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Arizona State University
Department of English
Box 870302
Tempe, AZ 85287-0302
480.965.3168

Main Office Location:
G. Homer Durham Language and Literature Building - LL 542

ASU English Home > Who's Who > Faculty Bio

Where I Come From

I have a long-standing interest in technology and tools for communication that was cultivated during my undergraduate work at New Mexico Tech. While there, in addition to my coursework, I photographed comets and helped with comet data analysis at the Joint Observatory for Cometary Research, and worked as a writer/editor for the Center for Explosives Technology Research. My graduate work in Rhetoric and Professional Communication took place at New Mexico State University. My dissertation, titled "Habitability in Search Engine Interfaces: Characteristics Identified through Formative Evaluation Techniques," enabled me to combine my interests in technology and rhetoric.

Where My Work Takes Me

My previous experience in both industry and academia helps me work with people around the world on projects in a variety of fields. Some of this work has been for:

• McCulley/Cuppan, LLC, where I contribute to projects that help pharmaceutical companies achieve their business goals through improved
  • practices for document authoring, management, and review,
  • standards for document quality,
  • technology for collaboration and communication.
• Canal+ Technologies where I helped develop applications and training for interactive digital television producers and providers.
• the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, where I helped develop training and procedures for operations and management, and first-responder training for Class 7 hazardous material.
• the Computing Research Laboratory, where I contributed to projects that developed tools for language analysts, learners and instructors.
• NEC, where I contributed to work in natural (human) language processing and machine translation.

My interest in all of this work is that through it we find useful ways to

• create and share knowledge,
• identify or construct resources that people want to use to help them with their work,
• connect those from different communities of practice.

My focus is on technologies that are user-centered and task oriented. I'm interested in technologies that are designed to help people accomplish their goals (as opposed to technologies that are imposed on people in ways that don't). I describe this work in the context of habitability: I work to find ways to make habitable resources.

Habitability

My use of the term "habitability" has its roots in the work of four scholars: C.S. Pierce, Pierre Bordieu, W.C. Watt, and W.C. Ogden. The American philosopher C.S. Peirce described "habit" in the context of belief. For him, beliefs are things that we are aware of, resolve doubt, and ground our actions and responses; "habit" is the result of belief, and beliefs guide our behaviors. Pierre Bourdieu uses "habitus" to describe the issue more broadly. For him, habitus is a social construct that motivates and arranges social practices. For Bordieu, evidence of "habitus" is shown through language use and forms within organizations, cultures, and communities. Communities of practice, or discourse communities, provide good examples of the effects of "habitus" because each uses language and communicative forms in unique, specialized and recurring ways. The beliefs of any organization are reflected in its collective actions and responses.

For Watt, habitability is a description of how easily, naturally, and effectively people can use natural language to express themselves (or an information need) in the context of a natural language interface to a database query system. For him, a natural language interface could be considered habitable if users can express everything that is needed for a system to satisfy a task using language they would expect the system to understand. Language that users expect a system to understand is a reflection of the beliefs they have of the system's capabilities. Ogden puts this more directly: "Habitable systems are those that people are comfortable using, that don't create confusion, frustration, or anxiety, and that people want to use to do their work." The common thread that ties "habit," "habitus" and "habitability" together is belief. Habit is the effect of beliefs, and our actions and responses are determined by our beliefs.

Habitability, as I use the term, is not synonymous with usability. While usability is certainly an important element of any technology, it doesn't get us far enough. Usability tells us lots about what people can do with something, but little about how people do (or want to do) things or why. Habitable systems are always usable, but usable systems aren't always habitable. Making systems habitable involves understanding what people do and how they like to do it.

Replace the word "system" with "document," and "usability" with "readability," and we can make a similar argument for habitability in documents. Authors who want to create habitable texts are mindful of the beliefs (and expectations) of readers. They anticipate how those beliefs and expectations may change as readers interact with a text, and actively look for ways to make texts more habitable.

My scholarly interests in habitability inform my teaching. I currently teach English 372 "Document Production." Here the notion of habitability has a central role as we learn about document design and quality, methods that help with quality control, assurance, and assessment, techniques that can improve document management and collaboration, and technologies that can help us with this work.

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