Collaborative Writing Across Multiple Artifact Ecologies

Research focusing on how collaborative writing takes place across multiple applications and devices and over longer projects is sparse. We respond to this gap by presenting the results of a qualitative study of longer-term academic writing projects, showing how co-writers employ multiple tools when working on a common text. We identify three patterns of multi-application collaboration as well as four common types of motivations for transitions between applications. We also extend existing taxonomies of collaborative writing by proposing a categorization of the functions served by the text as object and backbone of the collaboration. Together, these contributions offer a framing for understanding transitions within and across artifact ecologies in work around a common object. Our findings highlight ways in which features like concurrent editing may in fact challenge the collaborative writing process, and we point to opportunities for alternative application models.