Publications

Daniel Hocutt, Nupoor Ranade, and Gustav Verhulsdonck

Journal Article: This exploratory case study of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven chatbot demonstrates that microcontent, a snippet of personalized content that responds to users’ needs, is a form of localization reliant on a content ecology. In contributing to users’ localized experiences, technical communicators should recognize their work as part of an assemblage in which users, content, and metrics augment each other to produce personalized content that can be consumed by and delivered through AI-assisted technology. We conclude that technical communicators should teach, research, and practice competencies and skills to advocate for localized users in assemblages of user, content, metrics, and AI. Society for Technical Communication, Volume 69, Number 4

Andrew Iliadis, Amelia Acker

Journal Article (in The Information Society): Palantir is among the most secretive and understudied surveillance firms globally. The company supplies information technology solutions for data integration and tracking to police and government agencies, humanitarian organizations, and corporations. To illuminate and learn more about Palantir’s opaque surveillance practices, we begin by sketching Palantir’s company history and contract network, followed by an explanation of key terms associated with Palantir’s technology area and a description of the firm’s platform ecosystem. We then summarize current scholarship on Palantir’s continuing role in policing, intelligence, and security operations. Our primary contribution and analysis are a computational topic modeling of Palantir’s surveillance patents (n = 155), including their topics and themes. We end by discussing the concept of infrastructuring to understand Palantir as a surveillance platform, where we theorize information standards like administrative metadata as phenomena for structuring social worlds in and through access to digital information.

Where is the AI? Educator perspectives

Lesley Wilton, Stephen Ip, Merra Sharma, Frank Fan

Conference Paper: to be presented at 23rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, 27-31 July, Durham University, UK

Ann Hill Duin, Isabel Pedersen

Conference Paper: From Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm), 2021, pp. 1-5.

Lesley Wilton, Stephen Ip, Meera Sharma, & Frank Fan

Conference Paper: presented at 11th Annual SALTISE Conference, June 2022.

Student APProval: Building a dynamic reading comprehension program for struggling middle school readers

Lesley Wilton & Sarah Bernholtz

Conference Paper: Paper presented at Canadian Society for the Study of Education (CSSE) Annual Conference (Online).

Isabel Pedersen, Ann Hill Duin

Conference Paper: This exploratory study identifies the tangling of proposed relationships between human and non-human agents by providing an analysis on how AI technologies are marketed for learning subjects through a critical discourse analysis of corporate advertisements.

From the 55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences | 2022

Lesley Wilton

Book Chapter: In Designing for Meaningful Synchronous and Asynchronous Discussion in Online Courses.

Ann Hill Duin, Isabel Pedersen, Jason Tham

Book Chapter: This exploratory study examines instructor discussion, instructional development, and study of student building of digital literacy as a result of the use and/or curation of Fabric of Digital Life collections on emerging technologies.

Kenyan Burnham, Jason Tham

Journal Article: Digital literacy is an ongoing area of inquiry and research in technical and professional communication (TPC) pedagogy. This article reports the findings from an analysis of assignment designs and deployments, complemented by student and instructor reflections on the use of a digital archive in digital literacy development. Programmatic Perspectives, vol 12 issue 2.

Daniel L. Hocutt

Conference Paper: This paper reports on a preliminary comparative study of Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant voice assistants (VA) that explores the origins of answers provided on each platform in an attempt to determine the extent that these origins influence responses.  From Proceedings of the 39th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication.

Andrew Iliadis , Tony Liao , Isabel Pedersen , and Jing Han

Journal Article: Machines produce and operate using complex systems of metadata that need to be cata- logued, sorted, and processed. Many students lack the experience with metadata and sufficient knowl- edge about it to understand it as part of their data literacy skills. This paper describes an educational and interactive database activity designed for teaching undergraduate communication students about the creation, value, and logic of structured data. Journal of Communication Pedagogy, 2021, Vol. 4, 152-165