeling document-mediated interaction - and discusses challenges associated with this alternative approach.