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Track: Digital Media: Content and Communications
 Minitrack: Documenting work and working documents

This Minitrack addresses document work and the work of documenting. The notion of document serves as a lens into the socio-technical or socio-material nature of what organizational members do day in and day out. Documents are socio-technical in that they are both material – and, thus, embody the technical infrastructure – and social – as they embody both the work practices and shared understanding of those involved. In an effort to capture the broader sentiments of the literature and avoid the specific theoretical baggage embedded in each term we will draw on the broader notion of document. We define documents as typified and material communication, whether electronic, paper-based, wall mounted or set in stone, invoked in response to recurrent situations.

The minitrack will elicit papers on document work and the work of documenting. The notion of document serves as a lens into the socio-technical or socio-material nature of what organizational members do day in and day out. Documents are socio-technical in that they are both material—and, thus, embody the technical infrastructure—and social—as they embody both the work practices and shared understanding of those involved. For example, our production and distribution of the document involved the technology of word processors, several different computers, Google documents, hard copies, email messages and pdf files. We even touched a book in the process. Your reading of the call likely involves numerous other technologies; you are likely reading a digital version of this conference call that you received in your inbox or you might have stumbled over it among many other mini-track descriptions on the HICSS-43 website. Shared social practices are reflected in the degree to which you, the reader, and we, the authors, understand and share common knowledge about the form and contents of the genre of  conference calls in general and HICSS calls in particular and reflect this knowledge in this document.

The work we have done and that you are doing represents the basics of the work practices. And, the various material forms of the proposal represent some of the infrastructure supporting these HICSS and the broader information systems field. In short, the production of this call involves both the work of documenting and document work. The work of documenting falls close to the definition of the verb, to “document,” describing the act of providing factual or substantive support for statements made or hypotheses proposed; or to equip with exact references to authoritative supporting information (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary). As expected, we have included a lot of nice references below to support our claims. At the same time we engaged in document work involving the production, use, collection, classification, storage, retrieving and dissemination of documents within and across organizational settings.

A focus on documents is part of a larger trend in the academic literature. In parallel to the dissemination of increasingly complex information systems in organizational environments, there is an emerging literature studying document work and the work of documenting within and across organizational boundaries. These studies tend to oppose a purely information-based perspective propagating the abstract meanings and immaterial data communicated via various information systems. Instead this body of work largely draws on a pragmatic and practice-oriented perspective theorizing the social practices going into the manufacturing of documents through the manipulations of various material forms.

Topics the Minitrack will address include:

  • Documents as part of organizational infrastructure Institutional ethnography

  • Boundary documents

  • Immutable mobiles and mutable mobiles

  • Documents and accountability

  • The evolution of genres of digital documents, including non-textual genres

  • Investigations of genre in use

  • Analysis of particular document genres, e.g. email, spam, and deception

  • Combining document

  • Document life cycles

  • Documents and their materiality

  • Documents in Web 2.0 applications (Blogs, Wikis, Open Source)

Minitrack Co-chairs:

Kevin Crowston
 Syracuse University
School of Information Studies
Hinds Hall 348
Syracuse, NY 13244–4100
Phone: 315-443-1676
Dept Phone: 315-443-2911
Fax: 866-265-7407
Email: crowston@syr.edu

Carsten Østerlund
 Syracuse University
School of Information Studies
Hinds Hall 309
Syracuse, NY 13244–4100
Phone: 315-443-8773
Dept Phone: 315-443-2911
Fax: 315- 443-5806
Email: costerlu@syr.edu