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Mark Zachry

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Mark Zachry

Personal Homepage:
uwtc.washington.edu/people/faculty/mzachry.php

Current place of employment:
University of Washington
Mark Zachry is associate professor of technical communication in the College of Engineering at the University of Washington. He is the editor of Technical Communication Quarterly.

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Publications by Mark Zachry (bibliography)

» 2008 «

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Zachry, Mark, Hart-Davidson, William and Spinuzzi, Clay (2008): Advances in understanding knowledge work: an experience report. In: DOC08 2008. pp. 243-248. Available online

“Extending our ongoing investigation into the communicative practices of knowledge work, we have made recent advances on three different fronts: methodological framing, investigation of work practices and potential support tools, and application development. Each of these advances is considered in this experience report, which concludes with a brief discussion of where such research might most productively advance next.”

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» 2007 «

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Hart-Davidson, William, Spinuzzi, Clay and Zachry, Mark (2007): Capturing & visualizing knowledge work: results & implications of a pilot study of proposal writing activity. In: Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication 2007, El Paso, Texas, USA. pp. 113-119. Available online

“This paper reports on a pilot study of three proposal writers conducted by the authors during late Fall 2005 and Spring 2006. In this report we discuss how well the data collection, data analysis, and data visualization methods served the interests of our project and of the participants, along with implications for future research. Among the methodological issues we address: how to capture rich accounts of fragmented work without taxing participants too much, how to filter rich datasets that result from automated recording of work sessions to focus on specific issues, and how to visualize data to elicit follow-up information from participants.”

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Zachry, Mark, Spinuzzi, Clay and Hart-Davidson, William (2007): Visual documentation of knowledge work: an examination of competing approaches. In: Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication 2007, El Paso, Texas, USA. pp. 120-126. Available online

“Approaches to researching and understanding knowledge work in contemporary organizations have proliferated during the last decade. Interest in this area has been particularly charged by the emergence of knowledge management as a concern for administrators and managers. One of the challenges addressed by researchers working in this area is constructing visual representations of knowledge work. This paper examines competing approaches to such visualization work, exploring trends in current research-based work.”

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Pierce, Robert, Protopsaltis, Aristidis, Mehlenbacher, Brad and Zachry, Mark (2007): What is design of communication?. In: Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication 2007, El Paso, Texas, USA. p. 181. Available online

“What is the Design of Communication? In this panel, four SIGDOC members from different areas come together to discuss the interdisciplinary area of DOC.”

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» 2006 «

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Spinuzzi, Clay, Hart-Davidson, William and Zachry, Mark (2006): Chains and ecologies: methodological notes toward a communicative-mediational model of technologically mediated writing. In: ACM 24th International Conference on Design of Communication 2006. pp. 43-50. Available online

“Studies of knowledge work tend to take one of two research foci: either on communication (the transactional, intersubjective exchange of information, thoughts, writing, or speech among participants, performed in serial chains) or mediation (the nonsequential, implicit aspects of artifacts that serve to guide and constrain workers' activities). In this paper, we propose a methodological framework that coordinates the perspectives.”

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Hart-Davidson, William, Spinuzzi, Clay and Zachry, Mark (2006): Visualizing writing activity as knowledge work: challenges & opportunities. In: ACM 24th International Conference on Design of Communication 2006. pp. 70-77. Available online

“Digital environments enable distributed work. Though they pose challenges for research, they also provide affordances for addressing these difficulties including opportunities to capture and visualize writing activity in significant detail. This paper surveys sources of visualizations of writing processes and practices, focusing on attempts to deal with writing as a distributed activity. We then ask: what qualities of visualizations seem desirable and help to render writing visible as knowledge work for the purpose of providing mediational support to writers.”

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Zachry, Mark, Spinuzzi, Clay and Hart-Davidson, William (2006): Researching proposal development: accounting for the complexity of designing persuasive texts. In: ACM 24th International Conference on Design of Communication 2006. pp. 142-148. Available online

“Formal accounts of how proposals are prepared in the contemporary workplace are scarce. In particular, researchers have published very few reports based on structured studies of proposal writing. This paper offers an overview of the current state of our knowledge about proposal writing in the contemporary workplace. Drawing upon data from a case study, the paper then advances an argument for the field to develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of proposal development as a complex information gathering and design activity.”

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» 2001 «

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Zachry, Mark, Cook, Kelli Cargile, Faber, Brenton D. and Clark, David (2001): The changing face of technical communication: new directions for the field in a new millennium. In: IEEE ACM 19th International Conference on Computer Documentation 2001. pp. 248-260. Available online

“In this panel session, the authors identify four different factors shaping the future of technical communication: user-centered design, corporate universities, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and knowledge management. The authors each address how factors once considered external to the field of technical communication are now becoming thoroughly integrated with it. These four studies, in conjunction, suggest how the field of technical communication is becoming increasingly complex and how participants (practitioners, researchers, and educators) will need to adapt to this new terrain.”

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» 2000 «

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Spinuzzi, Clay and Zachry, Mark (2000): Genre Ecologies: An Open-System Approach to Understanding and Constructing Documentation. In ACM SIGDOC *Journal of Computer Documentation, 24 (3) pp. 169-181

“Arguing that the current approaches to understanding and constructing computer documentation are based on flawed assumptions, Clay Spinuzzi and Mark Zachry unfold an alternative approach. Using two historical case studies, they describe how viewing texts and their contexts as "genre ecologies" provides needed new insights into the complex ways that people use texts related to computers. This framework helps both users and writers take account of contingency, decentralization, and stability in the use of computer documentation. Three helpful heuristic tools arise from this genre-ecologies perspective: exploratory questions, genre-ecology diagrams, and organic engineering.”

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» 1999 «

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Zachry, Mark (1999): Constructing Usable Documentation: A Study of Communicative Practices and the Early Uses of Mainframe Computing in industry. In: ACM 17th International Conference on Systems Documentation 1999. pp. 22-25. Available online

“This study suggests that computer documentation is a complex technical communication genre, encompassing all the texts that mediate between complex human activities and computer processes. Drawing on a historical study, it demonstrates that the varied forms given to documentation have a long history, extending back at least to the early days of commercial mainframe computing. The data suggests that (1) early forms of computer documentation were borrowed from existing genres, and (2) official and unofficial documentation existed concurrently, despite efforts to consolidate these divergent texts. The study thus provides a glimpse into the early experimental nature of documentation as writers struggled to find a meaningful way to communicate information about their organization's developing computer technology.”

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Changes to this page (author)

16 Feb 2010: Enabled abstracts to be shown on Mark Zachry's author page.
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Publication statistics

Publication period:1999-2008
Publication count:10
Number of co-authors:8

Productive colleagues

Mark Zachry's 3 most productive colleagues in number of publications:

David Clark:24
Clay Spinuzzi:15
Brad Mehlenbacher:15

Collaboration count

Number of publications with 3 favourite co-authors:

Clay Spinuzzi:7
William Hart-Davidson:6
Aristidis Protopsaltis:1

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Learn more about Mark Zachry:
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- ACM
- CSB

Conference Calendar

Mar 22

Workshop on Pervasive healthcare in the home : Supporting patient motivation and engagement

Mar 22

UX People

Mar 22

ETRA '10 - Eye Tracking Research & Applications Symp.

Mar 21

“ Software design is the act of determining the user's experience with a piece of software. It has nothing to do with how the code works inside, or how big or small the code is. The designer's task is to specify completely and unambiguously the user's whole experience. ”

-- David Liddle, From Bringing Design to Software, edited by Terry Winograd, 1996 ”

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