Publications

Danielle Mollie Stambler, Saveena (Chakrika) Veeramoothoo, Katlynne Davis

Journal Article: This article is the introduction to the Communication Design Quarterly special issue on digital life. It explains the exigency for this issue and details how digital literacies in technical and professional communication are complicated by emerging technologies. It also demonstrates the potential for moving toward a model of digital life as a flexible way of foregrounding and talking about the work we are all already doing to understand and improve our post-human lives.

Isabel Pedersen

Journal Article: The rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) into postsecondary educationand many other sectors resulted in a global reckoning with this new technology. This paper contributes to the study of the multifaceted influence of generative AI, with a particular focus on OpenAI’s ChatGPT within academic settings during the first six months after the releasein three specific ways. First, it scrutinizesthe rise of ChatGPT as a transformative event construed through a study of mainstream discourses exhibiting AI hype. Second, itdiscusses the perceived implications of generative AI for writing, teaching, and learningthrough the lens of critical discourse analysis and criticalAI studies.Third, itencourages the necessity for best practices in the adoption of generative AI technologies in education.Keywords: AI and education, educational technologies, AI hype, ChatGPT, critical discourse analysis.

This article appears in Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association Journal (OTESSA Journal).

Daniel L. Hocutt, Ann Hill Duin

Intercom, 71(2), 9–13.

Andrea Slane, Isabel Pedersen

Journal Article: A growing number of consumer technology companies are aiming to convince older people that humanoid robots make helpful tools to support aging-in-place. As hybrid devices, socially assistive robots (SARs) are situated between health moni-toring tools, familiar digital assistants, security aids, and more advanced AI-powered devices. Consequently, they implicate older people’s privacy in complex ways. Such devices are marketed to perform functions common to smart speakers (e.g., Amazon Echo) and smart home platforms (e.g., Google Home), while other functions are more specific to older people, including health and safety monitoring and serving as companions to mitigate loneliness. Privacy is a key value central to debates about the ethics of using SARs in aged care, yet there has been very little interchange between these debates and the robust theoretical discussion in the legal literature about the future of privacy and AI governance. Drawing on two qualitative studies of older people’s views on consumer SARs, the paper contributes novel findings about older people’s thinking on privacy and data governance at the intersection of their experiences with present day digital technologies and projections for future AI systems, and places their views in dialogue with debates about the future of privacy protection and AI governance.

Jessica Lynn Campbell

Book: Health information technology (HIT) is a critical component of the modern healthcare system. Yet to be effective and safely implemented in healthcare organizations and physicians and patients’ lives, it must be usable and useful. User Experience (UX) research is required throughout the full system design lifecycle of HIT products, which involve a user-centered and human- centered approach. This book discusses UX research frameworks, study designs, methods, data-analysis techniques, and a variety of data collection instruments and tools that can be used to conduct UX research in the healthcare space, all of which involve HIT and digital health. This book is for academics and scholars to be used to design studies for graduate dissertation work, in independent research, or as a textbook for UX/usability courses in health informatics or related health information and communication courses. This book is also useful for UX practitioners because it provides guidance on how to design a user research or usability study and focuses on leveraging a mixed- methods approach, including step-by-step by instructions and best practices for conducting:

• Field studies
• Interviews
• Focus groups
• Diary studies
• Surveys
• Heuristic evaluation
• Cognitive walkthrough
• Think aloud

A plethora of standardized surveys and retrospective questionnaires (SUS, Post-study System Usability Questionnaire (PSSUQ)) are also included. UX researchers and healthcare professionals will gain an understanding of how to design a rigorous, yet feasible study that generates useful insights to inform the design of usable HIT. Everything from consent forms to how many participants to include in a usability study has been covered in this book. The author encourages user-centered design (UCD), mixed-methods, and collaboration amongst interdisciplinary teams. Knowledge from many inter-related disciplines, like psychology, technical communication (TC), and human-computer interaction (HCI), together with experiential knowledge from experts is offered throughout the text.

Daniel L. Hocutt

Research Study: This study introduces online advertising platforms as digital composing tools where persuasive rhetoric encourages users to follow links and take action on landing pages. It frames these platforms as digital spaces where human actors work alongside non-human AI agents (Duin & Pedersen, 2021 & 2023) and where rhetorical agency emerges through the activity of machine learning and artificial intelligence. It theorizes a (human) user-centered approach to composing digital ads in digital advertising platforms built around Walton, Moore & Jones’ (2019) framework of positionality, position, and power. It provides guidance for technical and professional writers in placing human users at the center of an abstracted, algorithm-driven partnership where generative AI appears poised to wrest power from both composers and users.

Daniel L. Hocutt

Intercom, 71(1), 29–33.

Delon Omrow

Book Chapter: This chapter presents the theoretical promise of eco-feminism in explaining how the oppression of young women and girls is connected to the oppression of nature. Central to both forms of oppression is the ‘logic of domination’ – a conceptual framework maintaining harmful value dualisms and hierarchies. This logic also draws concrete parallels between the eco-violent commodification of nature and women’s bodies, theorising debt-for-nature (DFN) swaps and underage marriage in Indonesia through an eco-feminist lens. The interconnections of DFN swaps and various forms of violence against women and young girls in the context of human and environmental security prompt immediate responses from international organisations.

Jason C.K. Tham, Tharon Howard, Gustav Verhulsdonck

Book: This flexible textbook provides an integrated approach to user experience (UX) writing and equips students and practitioners with the essential principles and methods to succeed in writing for UX.

The fundamental goal of UX writing is to produce usable and attractive content that boosts user engagement and business growth. This book teaches writers how to create content that helps users perform desired tasks while serving business needs. It is informed by user-centered design, content strategy, artificial intelligence (AI), and digital marketing communication methodologies, along with UX-related practices. By combining writing-as-design and design-as-writing, the book offers a new perspective for technical communication education where UX design and writing are merged to achieve effective and desirable outcomes.

Outlining the key principles and theories for writing user-centered content design, this core textbook is fundamental reading for students and early career practitioners in UX, technical communication, digital marketing, and other areas of professional writing.

Joe Moses and Jason Tham

Book: Informed by years of the authors’ teaching experience as well as thorough research on teamwork across multiple settings, this guide effectively brings together the practical, psychosocial, and pedagogical elements of collaboration and collaborative writing. Beautifully designed and appealingly readable, it is the finest and most comprehensive interdisciplinary text on this subject.

Isabel Pedersen

Podcast: Isabel Pedersen was the keynote speaker in this event. This podcast is a wide-ranging conversation about the current status of Artificial Intelligence in society.

This episode of The Big Rhetorical Podcast was produced as part of the 2023 TBR Podcast Carnival, “Artificial Intelligence: Applications and Trajectories.” The 2023 TBR Podcast Carnival takes place August 28-31 with new podcasts released each day.

Ann Hill Duin, Isabel Pedersen, Jim Hall, Dan Card, Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch

Conference Paper: OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology is now in use across academic and professional contexts, and co-writing content with AI is eclipsing older notions of AI assistantship. This panel re-envisions co-AI technical and professional writing amid this transformative AI writing landscape, inviting participants to join in discussion and research on documenting generative AI’s ability to develop documentation; providing critical examination to deal with issues of explainability, transparency, and user advocacy; introducing co-AI technical writing and usability testing to students; and designing ethical futures through use of ethical algorithmic impact assessment tools and processes.