SLIS professor Susan Herring co-organized and co-chaired (with Thomas Erickson from IBM) a workshop and mini-track on the theme "Persistent Conversation: Perspectives from Research and Design" for the Forty-Third Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. The conference was held January 5-8, 2010 on the island of Kauai.
The workshop was a part of the Digital Media: Content and Communication track. Excerpts from the Conference website are included here:
Track: | Digital Media: Content and Communication |
Minitrack: | Persistent Conversation 11: Perspectives from Research and Design |
"Persistent conversations occur via instant messaging, text and voice chat, email, blogs, web boards, MOOs, graphical and 3D virtual environments, gaming systems, video sharing sites, document annotation systems, mobile phone texting, etc. Such communication is persistent in that it leaves a digital trace of varying duration, and the trace in turn affords new uses. It permits conversations to be saved, visualized, browsed, searched, replayed, and restructured. Persistence also means that conversations need not be synchronous: they can be asynchronous (stretching out over hours or days) or supersynchronous (with multiple parties 'talking' at the same time). Finally, the creation of persistent and potentially permanent records from what was once an ephemeral process raises a variety of social and ethical issues. This multi-disciplinary minitrack seeks contributions from researchers and designers that improve our ability to understand, analyze, and/or design persistent conversation systems.
See http://www.visi.com/~snowfall/HICSS_PC.html for more information.
The particular aim of the minitrack is to bring together researchers who analyze existing computer-mediated conversational practices and sites, with designers who propose, implement, or deploy new types of conversational systems. By bringing together participants from such diverse areas as anthropology, computer-mediated communication, HCI, interaction design, linguistics, psychology, rhetoric, sociology, and the like, we hope that the work of each may inform the others, suggesting new questions, methods, perspectives, and design approaches."
Posted January 25, 2010