Track: Digital Media: Content and Communication
Minitrack: Persistent Conversation 10: 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.

Topics and research areas include, but are not limited to:
* Turn-taking, threading and other structural features of CMC
* The dynamics of large scale conversation systems (e.g. blog networks)
* Methods for summarizing or visualizing conversation archives
* Studies of virtual communities or other sites of digital conversation
* The roles of mediated conversation in knowledge management
* Studies of the use of instant messaging in large organizations
* Novel designs for computer-mediated conversation systems
* Analyses of or designs for distance learning systems

Co-chairs:
Thomas Erickson (Primary Contact)
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
3136 Irving Ave. (Remote office), Minneapolis MN 55408-2515, USA
Phone: +1-612-823-3663
Fax: +1-612-823-1576
Email: snowfall@acm.org

Susan C. Herring
School of Library and Information Science
Indiana University
10th St. and Jordan Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405, USA
Phone: +1-812- 856-4919
Fax: +1-812-855-6166
Email: herring@indiana.edu