Making Work Visible

Margaret H. Szymanski is a Senior Research Scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center. She earned her PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and specialized in the study of language, interaction and social organization. In her work, Szymanski has examined topics such as communication across knowledge boundaries, social engagement at museums around electronic guidebooks, ethnographic training for corporations, and the organization of remote and co-present multi-party conversational interaction. She has published articles in Language in Society, the International Journal of Computer Support for Cooperative Work, Linguistics and Education and Discourse Processes. Jack Whalen is a sociologist working for Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, an international NGO. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the School of Art and Design at Aalto University, Helsinki. Previously, Whalen was a Principal Scientist at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and Associate Professor of Sociology and Department Head at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Beyond the Barricades: The Sixties Generation Grows Up (with Richard Flacks); has published articles in Social Psychology Quarterly, the British Journal of Sociology, Social Problems, and many other journals; and has written chapters for a number of edited volumes, including Workplace Studies: Recovering Work Practice and Informing Systems Design; Organisation, Interaction and Practice: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis; and The Social and Interactional Dimensions of Human-Computer Interfaces.