Modeling genre ecologies

The genre ecology framework is an analytical framework for studying how people use multiple artifacts - such as documentation, interfaces, and annotations - to mediate their work activities. Unlike other analytical frameworks, the genre ecology framework has been developed particularly for technical communication research, particularly in its emphasis on interpretation, contingency, and stability. Although this framework shows much promise, it is more of a heuristic than a formal modeling tool; it helps researchers to pull together impressions, similar to contextual design's work models, but it has not been implemented as formally as distributed cognition's functional systems.In this paper, I move toward a formal modeling of genre ecologies. First, I describe the preliminary results of an observational study of seven workers in two different functional teams of a medium-sized telecommunications company (a subset of a larger, 89-worker study). I use these preliminary results to develop a model of the genres used by these two teams, how those genres interconnect to co-mediate the workers' activities, and the breakdowns that the workers encounter as genres travel across the boundaries of the two teams. I conclude by (a) describing how formal models of genre ecologies can help in planning and designing computer documentation and (b) discussing how these models can be further developed.