Territorial Functioning in Collaborative Writing: Fragmented Exchanges and Common Outcomes

Abstract

This paper examines territorial functioning in collaborative writing through a mixed methods study involving interviews and analysis of collaboratively authored documents. Our findings have implications for the way we think about collaborative writing as a design problem, in that current conceptualizations of collaborative writing emphasize the work context rather than the work itself, at the cost of understanding interpersonal dynamics that are central to the common process. The findings come from 23 interviews with 32 university researchers and students regarding their experiences with collaborative writing of academic texts. The analysis of these interviews is supplemented with visualizations of the revision histories of documents written by a subset of the study participants. We discuss our findings in terms of fragmented exchanges in common information spaces and consider the shared document as a mediator for the simultaneous accomplishment and negotiation of work.