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Territorial Functioning in Collaborative Writing

Fragmented Exchanges and Common Outcomes

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. This interpretation is more dynamic than the one by Bakker and Bakker-Rabdau which focuses only on situationally dependent roles such as teacher/student.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Susanne Bødker for her valuable contributions, including suggestions and feedback. We are also grateful to the participants, without whom this work would not have been what it is. Finally, we wish to thank Anke van Oosterhout, for her assistance in preparing the figures, and Marianne Dammand Iversen for proofreading. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 740548).

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  1. Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Åbogade 34, 8200, Aarhus N, Denmark

    Ida Larsen-Ledet & Henrik Korsgaard

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Larsen-Ledet, I., Korsgaard, H. Territorial Functioning in Collaborative Writing. Comput Supported Coop Work 28, 391–433 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-019-09359-8

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