We describe a case study of a complex, ongoing, collaborative work process, where the central activity is a series of meetings reviewing a wide range of subtle technical topics. The problem is the accurate reporting of the results of these meetings, which is the responsibility of a single person, who is not well-versed in all the topics. We provided tools to capture the meeting discussions and tools to “salvage” the captured multimedia recordings. Salvaging is a new kind of activity involving replaying, extracting, organizing, and writing. We observed a year of mature salvaging work in the case study. From this we describe the nature of salvage work (the constituent activities, the use of the workspace, the affordances of the audio medium, how practices develop and differentiate, how the content material affects practice). We also demonstrate how this work relates to the larger work processes (the task demands of the setting, the interplay of salvage with capture, the influence o...
Thomas P. Moran, Leysia Palen, Steve R. Harrison,