Workshop: Persistent Conversation (half-day)
Leaders: Tom Erickson and Susan Herring

Persistent conversations occur via instant messaging, text and voice chat, email, blogs, web boards, graphical and 3D environments, video sharing sites, document annotation systems, mobile phone texting, etc. Such communication is persistent in that it leaves a digital trace, and the trace gives it the potential to be searched, browsed, replayed, annotated, visualized, restructured, and recontextualized, thus opening the door to a variety of new uses and practices. This half-day, multidisciplinary workshop sets the stage for the persistent conversation minitrack, and is intended to promote dialog between those who design persistent conversation systems, and those who study them. We will select (in late November) a publicly accessible computer-mediated communication (CMC) site. Before the workshop convenes at the conference each workshop participant will be asked to analyze, critique, redesign, or otherwise examine the site, using their disciplinary techniques. The workshop will include presentations and discussions of the participants' examinations of the site.

See http://www.visi.com/~snowfall/HICSS_PC.html for more information.

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

Thomas Erickson (snowfall@acm.org) is a Research Staff Member and an interaction designer and researcher at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in New York. He is interested in understanding how large groups of people interact via networks, and in designing systems that support deep, productive, coherent, network-mediated conversation. Originally trained as a cognitive psychologist, Erickson has evolved into an interaction designer and researcher via work at a start up, Apple Computer, and IBM Research. Erickson is co-editor of HCI Remixed: Essays on Works that have Influenced the HCI Community (MIT Press, 2007).

Susan Herring (herring@indiana.edu) is a Professor of Information Science and Linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research applies language-focused methods of analysis to digital conversations in order to identify their recurrent properties and social effects. She is the editor of Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Benjamins, 1996), Computer-Mediated Conversation (Hampton, in press), co-editor of The Multicultural Internet: Language, Culture, and Communication Online (Oxford, 2007), and Editor of the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication .