Chains and Ecologies: Methodological Notes toward a Communicative-Mediational Model of Technologically

Mediated Writing

Clay Spinuzzi University of Texas at Austin 1 University Station B5500

Austin, TX 78712-1122 512-471-8707

clay.spinuzzi@mail.utexas.edu

William Hart-Davidson Michigan State University

235 Bessey Hall East Lansing, MI 48824

517-432-2560

hartdav2@msu.edu

Mark Zachry University of Washington

14 Loew Hall, Box 352195 Seattle, WA 98195-2195

206-543-2567

zachry@u.washington.edu

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.

Categories and Subject Descriptors K.4.3 [Computers and Society]: Organizational Impacts – Computer-supported collaborative work.

General Terms Documentation, Design, Theory.

Keywords Qualitative research, genre ecologies, communicative event models, writing.

1. INTRODUCTION One of the key insights in computers and writing scholarship is that technology really does change the way we write, think, and act. Such modifications go hand in hand with recent trends in work fragmentation and new divisions of labor [6, 13, 14, 31, 34, 46, 53] and the attendant new and hybridized genres [16, 28, 39, 49, 51]. Texts and text types have proliferated at a startling rate, as have tools and methods for managing them. Personal information management, once primarily a concern of managers, has emerged as a life philosophy that makes no distinction between work and home life – a life philosophy that heavily relies on creating, sorting, and discarding texts (e.g., [1, 8]). How do we examine these rapidly proliferating texts and how they’re

used? How do we set about to do an empirical analysis? These questions are especially important since the trend lines point upward: more texts to coordinate, more genres to learn, more work fragmentation. To this point, the field has addressed these questions in diverse ways. These ways boil down to at least two major focuses. One of these focuses is communication. Scholars in rhetoric usually take it for granted that we are in the communication business. (Just look at how many of our journals have the term communication in their titles.) Rhetoric has always been construed as a public, transactional activity, and writing happens to be a very good way to carry out that activity. So it’s reasonable that we focus on communication processes and communication events, especially when dealing with communication technologies. By “communication” we mean the transactional, intersubjective exchange of information, thoughts, writing, or speech among participants. Informational exchange is indeed the obvious purpose of most of the texts we author, teach, and expect from each other, and so when we examine how people communicate, we tend to follow the information. Since we tend to see work as a series of such exchanges, our empirical studies of communication – particularly at the micro level – tend to focus on chains of communicative events in which people exchange artifacts in a regular series and synthesize them in relatively predictable ways [20, 21]. Writing scholars have examined, for instance, how tax documents are handed from one worker to the next [10]; how participants use a series of genres to structure team meetings [50]; and how patent offices rely on a stream of sequenced genres [3]. In all these cases, the emphasis is on explicit communication in which texts are exchanged among participants in a set of intersubjective transactions, and the focus is on how information is serially acted upon – the chain of communication is a chain of custody of a particular piece of information. Or, to use a sports metaphor: The camera follows the ball, tracing through the series of handoffs and tosses that move it downfield. But this focus on chained communicative events is not the only way to understand how we interact with texts. Another is mediation, which allows us to examine aspects of textually mediated activity that are neither serial, nor explicit, nor necessarily even interpersonal. Our lives may be soaked through with texts that are meant to be sequentially exchanged, but they are also saturated with texts that are not meant to be exchanged

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with others, texts that may even be indecipherable by others if they were to be exchanged: shopping lists [33, 48], checklists [36], annotations [38, 39, 43, 46, 49], comments in computer programs [37], and computer interfaces themselves [22, 23]. Furthermore, even when texts are exchanged, they can guide and constrain others’ activities in ways not easily described as communicative: checklists and stacks of documents might implicitly order actions, for instance, shaping the way in which workers conceive of and execute their own and others’ work, even though no explicit message is intended or received [36]. And certainly workers bring many different texts to bear on a particular activity all at the same time – even texts that are conceived as chained – resulting in an ecology of resources that is qualitatively and quantitatively different from a single text [15, 30, 39, 52]. Again, to use a sports metaphor: The camera follows the game, watching systemic dynamics and changes in strategy as players and artifacts all over the field continuously reconfigure themselves. Both perspectives are valuable for examining ways in which computer technologies facilitate and change writing. But they typically have been explored exclusive to one another, certainly in the models of writing that are typically used in rhetoric. Can we keep the camera on the ball and the game? By focusing on communicative events, the chained perspective highlights transactional events of explicit, interpersonal, and lexical knowledge, but typically loses track of nontransactional events of implicit, situated knowledge that are just as likely to be intrapersonal as interpersonal. By focusing on nontransactional mediation, the ecological perspective often results in descriptions that are developmentally elaborate but ultimately directionless. Up to this point, comparisons between the two have been made [44], but no attempts have been made to coordinate models of the two views. That’s the task we set for ourselves in this paper: not to report on empirical research, but to conduct a methodological discussion similar to [45]. Below, we provide an example with which to work; discuss chained and ecological perspectives in terms of that example, grounding them in activity theory and genre theory; and demonstrate a modeling approach that integrates chained and ecological models.

2. An Example: Knowledge Work at a Telecommunications Company For an example, let’s look at an incident one of us examined in a previous paper: the heavily computer-mediated work of a knowledge worker. Ralph is a collections worker at a telecommunication company. Although he’s been on the job for only a few months, he has learned and become surrounded by a bewildering number of genres. As we join him, he is coordinating paper genres, computer genres, speech genres, and annotations to help him accomplish his work. (Italics highlight some of the many texts in play.)

Ralph begins by looking up the next customer on the Past Due list. Reading the customer's number from the list, he enters it into the computer system, brings up the customer's account, and looks for notes and collection information. There are none, so he knows that this customer is not a habitual offender, nor has the customer been contacted about this particular problem. He calls the customer, getting the number from the list.

He introduces himself, asks for the listed contact, and informs her that she has an outstanding balance for her long distance service. She claims that she has sent in the payment, so he confirms her account number, then looks up her pay record in the computer system. She has indeed made the payment, but it has posted to a different account, so he gives her the right account number. He then asks for her fax number and promises to fax her the bill.

After hanging up, he types notes into the Customer Collection Information screen. Then he writes the name and phone number of the company on a sticky note and puts it on the edge of his cubicle door. He grabs a blank fax cover sheet and writes, “Please call if you have any questions.” He puts a blank sticky note on the cover sheet, then writes the company's fax number on it. Finally, he annotates the Past Due list next to the customer's name: he circles the previous annotation “wfp,” then adds the date. ([40], pp. 110-111; italics added)

The genres discussed here, of course, represent only a small fraction of what is available in the “datacloud” [22, 23] of Ralph’s environment. (For instance, we haven’t mentioned clothing labels, office signage, and the numbers on the telephone’s keypad.) One has to draw the line somewhere; analytically, we must select focuses to make sense of work like Ralph’s. But those lines are problematic to draw because Ralph’s work involves coordinating different people, genres, and social worlds. This strong orientation to coordination work is, we believe, symptomatic of the work fragmentation that has become part of most work, but that is at the core of knowledge work. As Ralph smoothly maneuvers through this cloud of genres, he follows relatively stable sequences in which he chains together communication events: the sequence of looking up a customer, calling her, discussing an outstanding balance, and resolving the issue is one that Ralph and his colleagues repeat regularly. At the same time, Ralph’s stable transactions are supported at every step by genres in his environment, mediational genres that affect his work in ways that are simultaneous, relational, and nontransactional: the set of annotations on the call list are largely idiosyncratic, meant for him alone; the sticky notes won’t be shared with others; but both help him to coordinate his work. As we analyze accounts like this one, we find that we can see work as constituted by chains of communicative events, but also as ecologies of mediational genres that are coordinated in ways that may or may not be communicative. The two perspectives are rarely paired (but see [5]). Nevertheless, they are not contradictory. Below, we examine two separately deployed models for describing how texts are coordinated. Both are based on activity theory and genre theory, making it easier for us to propose a unifying framework that describes both chains and ecologies.

3. Chains: The Camera Follows the Ball In Ralph’s example, communication is most certainly occurring. In fact, we see complex communicative relationships among genres, relationships that repeat across observations of Ralph’s colleagues as well. Genres are typically seen as responses to recurrent activities [27, 33], and that’s certainly true here. Several

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frameworks have been proposed for discussing such communicative relationships among genres, including genre sets, genre systems, and genre repertoires [40]. To some extent, each focuses on “handoffs,” points at which individuals exchange information (typically by exchanging artifacts). One way to represent these handoffs is through Communication Event Models (CEMs) [20, 21]. In Figure 1, Ralph’s work has been reduced to a string of communicative events: A phone call to the customer is guided first by a list, then by account information on the terminal. After the phone call, Ralph writes a message to the customer on the fax cover sheet, then faxes it to the customer. CEMs provide a simplified, easily comparable description of event sequences, a description that can help us detect patterns in people’s work, compare patterns, and see sequential divergences. Any given action is a contingent choice made in response to situational constraints. In the CEM, these contingent choices are essentially portrayed as strings of verbs and objects. If we were to apply CEMs to longer segments of Ralph’s work and the work of his colleagues, we should be able to formally detect consistent patterns, identify larger units of interaction, and consistently explore places where sequences diverge across workers or conditions. (Hart-Davidson [20, 21] does exactly this in his studies.) CEMs, then, have many of the advantages of what one of us has called “fieldwork-to-formalization methods” [39]. In fact, they bear some similarities to contextual design’s work models, though CEMs do a better job of comparatively analyzing fine-grained data such as videotaped observations and diary studies. But, by themselves, CEMs also reflect the limitations of these formalized models. By focusing on interpersonal communicative events, they miss much of the nontransactional, textually mediated work. When Ralph orders his work with a list, tracks his work by checking off and annotating lines on that list, reviews and compares documents in preparation for the next call, and writes notes to himself, these nontransactional events don’t make it into the CEM. That is, the CEM’s analytical focus is valuable, but it leads us away from examining the self-mediational work that supports those communicative events. The camera follows the ball through its series of handoffs, but the game – Ralph’s information ecology – is left largely unexplored.

4. Ecologies: The Camera Follows the Game So how do we follow the game? How do we restore a worthwhile examination of this information ecology, one that highlights actions that are not necessarily communicative? One way is to turn to the complementary notion of mediation, which we draw from Lev Vygotsky’s work. Vygotsky argues that human activity is marked by a reliance on cultural artifacts: external stimuli that allow humans “to control their behavior from the outside,” that is to say, indirectly ([47], p.40, his emphasis). These external artifacts, Vygotsky emphasizes, do not simply help humans to do things they would do anyway; the artifacts qualitatively transform the activity, often in ways that exceed the unmediated capacity of the human being. (One of Vygotsky’s favorite examples is tying a knot in a handkerchief, a Russian aide-memoire similar to tying a string around one’s finger.) In using mediational artifacts, Michael Cole argues, people themselves are psychologically transformed: they begin to think, act, and value differently ([7], p.108). Mediation applies to all cultural artifacts. Yrjö Engeström, for instance, illustrates the notion by discussing how walls and other infrastructure mediate human activity, even becoming part of the social fabric as they facilitate and reify divisions of labor [12]. But texts are our central concern here. And, particularly in the dense information ecologies inhabited by knowledge workers such as Ralph, texts mediate work in combinations; the mediation is compound [35; 18]. That is, a chained transactional sequence is not adequate for examining how texts mediate activity, since texts can be brought into play at any point and can intermediate in an assemblage [40; 2; 9]. And these intermediations do not necessarily happen in ways that are directly observable, though they can be explored through interviews and artifactual techniques [32]. In Ralph’s example, he deploys a dense set of genres to mediate his work. We describe this ecology of genres in the genre ecology model (GEM) below (figure 2). (For more on genre ecologies, see [39, 43]; for a comparison with other genre frameworks, see [40].) Some of these genres are provided by his company (such as the list, printed from the customer database, which implicitly sequences his work); some are his own invention (such as the number he wrote on a sticky note, which mediates his interaction

Figure 2. A genre ecology model of Ralph’s work.

Figure 1. A Communicative Event Model of Ralph’s

work.

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with the fax cover sheet); and many are combinations (such as his list annotations, which allow him to track progress) or collaborations (such as his dialogue with the customer). At every point, Ralph uses more than one genre; we have a hard time envisioning a “ball” that can be “handed off.” Here, each of Ralph’s genres is connected with others using lines that represent mediational relationships rather than sequential ones. These mediational relationships offer possibilities for activity that are not afforded by individuals or individual artifacts; these possibilities arise from the tension among these different cultural-material resources. For instance, when Ralph prepares to call the customer, he uses the past due list to identify the customer, looking up the customer’s account and any notes on that account. And he uses all three of these resources during his subsequent conversation with the customer, along with various other genres. His use of them overlaps; rather than a sequence of handoffs, the GEM depicts a set of mediational resources that can be paired, combined, and substituted. Some of these resources are the same ones depicted in the CEM (figure 1), but here they are seen in mediational rather than sequential terms. The GEM answers two different questions. In a particular episode, such as Ralph’s interaction above, it answers the question: “What genres are brought to bear during the episode but are not highlighted because they are not being used transactionally?” But in the aggregate – for instance, when comparing several different Communication Event Models – it can also answer the question: “How did alternate genres get used to perform the same activity? Given x conditions, what genres are people likely to use to perform y type of activity?” Just as a purely sequential understanding of text use has its drawbacks, so does a purely mediational understanding. By itself, the GEM tends toward description without direction. To use the metaphor we introduced earlier: if the camera just follows the game, we are lost in a sea of jerseys and have trouble perceiving the goals that individuals and teams set for themselves; the associations among people and texts, though important, tend to overwhelm the agency and the activity of those involved.

5. Modeling Communication and Mediation: A Syntagmic-Paradigmatic Approach So we have laid out the advantages and disadvantages of each model. CEMs highlight moment-by-moment communicative interactions, but squeeze out texts that are peripheral to that sequential work, texts that turn out to be tremendously influential in terms of mediation. GEMs highlight those mediational relationships, but in taking on that focus, they pull away from the sequentiality of CEMs and lose direction. Both rely on common, comparative units. We have attempted various solutions in the past. For instance, Spinuzzi [39] depicted sequential interactions through time-and-category graphs used in association with GEMs, and elsewhere tried to build some limited sequence into GEMs [36]. But in our more recent work, we have been attempting to model sequence and mediation in a more integrated fashion and across longer observations, and that has led us to reexamine some methodological issues and to look beyond the Bakhtin-Vygotsky syntheses that have dominated our previous work. To make sense out of this work, we turn by analogy to Bruno Latour’s work with sociotechnical graphs [24, 25].

5.1 Methodological Assumptions Latour, Mauguin, and Teil [25] describe “a visual and conceptual space” that explicitly works against the social vs. technical factors that are often described in social studies of science by introducing a dichotomy that explicitly cuts across those factors. The social-technical division is a false one, they say, so the new dichotomy serves to jolt us out of its use. This visual-conceptual space, meant to map scientific controversies by examining statements of all parties, draws on the notions of association and substitution – or in the linguistic terms used here, syntagm and paradigm – for the mapping structure. These two notions serve as the axes for a two-dimensional graph in which narratives are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Sociotechnical graphs were specifically developed to analyze narratives in science and technology studies, not observations or other naturalistic collection methods and not other sorts of narratives. One function is to examine a series of accounts to identify “black boxing,” or tendencies to encapsulate elements of the social and material environment: if a series of actants (represented by recurrent terms in the narratives) stays together through successive versions of narratives without “defecting,” then “they may be aggregated in a black-box and given either a new name or the name of one of the actants” (p.41). And just as the graphs can be used to identify coherent assemblages across accounts, they can also compare contradictory accounts. This, say the authors, allows us to avoid the essentialism in functionalist accounts by identifying divergences without making a priori distinctions about which ones are useful (right, reasonable) and which ones are meaningless (wrong, irrational). In sociotechnical graphs, the syntagmic dimension is that of association: Which elements must be associated to form a coherent claim? The paradigmic dimension is that of substitution: of the elements assembled, which can be substituted with others? Latour et al. applied these graphs to narratives of participants they interviewed in their research, allowing them to see convergences and divergences in those accounts, and thus to compare how participants saw and handled their sociotechnical environments. See Figure 3. We believe that our work with CEMs and GEMs is somewhat similar, although we are interested in incorporating more fine-grained data, particularly observational data. That is, we add our own systematically collected accounts to those of the participants. In linguistics, syntagms and paradigms allow for the rules of language systems to be inferred, tested, and compared with those of other language systems. In sociotechnical graphs, syntagms and paradigms allow for the rules of an activity to be inferred,

Figure 3. A sociotechnical graph (based on [27], p.35).

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tested, and compared across participants’ accounts. And in our work, syntagms (CEMs) and paradigms (GEMs) allow for the conventions of an activity to be systematically inferred, tested, and compared across narrative accounts such as diaries, interviews, and our own field observations. As discussed earlier, CEMs describe sequences (“What communicative events constitute a given episode?”), while GEMs describe associations (“What genres are brought to bear during the episode but are not highlighted because they are not being used transactionally?”) and substitutions (“How did alternate genres get used to perform the same activity? Given x conditions, what genres are people likely to use to perform y type of activity?”). We believe that we need to bundle these different perspectives together to provide a unified vision. Implicit in Latour’s work with sociotechnical graphs, as well as with other forms of qualitative research such as participatory design research [11, 42] and action research [17], is the principle that participants should be able to represent their own work. That is, they should individually and collectively make the call about what constitutes their work, what is a tool, and what is an action. Furthermore, they should be able to determine how to locally adapt their work [39]. Based on that principle, we make the following methodological assumptions:

5.1.1 Assumption 1. Work can be segmented into “events” defined by the participant. We have come to believe that events are best defined by participants. Looking at these in aggregate can help us to see relative coherence. We find drift not just in how participants segment events but also in what they use to define these. Ceding the definition of events and transactions to the participant means that our task becomes more difficult in analysis. Participants quite often do not use the same scope to talk about their work. Take these two statements (not actual quotes):

Participant 1: “I use the customer database to look up a customer, check the credit history, and find the contact information.”

Participant 2: “I use screens A, B, and C to gather information about the customer.”

Participant 1 talks about a “customer database” whereas Participant 2 breaks this genre down into components (screens). Participant 1 lists three component events whereas Participant 2 bundles them into a single component event. The temptation here is to standardize on a unit for events (as well as for genres). These can easily become a priori distinctions that reframe work in ways that the participants find unrecognizable. Instead, following Latour, we argue that examining the tensions between these statements can help us to detect relative coherences in accounts while still valuing and modeling the differences that inevitably occur in work. Workers can tell their own stories with their own definitions and scales. John Law talks of research method as “an enactment of a bundle of ramifying relations” ([26] p.84). We embrace a relational approach and we think this means opening the ontological question: opening the black boxes and looking for drifts. In this approach, workers function as co-researchers who tell narratives within their own worlds.

5.1.2 Assumption 2. Genre is defined by the participant. Similarly, we believe genres should be defined by the participants. Rather than assuming that genre is an extant category or one that should be defined by the researcher, we argue for a pragmatic definition, one that assumes multiplicity [29] rather than unity in how people perceive, manage, and use genres. That is, rather than trying to define genres by preexisting functional criteria, we recommend encouraging workers themselves to identify genres they use in their work. This choice results in strong variations (e.g., one person may call an entire computer interface a genre, while another may pick out genres in the interface such as menus). Although these variations can be problematic for generating a strong unified account, they also help us to determine where these assemblages cohere and form black boxes. We can take a genre to be a black box that potentially holds other genres, or even a multiplicity of possibly overlapping types. The comparative study allows us to detect relative coherence in the stories participants tell and the ways they relate to their technologies.

5.1.3 Assumption 3. Genres can be discussed as “communicative” and as “resources.” Communicative genres are those highlighted in CEMs, the ones that are the focus of the individual’s actions, that are created or modified. The participant is primarily using these genres to directly foster intersubjective understandings through chained artifactual transactions. In interviews during observations, for instance, a participant might explain: “I'm having a phone conversation.” “I'm writing an email.” The resource genres are the mediational ones highlighted by GEMs, the nontransactional, ecological “helpers” in the assemblage that make the communicative genre work, i.e., that intermediate it in ways that fit it into the activity. For instance, the participant might add: “When I finish the phone call, I cross off the name on the list.” “If I forget which item to mark off, I look at the screen to see which customer I was looking at last.” This distinction, again, is supplied by the stories told by participants as well as by researchers. To illustrate these assumptions, we turn again to Ralph’s story, examining it this time in terms of a unified communicative-mediational model and supplementing it with the stories of others in his group. These data were not collected with this analysis or modeling technique in mind, but they provide a basic illustration of how the model can be applied to examine computer-mediated writing.

5.2 The Communicative-Mediational Model Once again, we return to Ralph’s work. But this time, we separate two different types of accounts: the researcher’s account (field notes) and Ralph’s account (interview). And we supplement these with field notes and interviews of two of Ralph’s co-workers as they did similar work. Of course, the field notes describe specific incidents, while the interviews provide more general descriptions of these types of incidents. Such differences between specific and general incidents can introduce strong variations in stories, since it’s difficult to know whether a specific incident is a special case or not. Nevertheless, it became clear that workers had adopted different systems for addressing similar work. Figure 4 allows us to

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examine these disjunctures while highlighting the relative coherence across accounts. The syntagmic dimension (x axis) shows transactions, while the paradigmatic dimension (y axis) shows accounts. Cells show similarities and variations.

Transactions (syntagmic) Prepare for call Contact

customer and discuss bill

Record notes on call

Ralph’s Field notes

Past due list (annotations on past due list, AS/400 Customer Master Maintenance screen, AS/400 Customer Collection Information screen)

Phone call to customer (past due list, AS/400 Customer Collection Information screen)

AS/400 Customer Collection Information screen, fax cover sheet, sticky note (past due list)

Ralph’s Interview

Past due list, annotations on past due list, bankruptcy notices, spiral notebook, phone calls from coworkers

Bills, phone call to customer

Past due list, annotations to past due list, AS/400 F1 notes, AS/400 customer account

Alexis’ Field notes

Past due list (annotations on past due list, AS/400 Customer Master Maintenance screen, AS/400 Customer Collection Information screen)

Phone call or voice mail to customer, past due list (AS/400 Customer Collection Information screen)

AS/400 Customer Collection Information screen (annotations on past due list)

Alexis’ Interview

AS/400 F1 notes, spiral notebook, disconnect letter, phone calls to coworkers

Phone call to customer, past due list

AS/400 F1 notes

Mariah’s Field notes

Past due list (AS/400 Customer Master Maintenance screen)

Phone call to customer (past due list, AS/400 Customer Collection Information screen, AS/400 customer account)

AS/400 Customer Collection Information screen

Acc

ount

s (pa

radi

gmat

ic) Mariah’s

Interview Past due list, annotations on past due list, AS/400 customer account, Excel list of disconnects, phone calls to coworkers

Phone call to customer

AS/400 customer account, Excel list of disconnects

Figure 4. Seeing CEMs and GEMs in terms of syntagms and paradigms. (Contents are illustrative, not actual data).

In Figure 4, rows (the paradigmatic dimension) represent accounts: separate accounts of the same incident (same shade) and accounts of different incidents (different shades). This allows us to examine both inter- and intra-user events, and perhaps to compare several similar events by the same user side-by-side. Accounts can come from field notes, videocoding, interviews, artifact analysis, diaries, etc. In this case, field notes and interviews constitute different accounts to which we assign no preference (though one is ours and one is participants’). Each cell lists a transaction genre and attendant genres; the two are usually distinguished in field notes, but usually not in interviews. Notice that genres are defined in the accounts themselves, and consequently they converge and diverge in how they’re defined and where they’re listed. Columns (the syntagmic dimension) represent transactions. These columns are phases that workers each mentioned, and the boundaries between them represent definite boundaries on which workers agreed and which they reified through their work. For instance, workers mentioned preparing for calls and this preparation was concluded, not by the time they picked up the phone, but certainly by the time the customer picked up. Each transaction can involve one or more communicative genres and zero or more resource genres. In both dimensions, we look for convergences and divergences. For instance, looking across accounts, we see similar (or similarly identified) genres being deployed to support various communicative events (represented in roman type, normal weight). But we also see differences in particular genres deployed by different participants, as well as differences in field notes and interview accounts of individuals’ work (represented in bold italic type). The convergences give us an understanding of commonalities in how workers perform their work; the divergences point to local differences that can be traced to local conditions, differences in training, differences in resources, or the interpenetration of other activities. In this example, we have retroactively applied a communicative-mediational model of computer-mediated writing to observational data. This is an exploratory move, and we’ve found that the fit is far from perfect.

6. Methodological Problems This is messy. But so is writing. We’re aware that we could be accused of being the foolish man in the parable who builds his house on shifting sand rather than the solid rock. But what else can you do when you have nothing but sand? In any case, we’re not building a house so much as pitching a tent, as nomads in the desert must do [9]. To further explore the model, we intend to design studies that will produce data that will be more easily and consistently modeled. In the next and final section, we discuss the implications of this work for future research design and analysis.

7. Implications In this paper, we’ve presented a methodological discussion intended to help develop a communicative-mediational model of computer-mediated writing. The model is not intended to provide pinpoint accuracy or to predict future writing work, successes of different textual environments, or reliability of writing processes. Rather, it should ideally provide a language game that allows researchers and workers to critically examine workplace writing.

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As we develop this model further, we plan to underpin it with a set of studies that are designed to collect and relate appropriate data from different workers. The resulting models should systematically relate chains of communicative events with ecologies of genres along the lines discussed above. In doing so, the models should break down a priori distinctions in events and genres while still identifying units that we can use to have coherent conversations and perform coherent analyses. Furthermore, in the spirit of participatory design [11, 41, 42], user-centered design [4, 44], and action research [17], these models should provide a mutually intelligible language game that facilitates self-mediation and pattern recognition. That is, these models should be brought back to workers, who can then critically examine and discuss their work and determine whether they want to change it based on what they see. Rather than working toward normative practices as fieldwork-to-formalization methods do [39], we prefer to value divergences and encourage workers to make their own decisions about how to best change their work.

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