Research focusing on how collaborative writing takes place across multiple applications and devices and over longer projects is sparse. We respond to this gap by presenting the results of a qualitative study of longer-term academic writing projects, showing how co-writers employ multiple tools when working on a common text. We identify three patterns of multi-application collaboration as well as four common types of motivations for transitions between applications. We also extend existing taxonomies of collaborative writing by proposing a categorization of the functions served by the text as object and backbone of the collaboration. Together, these contributions offer a framing for understanding transitions within and across artifact ecologies in work around a common object. Our findings highlight ways in which features like concurrent editing may in fact challenge the collaborative writing process, and we point to opportunities for alternative application models.
This paper examines territorial functioning in collaborative writing through a mixed methods study involving interviews and analysis of collaboratively authored documents. Our findings have implications for the way we think about collaborative writing as a design problem, in that current conceptualizations of collaborative writing emphasize the work context rather than the work itself, at the cost of understanding interpersonal dynamics that are central to the common process. The findings come from 23 interviews with 32 university researchers and students regarding their experiences with collaborative writing of academic texts. The analysis of these interviews is supplemented with visualizations of the revision histories of documents written by a subset of the study participants. We discuss our findings in terms of fragmented exchanges in common information spaces and consider the shared document as a mediator for the simultaneous accomplishment and negotiation of work. DRAFT: Territorial Functioning in Collaborative Writing-Fragmented Exchanges and Common Outcomes 'Territorial functioning refers to an interlocked system of sentiments, cognitions, and behaviors that are highly place specific, socially and culturally determined and maintaining, and that represent a class of person-place transactions concerned with issues of setting management, maintenance, legibility, and expressiveness.' [56, p. 6]
Involving end-users in the development of a product before it is deployed has great potential to increase the fit between a product and individual users' needs. While end-users can be directly involved in modifying low-fidelity prototypes, they are left out when it comes to high-fidelity interactive prototypes -in part because these cannot be modified directly or require time-consuming edit-compile-run cycles. High-fidelity prototypes, however, are more engaging for users. We created a reprogrammable high-fidelity prototype and explored its use in shortterm prototyping workshops with end-user developers, i.e. end-users with programming experience, in the domain of collaborative writing. We report observations and pitfalls, and distill four lessons learned into guidelines on how to use reprogrammable high-fidelity prototypes with end-users in contexts with limited resources. Our experiences demonstrate, among other things, that reprogrammable high-fidelity prototypes are difficult to work with -even for experienced programmers -and emphasize the need for careful attention to guiding participants, time for familiarization, and catering to multiple levels of programming experience.
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