Write here, write now!: an experimental study of group maintenance in collaborative writing
Venue
CHI '13 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, New York, NY, USA (2013), pp. 961-970
Publication Year
2013
Authors
Jeremy Birnholtz, Stephanie Steinhardt, Antonella Pavese
BibTeX
Abstract
Writing documents together using collaborative editing tools has become extremely
common with the widespread availability of tools such as Google Docs. The design of
such tools, rooted in early CSCW research, has historically been focused on
providing awareness of the presence and activities of one's collaborators. Evidence
from a recent qualitative study, however, suggests that people are also concerned
about how their behaviors -- and they themselves -- will be perceived by others;
and take steps to mitigate possible negative perceptions. We present an
experimental study of dyads composing documents together, focusing in particular on
group maintenance, impression management and relationship-focused behavior. Results
suggest that communication is positively related to social relations, but only for
synchronous writing in a shared space; the reverse can be true in asynchronous
commenting and editing
