The material qualities of technological mediators are vital to collaborative activity, but current paradigms for collaboration support leave the potential of material mediation largely untapped. The HCI literature addresses both material mediation for individuals and coordination between collaborators - but rarely does it discuss the more direct role of the material as standing between people: its communicative role. This paper unfolds a material/linguistic analysis of four empirical examples from previous work on collaborative writing to showcase how material qualities of both tools and the text-in-progress, used in both planned and improvised manners, help co-authors shift between levels of collaboration, from independent co-ordinated activity to highly collaborative co-constructive activity. On one hand, we see co-authors successfully collaborating through material means; on the other, we see frustrations resulting from limited material expressivity in current tools. This duality between the significance of material mediation and obstacles to drawing on its potential makes clear that our conception of materiality needs elaboration. We point to multimodality as one opportunity for this.

This paper extends the literature on social media activism by foregrounding the invisible work of orchestrating it. We analyze the activities of a #MeToo group in a Northern European country and characterize the group's efforts to catalog incidents of gender-based harassment and discrimination as an activist, platform-mediated participatory writing project. Our analysis details the work of organizing this form of activism, particularly: 1) the editorial work that underlies publishing personal stories on social media, 2) the emotional labor that unfolds as part of this form of writing, and 3) the work of creating publics. By drawing attention to these efforts, the paper frames activism as effortfully driven, sometimes in tension with the platform or evolving value positions. We conclude with a discussion on the role of social networking sites in organizing activism where writing is central, and with a set of sensitivities that can support designers and activists alike in designing socio-technical practices concerned with social change.

In this paper we activate theoretical principles for HCI and CSCW in analysis and design of collaborative technologies. We critically evaluate theoretical principles about how technologies mediate collaborative activities through two empirical cases regarding smart speakers and collaborative writing, respectively. Common to them is that both common objects and mediating artifacts are set in a mixed virtual and physical setting. Principles from activity theory are examined, specifically with a focus on how people use artifacts and objects as mediators to collaborate in joint activity. As part of questioning the cases, we also position collaborative affordances in relation to the principles. We engage with the cases by using the theoretical principles both analytically and constructively. Our analysis specifically targets traces as a possible construct that has potential to constructively aid collaboration across the two cases. We explore what seems to be a lack of support, and in particular theoretical framing, of traces of past activities, connected objects, other users, etc. With an initial hypothesis that traces could be a mechanism that would support these two kinds of collaborative activities better in a future redesign, we set out to further explore the cases and their future possibilities, and how they could be conceptually grounded and supported. We present a set of analytically and constructively oriented questions to help researchers and designers of artifacts identify mediators for and instances of collaboration.

Research focusing on how collaborative writing takes place across multiple applications and devices and over longer projects is sparse. We respond to this gap by presenting the results of a qualitative study of longer-term academic writing projects, showing how co-writers employ multiple tools when working on a common text. We identify three patterns of multi-application collaboration as well as four common types of motivations for transitions between applications. We also extend existing taxonomies of collaborative writing by proposing a categorization of the functions served by the text as object and backbone of the collaboration. Together, these contributions offer a framing for understanding transitions within and across artifact ecologies in work around a common object. Our findings highlight ways in which features like concurrent editing may in fact challenge the collaborative writing process, and we point to opportunities for alternative application models.

This paper examines territorial functioning in collaborative writing through a mixed methods study involving interviews and analysis of collaboratively authored documents. Our findings have implications for the way we think about collaborative writing as a design problem, in that current conceptualizations of collaborative writing emphasize the work context rather than the work itself, at the cost of understanding interpersonal dynamics that are central to the common process. The findings come from 23 interviews with 32 university researchers and students regarding their experiences with collaborative writing of academic texts. The analysis of these interviews is supplemented with visualizations of the revision histories of documents written by a subset of the study participants. We discuss our findings in terms of fragmented exchanges in common information spaces and consider the shared document as a mediator for the simultaneous accomplishment and negotiation of work.