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Research Statement

My scholarship in technical communication and the related areas of computers and writing and rhetoric and composition brings together my professional interests: the importance of research and what the body of research looks like; usability and how people use new technologies and media; technology and media studies focusing on composition, writing, and rhetorical issues; and how all these areas impact our teaching, students, programs, scholarship, and practice. My work incorporates feminist lenses and methodologies, empirical research, various media and technology, and user-centered design, often overlapping these areas to examine technology and writing from different perspectives. My body of scholarship includes collaborative and single-authored work; and presentations, proceedings papers, articles, and chapters; print publications, hypertexts, web texts, podcasts, and multimodal texts.

In the first major area of my scholarship, I research research—the search for knowledge and systemic investigation to establish understanding. I study the research of technical communication and rhetoric and composition, investigating the body of knowledge in order to better understand what types of scholarship have been done and what needs to be done. In two articles, “CW2K” and “Visions,” I collaborated with other scholars to examine graduate training in research. This scholarship shows a snapshot of the state of research training and I have correspondingly analyzed the overall state of research in another article. Working with Heather McGovern and Monica Bulger, we analyzed five years of computers and writing research articles in a large empirical study of 365 journal articles in the forthcoming article “De-coding Our Scholarship.” This ground-breaking article provides scholars in computers and writing with a previously unavailable understanding of the state of research including its quality, methods, knowledge claims, sex of author(s), collaborative status, and more. One editorial board reviewer stated that this article is a “strong essay that makes an important contribution to Computers and Composition” and another said it “will help us as a field understand what we’ve accomplished and where we should go.” I plan to continue work in this area by investigating graduate research training and the research needs in academia and industry. All together, my work in research as a subject provides a better understanding of the state of research—and the state of training researchers—supports graduate and beginning and developing researchers, and gives the disciplines much needed information from which they may then make informed decisions about future directions for training and research.

Another major area of my interest is in users, usability, and user-centered design. Finding that usability and user-centered design has some of the same issues critiqued in feminist scholarship, including othering, limitations, and exclusion, I have applied feminist methodology and critiques to usability and user-centered design methods. This work has developed over time, starting with ten conference presentations and one conference proceedings article (“Landmarks, Links, and Search Engines”) and developing into an in-progress empirical research article, and the book chapter “Beyond the Universal.” While using a small piece of a larger empirical study for support, this book chapter presents my critique of the “universal user” often found in user-centered design and usability research and suggests a more inclusive model, “the universe of users,” which can lead to users-centered research, and not the limited and exclusive user-centered research. I intend to take this work further in a book-length project, with a deeper look at my universe of users approach and a multi-layered feminist critique of usability and user-centered design, especially as they apply to social media.

My persistent commitment to understanding technology, users, and use, along with my own media use and creation and the integration of media into my classes, has developed into the final area of interest: technology and media studies. In two early articles (“Student Problems” and “Gendered Statements”) I examined technology use by students, finding issues with gender stereotypes online and students’ problems with reading hypertexts. As technology is an “inhospitable and sometimes dangerous space for girls,” (Takayoshi, Huot, and Huot, 89), part of my scholarship has included feminist analysis of technology use. In one project, Heather McGovern and I have sought to understand the digital “herstories” of Generation X women. We analyzed some early survey results in our presentation “Daughters of the Revolution” and are currently finishing an article on this research project that incorporates our own personal technology narratives, along with the survey results and the narratives of our participants. We intend to take this project further, with an updated and more widely distributed survey, followed by video and audio interviews, technology walk-throughs, artifact analysis, and more. The result will be a book-length multimedia project integrating our research in a mostly textual form along with images, videos, and audio including the actual voices of our participants. Generation X is a unique generation—neither digital immigrants (those born before the digital revolution) nor digital natives (those born after the revolution—the Millennials)—in that they have grown up with the digital revolution and can offer those of us in technology and communication an interesting perspective on use, evolution, technical literacy, and much more, that can inform our scholarship, teaching, and our own uses of technology.

Recently I have begun a more focused examination of one particular media: podcasting. Given the limited scholarship on podcasting, especially empirical research, I am exploring it from several perspectives. I am investigating podcasting from a rhetorical perspective in the chapter “Casting the Contest and Rebellion,” comparing podcasting to the ancient rhetorical contests. In my article for Kairos, “Rhetorical Roots and Media Future,” along with the companion piece “Podcasting in a Writing Class?”—which I am currently revising based on a revise and resubmit from Kairos—I am examining podcasting from pedagogical and theoretical perspectives. These two articles are examples of the media I discuss, as they are multimodal compositions and include a mix of hypertext and podcasts. I am also beginning my fourth semester of a longitudinal study, exploring the impacts and effectiveness of podcasting, along with other digital and social media such as wikis and blogs, in the writing classroom. Initial findings suggest that podcasting and other media can aid the development of many writing skills. In addition, I am beginning work on the usability of podcasting, which can have implications for practice, pedagogy, and theory. In these works, I argue podcasts should be considered valuable and important rhetorical texts that combine ancient rhetorical concepts with new media, resulting in revolutionary texts that reach wide audiences and may aid our students in becoming better writers, communicators, and rhetoricians.

My scholarship resides at the intersection of technology, research, communication, and users. I incorporate a feminist lens to my work, critiquing and enriching current methods and seeking to understand and explore the users and uses of our technologies and media—from students to Generation Xers. As a media scholar my work spans media—hypertext, the web, podcasts, print and more—I study, teach, create, and work with and within a variety of media. In my past, current, and future work, I examine new applications of ancient rhetorical practices; the impact of technology and media on our teaching, students, and classes; technology literacy and use narratives; open and user-centered methods for technology development for the universe of users; and the status and development of research in the technology-rich areas of technical communications and computers and writing. I will continue to explore and build upon these interests in my scholarship and teaching as I develop shorter projects (such as those on podcasting and also industry research needs), two book-length projects (one on my “universe of users” approach to digital and social media, and the other more deeply examining the daughters of the digital revolution—those in Generation X), and as I begin new projects. I will integrate this work in ways that better allow the field to understand technology, users, “new” rhetoric, and our body of knowledge.