Dissertations and Theses
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Software and Space: Investigating How a Cosmology Research Group Enacts Infrastructure by Producing Software
Software is a pervasive element of twenty-first century life and an integral element of scientific research. Research in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in recent decades investigates how distributed, collaborative ... -
Knowledge Workers and Associative Activity: An Examination of Knowledge Work Systems and Settings
The US has experienced broad reaching economic changes as work has moved from the farm, to the factory, to the office, and now beyond. The long-term, high-level shift toward information work in the US is accompanied by ... -
An Analysis of Game-Based Learning for the Design of Digital Science Games
As science becomes increasingly data-driven, there is a need to prepare the next generation of youth with the wide variety of skills and tools necessary for future scientific careers. In this dissertation, I address the ... -
Coordination in Commons-Based Peer Production Communities: Evaluation, Analysis, and Design for Emergent Systems
Traditional organizations are often relatively structured, involving hierarchies of individual agents driving progress through production, with well-defined boundaries between internal requirements and external expectations ... -
Human Centered Tools for Analyzing Online Social Data
In the social sciences, researchers are increasingly turning to datasets collected from social media, online chat, forums, and email to address questions about human communication and behavior. However, these datasets are ... -
The Effect of Visual Design and Information Content on Readers’ Assessments of API Reference Topics
Software developers must learn and use an increasing number of application-programming interfaces (APIs) to create applications and web sites. To apply these APIs in the increasingly short development time that modern ... -
Coordinating the Commons: Diversity & Dynamics in Open Collaborations
(2014-02-24)The success of Wikipedia demonstrates that open collaboration can be an effective model for organizing geographically-distributed volunteers to perform complex, sustained work at a massive scale. However, Wikipedia's history ... -
Conceptions of Trust: How Designers Approach Usable Privacy and Security
(2013-11-14)Designers who create user interfaces are frequently required to ask users for personal information. For the user, this is a "trust question": Do I, the user, trust the system or entity that is asking me for this information? ... -
Understanding University Students' Use of Tools and Artifacts in Support of Collaborative Project Work
(2013-07-23)When designers collaborate on projects, they use an assortment of tools to generate a variety of artifacts that help them complete their work. However, it remains unclear how university students use tools and create artifacts ... -
Engineering Student Development: Supporting Self-Authoring Engineers
(2013-07-23)In this study, engineering undergraduate students constructed a preparedness portfolio in a portfolio studio--the pedagogy at the center of this study. To explore and understand this pedagogy, the construct of self-authorship ... -
Promoting Rhetorical Awareness and Perceived Self-Efficacy: Engineering Undergraduate Students Creating Preparedness Portfolios About Communication
(2013-07-23)Effective communication has been identified in recent years as a crucial competency for practicing engineers by industry professionals, educators, engineering graduates working in the field, and current engineering ... -
"Greater than the Sum of its Parts:" Coordinating Centers as Facilitators of Network-Level Work in Cancer Epidemiology Coordinating Center Enabled Networks
(2013-07-23)As collaborative research has increased in size and scope, the overhead of managing such large endeavors has also increased. In cancer epidemiology, one tool used to address the challenges of working on multi-institutional ... -
Choices on Top of Choices: A Case Illustrating the Dialectic Impact of User Technology Choice
(2013-07-23)This dissertation is an instrumental case study of the dialectic impact of user technology choices on systems where users have high autonomy - more ability to choose technologies. The high autonomy context of the case ... -
Mediation, Motives, and Goals: Identifying the Networked Nature of Contemporary Activism
(2012-09-13)Many contemporary work organizations are dynamic, complex entities that are increasingly networked and distributed in nature. Using an activist organization as the site of research, this study examines how a loosely-networked, ...
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