Lee Sherlock (a second year MA student in Rhetoric and Writing program here at MSU and I (Douglas Walls, WIDE Research Assistant) both presented publications at this years SIGDOC 2007 along with Bill.

SIGDOC is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group (SIG) on the Design of Communication (DOC). SIGDOC brings a wide variety of disciplines together to talk about and understand how communication works in digital environments. This years SIGDOC took place in lovely El Paso, TX from October 22nd to the 24th . SIGDOC hosts a wide array of work from Lee's "When social networking meets online games: the activity system of grouping in World of Warcraft" to Bill's work in visualizing knowledge work, to my own paper "Distributed Value System Matrix: a new use for distributed usability testing". Here are some reflections from Lee on attending such a multidiscipline conference:

"The first thing that struck me while attending and presenting at SIGDOC this year is the true interdisciplinarity of the conference—we often employ that descriptor as a vaguely positive attribute, but SIGDOC includes all kinds of work on communication technologies and the design of communication, broadly conceived. Accompanying this is the diversity in audience; SIGDOC attendees are a mix of academics and industry professionals, which leads to fascinating questions and opportunities for conversation.

Because the conference is relatively small, SIGDOC participants can attend all (or nearly all) of the conference presentations across the three session days. For me, this was valuable not only in terms of being able to see and listen to everyone else’s work, but also in terms of the connections that were built across sessions throughout the conference. The discussions at SIGDOC were some of the most insightful and engaging conversations that I’ve been a part of, and the ability to make reference to and frame the work of the conference participants as a whole allowed these rich conversations to develop."