My research interests are located at the intersection of professional and technical communication, user experience research, public rhetorics, and civic engagement. I am interested in the role that technical communicators (and technical communication researchers) can play in advocating for more transparent, equitable, and open forms of citizen involvement. In particular, I am interested in complex and public rhetorical situations where new technologies and practices bump against established protocols and professional cultures; such situations, I believe invite both careful analysis and thoughtful integration into pedagogical application. As a scholar I pursue projects that can inform practice, policy, and pedagogy and pride myself in working collaboratively with colleagues to transform the ways in which civic engagement and public rhetorics inform our approaches to professional and technical communication scholarship, broadly construed. My research has been published in several prominent journals in the field of professional and technical communication and I have presented papers at numerous national conferences, including the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Association of Teachers of Technical Writing Conference, Computers and Writing, IEEE International Professional Communication Conference, and Council of Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication Conference. 

Publications

Technical Communication Special Issue, November 2021: “The Work of Storytelling in Professional and Technical Communication”

Stories are everywhere in our personal, public, and professional lives. From casual conversations and social media posts to published explanations of complex scientific information, the act of storytelling affords humans a rhetorical capacity to engage with one another and the world around us. Stories bring cause and effect together into a cohesive event, thus helping us make sense of and impose—even just temporarily—a sense of stability to an uncertain world. Through stories, we are also able to articulate the complexity of firsthand experience into knowledge that is social, shareable, and lasting. That is, storytelling helps us communicate complex ideas to one another, particularly in ways that increase not only comprehension but also engagement, curiosity, and even excitement. Stories and storytelling are, and always have been, at the heart of technical communication (TC). With its emphasis on characters, settings, descriptive language, metaphor, and narrative structure, stories are arguably one of the most effective ways of communicating complex technical and scientific information—and as the articles in this special issue illustrate, the rhetorical potential for storytelling is far richer than even that.

Journal of Business and Technical Writing, 2017: “‘Wicked Problems, Hybrid Solutions, and the Rhetoric of Civic Entrepreneurship in +POOL”

This project examined the ongoing development of +POOL, an proposed recreational pool, filtration system, and floating laboratory in New York City's East River, to better understand the rhetorical work involved in civic entrepreneurship. My co-author Kyle Vealey and I considered how the development of +POOL, as an entrepreneurial venture funded through the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, might help expand the inventive possibilities for civic entrepreneurs coming to grips with wicked civic problems today. The study offers a look into the rhetorical work of civic entrepreneurship by examining the way +POOL developed as what we term a hybrid solution, which recognizes and foregrounds the notion that wicked problems (such as the pollution of the East River) can never be fully understood or known at any one moment. Hybrid solutions offer stable outcomes for civic entrepreneurial ventures that are stable enough to attract investors and clear logistical and legal hurdles yet dynamic enough to continually adapt to the evolving contours of a wicked problem. Our framework identifies four characteristics of an effective hybrid solution—slow, subtle, scalable, and sustainable—that are productive points of engagement for civic entrepreneurs and technical communicators alike. This project was first presented at the 2015 NCTE annual conference and published in the July 2017 special issue of the Journal of Business and Technical Writing on the Rhetoric of Entrepreneurship.

IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 2016: “Teaching Crowdfunding as an Emerging Site of Professional and Technical Communication”

Between August 2014 and April 2015, I co-developed with Kyle P. Vealey an approach to teaching entrepreneurial thinking and values of civic engagement in an upper-level business writing course at Purdue University. Using a service learning model, we tasked groups of students to (1) identify a local exigency or need; (2) collaborate with a community partner or campus organization that is invested in the problem to research possible solutions; and (3) create a Kickstarter campaign based on that research that could address at least some aspects of the problem. This civic crowdfunding assignment sequence takes place over two phases: first, students conducted primary and secondary research on a local problem or exigency and used this as evidence for a white paper and a project proposal. Second, students developed a feasible solution to this problem which then formed the basis for crowdfunding campaign materials, including a Kickstarter page, campaign video, and branding materials. In our article we describe what we observed before, during, and after teaching this project over two semesters and rely on two sources of data: a collection of teaching materials (e.g., syllabi, lesson plans, project prompts, in-class activities, correspondence between instructors, teaching logs, etc.) and actual civic crowdfunding project materials produced by students. Ultimately, we seek to understand how entrepreneurial writing projects can meld commercial and financial motivations with civic exigencies, direct participation, and stakeholder engagement.  Our teaching case has demonstrated the need to prepare students not only to pitch venture ideas for a small audience of investors, but also to consider how to identify and frame problems, construct stories about these problems and, ultimately, develop ethical relationships with stakeholders. Findings from this project were published in the December 2016 special issue of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication and presented at CCCC 2017 in Portland, OR.

IEEE Professional Communication Conference Proceedings, 2017: “Case Study of GitHub as an Alternative Platform for Federal Public Comment Periods”

The first published excerpt from my dissertation research presents one initial finding from the larger project on the federal government’s initiatives to involve citizens more prominently in the development of government services. Specifically, this case study analyzes public participation in the open comment period for the Federal Source Code Policy (FSCP), an initiative by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to standardize how open source software is used and created by the federal government. By using GitHub, a popular version control code repository program, as an alternative to traditional public comment periods, Digital Service Experts (DSEs) in the White House and the General Services Administration (GSA) provide an alternative to the traditional model of public comment. In addition to analyzing the comment period itself, this case is based on an interview with ‘Will’ (a pseudonym), a DSE currently working for the OMB and a site visit to the GSA headquarters conducted in July 2017. In my analysis, I triangulate Will’s responses with data collected from the GitHub repository and public communications (blog posts, etc.) to better understand the extent of citizen engagement in the Federal Source Code Policy. Using six characteristics of collaborative participation described by public planning scholars Judith Innes and David Booher, I evaluate the FSCP comment period and consider both the affordances and limitations of using GitHub and other digital platforms to complement or replace the more traditional model of public comment. My analysis ultimately suggests the federal government made progress toward multi-directional, open, and fully collaborative public participation, though how (indeed, whether) this process might be continued remains to be seen. Initial findings from this case were presented at the 2017 IEEE Professional Communication Conference in Madison, WI, published in conference proceedings, and received the 2017 Hayhoe Fellow Award from the IEEE Professional Communication Society.

Dissertation

Purdue University E-Pubs, 2018: “Advocating for Users, Engaging Citizens: Analyzing the Rhetoric of Civic Engagement in the Digital Services Movement”

This dissertation examines the digital service movement, a global effort to improve government services for citizens by importing best practices and talent from outside government, including private sector technology companies, the open source software community, and civic technology nonprofit organizations. More specifically, I focus on the digital service movement as it has developed within the United States Federal Government during the second term of former president Barack Obama. By studying the processes, methods, and tools through which federal agencies have created space for more active, transparent, and multidirectional citizen involvement, my dissertation contributes to an ongoing conversation about the role technical communicators, service designers, and user researchers can play as advocates for what Robert Johnson (1998) terms “the user as citizen” (p. 46). Recognizing users as active and engaged citizens allows professionals within the federal government to advocate for spaces in which citizens are empowered to contribute to the decision-making processes that directly impact their lives. Located at the intersection of public rhetoric, professional and technical communication, and experience architecture, this study seeks to understand how user experience design, usability research, service design theory, and principles of human-centered design have been institutionalized within the United States federal government. I theorize that the digital service movement has achieved success, in part, by circulating a rhetoric of civic engagement comprised of the values, methods, tools and technology, and best practices necessary for sustaining the movement both within and beyond individual institutions, which contributes both toward short-term adoption of digital services practices and the long-term goal of transforming government/citizen interactions.