About the Minitrack

This interdisciplinary minitrack and workshop brings designers and researchers together to explore persistent conversation, the transposition of ordinarily ephemeral conversation into the potentially persistent digital medium. The phenomena of interest include human-to-human interactions carried out using chat, instant messaging, text messaging, email, weblogs, mailing lists, news groups, bulletin board systems, multi-authored Web documents, structured conversation systems, textual and graphical virtual worlds, etc. Computer-mediated conversations blend characteristics of oral conversation with those of written text: they may be synchronous or asynchronous; their audience may be small or vast; they may be highly structured or almost amorphous; etc. The persistence of such conversations gives them the potential to be searched, browsed, replayed, annotated, visualized, restructured, and recontextualized, thus opening the door to a variety of new uses and practices.

 

The particular aim of the minitrack and workshop 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, managment, and the like, we hope that the work of each may inform the others, suggesting new questions, methods, perspectives, and design approaches.

 

About Paper Topics

We are seeking papers that address one or both of the following two general areas:

 

Understanding Practice. The burgeoning popularity of the internet (and intranets) provides an opportunity to study and characterize new forms of conversational practice. Questions of interest range from how various features of conversations (e.g., turn-taking, topic organization, expression of paralinguistic information) have adapted in response to the digital medium, to new roles played by persistent conversation in domains such as education, business, and entertainment.

 

Design. Digital systems do not currently support conversation well: it is difficult to converse with grace, clarity, depth and coherence over networks. But this need not remain the case. Toward this end, we welcome analyses of existing systems as well as designs for new systems which better support conversation. Also of interest are inquiries into how participants design their own conversations within the digital medium -- that is, how they make use of system features to create, structure, and regulate their discourse.

 

Examples of appropriate topics include, but are not limited to:

For other examples of appropriate topics see the list of previous years' papers: http://www.pliant.org/personal/Tom_Erickson/HICSS_PC_History.html

 

The Workshop [tentative -> now confirmed!]

For the past four years the minitrack has been preceded by a half-day workshop; we hope this will be continued for 2005, but will not know for sure until April. The intent of the the workshop is as follows:

The workshop will provide a background for the sessions and set the stage for a dialog between researchers and designers that will continue during the minitrack. The minitrack co-chairs will select in advance a publicly accessible CMC site, which each author will be asked to analyze, critique, redesign, or otherwise examine using their disciplinary tools and techniques before the workshop convenes; the workshop will include presentations and discussions of the participants' examinations of the site and its content. The workshop is primarily intended for minitrack authors, although other participants are welcome provided they are willing to prepare for it as described above.

 

Instructions for Abstract Submission

1. Submit a 250 word abstract of your proposed paper via email to the chairs: Tom Erickson <snowfall@acm.org>, Susan Herring <herring@indiana.edu> by the deadline noted above.
2. We will send you feedback on the suitability of your abstract shortly thereafter.

Instructions for Paper Submission

1. HICSS papers must contain original material not previously published, or currently submitted elsewhere
2. Do not submit the manuscript to more than one Minitrack Chair. If unsure which Minitrack is appropriate, submit the abstract to the Track Chair for guidance.
3. Submit your full paper according to the detailed formatting and submission instructions found on the HICSS website. Note: All papers will be submitted in double column publication format and limited to 10 pages including diagrams and references.

What the Minitrack is like

 The Persistent Conversation minitrack at HICSS is halfway been a conference and a workshop. The minitrack includes a broad range of papers, and makes an effort to bring together researchers and designers from many disciplinary backgrounds. Authors and a core of interested participants,from multiple disciplines, spend a day together, presenting and discussing papers on the topic of persistent conversation.

Papers range from those that describe innovative system designs to analyses of existing systems and practices. The pictures below provide a glimpse of the minitrack.

Fernanda Viegas presents "Newsgroup Crowds and AuthorLines: Visualizing the Activity of Individuals in Conversational Cyberspaces..." by Ferndana Viegas (MIT Media Lab) and Marc Smith (Microsoft Research).

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Sheri Condon presents"Temporal Properties of Turn-Taking and Turn-Packaging in Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication" by Claude Cech (University of Louisianna at Lafayette) and Sherri Condon (The MITRE Corporation).

HICSS also strives to provide time for quality discussion, with a format that reserves 30 to 50 percent of a paper's slot for discussion. Above John Paolillo holds forth as Susan Herring and other minitrack participants listen. Below, Tom Erickson, Sherri Condon, Claude Cech and Fernanda Viegas listen intently.