Persistent conversation: a dialog between design and research
Thomas D. Erickson, Susan C. Herring · 2005
This minitrack explores persistent conversation, the transposition of ordinarily ephemeral conversation into the potentially persistent digital medium. The phenomena of interest include conversations carried out using email, mailing lists, news groups, bulletin board systems, textual and graphic MUDs, chat clients, structured conversation systems, document annotation systems, etc. The persistence of such conversations as computerized records, although variable in duration and ease of user access, gives them the potential to be searched, browsed, replayed, annotated, visualized, restructured, and recontextualized, thus making possible a variety of new uses and practices.The 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, and sociology, we hope that the work of each might inform the others, suggesting new questions, methods, perspectives, and design approaches relating to the theme of persistent conversation.