Workshop: Persistent Conversation (Half-day Workshop)
Leaders: Thomas 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 that each workshop member will be asked to analyze, critique, redesign, or otherwise examine using their disciplinary techniques before the workshop convenes. 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.

Thomas Erickson (snowfall@acm.org) is an interaction designer and researcher at IBM Research. His focus is on studying and designing systems that support deep, productive, coherent, network-mediated conversation. Erickson is co-editor of the books HCI Remixed (MIT Press, 2008), Resources, Coevolution and Artifacts (Springer, 2008) and about 50 peer-reviewed papers.


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 three books on computer-mediated communication.