I teach and research in the Technical Communication program at the Polytechnic campus of Arizona State University. I teach classes on social media and digital ethics. My main research concern is two-fold: independent professionals' use of social media and the ethical structures surrounding development and maintenance of the internet that make independent professionals' work possible. I also have published on disciplinarity, communication in video games, and mobile phones in the workplace.
Extra-institutional individuals are individuals who work outside of a bureaucracy. I argue that, ... more Extra-institutional individuals are individuals who work outside of a bureaucracy. I argue that, in the absence of a bureaucracy organizing their work, the professional communication of extra-institutional individuals is organized by the problems they are trying to solve. Grouping extra-institutional individuals by the problems they are trying to solve instead of their field or area allows for deeper analysis of the communication needed in individual fields. The problems-based approach also allows comparison of extra-institutional individuals across fields, which can result in interdisciplinary knowledge sharing. This interdisciplinary knowledge sharing can help designers of communication to better understand their extra-institutional users and develop tools appropriate to the needs of audiences across fields with shared problems.
Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Aug 29, 2022
This article investigates multimodal elements—images, links, gifs, videos, and galleries—of crowd... more This article investigates multimodal elements—images, links, gifs, videos, and galleries—of crowdfunding campaigns on the platform Kickstarter to develop an understanding of characteristics of successful campaigns. The authors scraped 327,586 campaign pages, analyzing the multimodal elements of successful and unsuccessful campaigns. They found that successful campaigns featured more images, links, and gifs and more frequently included a project video than did unsuccessful campaigns. Images, links, and the presence of a project video had a positive impact on success while gifs and project galleries did not. These findings give business communicators practical guidance, develop theoretical aspects of Kickstarter research, and validate previous findings with a larger data set.
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Jun 1, 2020
Background: Technical communication, business communication, and professional communication are p... more Background: Technical communication, business communication, and professional communication are potentially overlapping disciplines with open disciplinary questions. A comparative topical analysis of research topics can identify similarities and differences between them, addressing intellectual and physical concerns for each. Literature review: Recent topical analyses have been done for technical communication. Historical topical analyses have been done for business communication. Few professional communication topical analyses exist. Some studies were done 15 or more years ago, and one related comparative study exists. Research questions: 1. What research topics are unique to each of the disciplines of technical communication, business communication, and professional communication in a corpus of research abstracts spanning 1963–2017? 2. What topics are shared among the disciplines of technical communication, business communication, and professional communication in a corpus of research abstracts spanning 1963–2017? Research methodology: I used collocation analysis on the target phrases technical communication, business communication, and professional communication from a 4822-abstract corpus. I compared words collocated with target phrases to find words unique to a single term, those shared with two terms, or those shared with all three terms. Results/discussion: Findings identified science communication as a technical communication topic; other findings corroborated previous research. Business communication findings corroborated previous research and identified an emphasis on global communication. Findings show professional communication as a rhetorically flexible term that creates a space for emerging concepts and expands disciplinary boundaries. The three shared communication, pedagogy, international, and disciplinary concerns. Conclusions: The disciplines feature some overlap but maintain distinct research foci. Professional communication is a distinctive discipline that assists technical communication and business communication by incubation of emerging concepts.
Proceedings of the 35th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication, 2017
Extra-institutional individuals are individuals who work outside of a bureaucracy. I argue that, ... more Extra-institutional individuals are individuals who work outside of a bureaucracy. I argue that, in the absence of a bureaucracy organizing their work, the professional communication of extra-institutional individuals is organized by the problems they are trying to solve. Grouping extra-institutional individuals by the problems they are trying to solve instead of their field or area allows for deeper analysis of the communication needed in individual fields. The problems-based approach also allows comparison of extra-institutional individuals across fields, which can result in interdisciplinary knowledge sharing. This interdisciplinary knowledge sharing can help designers of communication to better understand their extra-institutional users and develop tools appropriate to the needs of audiences across fields with shared problems.
Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 2016
Indie rock musicians are a group of extra-institutional individuals who play an often-vibrant rol... more Indie rock musicians are a group of extra-institutional individuals who play an often-vibrant role in urban economic development. The organizational structure that guides their professional activities has yet to be investigated. Interviews with 18 indie rock musicians provided a way to investigate organizational structure. They reported a build structure featuring the principles of audience development, slow growth, and unevenness. The constraints of the musician’s professional situation require long-term promotion of aesthetic products to a slowly growing audience in a saturated market that produces unevenness through power imbalances. This slow-growing structure contrasts with organizational structures that provide immediate benefits.
Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 2016
Indie rock musicians are a group of extra-institutional individuals who play an often-vibrant rol... more Indie rock musicians are a group of extra-institutional individuals who play an often-vibrant role in urban economic development. The organizational structure that guides their professional activities has yet to be investigated. Interviews with 18 indie rock musicians provided a way to investigate organizational structure. They reported a build structure featuring the principles of audience development, slow growth, and unevenness. The constraints of the musician’s professional situation require long-term promotion of aesthetic products to a slowly growing audience in a saturated market that produces unevenness through power imbalances. This slow-growing structure contrasts with organizational structures that provide immediate benefits.
Supplemental material, Appendix_A for Work–game balance: Work interference, social capital, and t... more Supplemental material, Appendix_A for Work–game balance: Work interference, social capital, and tactical play in a mobile massively multiplayer online real-time strategy game by Anya Hommadova Lu and Stephen Carradini in New Media & Society
Supplemental material, Appendix_A for Work–game balance: Work interference, social capital, and t... more Supplemental material, Appendix_A for Work–game balance: Work interference, social capital, and tactical play in a mobile massively multiplayer online real-time strategy game by Anya Hommadova Lu and Stephen Carradini in New Media & Society
The rapid, widespread implementation of artificial intelligence technologies in workplaces has im... more The rapid, widespread implementation of artificial intelligence technologies in workplaces has implications for business communication. In this article, the authors describe current capabilities, challenges, and concepts related to the adoption and use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in business communication. Understanding the abilities and inabilities of AI technologies is critical to using these technologies ethically. The authors offer a proposed research agenda for researchers in business communication concerning topics of implementation, lexicography and grammar, collaboration, design, trust, bias, managerial concerns, tool assessment, and demographics. The authors conclude with some ideas regarding how to teach about AI in the business communication classroom.
Extra-institutional individuals are individuals who work outside of a bureaucracy. I argue that, ... more Extra-institutional individuals are individuals who work outside of a bureaucracy. I argue that, in the absence of a bureaucracy organizing their work, the professional communication of extra-institutional individuals is organized by the problems they are trying to solve. Grouping extra-institutional individuals by the problems they are trying to solve instead of their field or area allows for deeper analysis of the communication needed in individual fields. The problems-based approach also allows comparison of extra-institutional individuals across fields, which can result in interdisciplinary knowledge sharing. This interdisciplinary knowledge sharing can help designers of communication to better understand their extra-institutional users and develop tools appropriate to the needs of audiences across fields with shared problems.
Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Aug 29, 2022
This article investigates multimodal elements—images, links, gifs, videos, and galleries—of crowd... more This article investigates multimodal elements—images, links, gifs, videos, and galleries—of crowdfunding campaigns on the platform Kickstarter to develop an understanding of characteristics of successful campaigns. The authors scraped 327,586 campaign pages, analyzing the multimodal elements of successful and unsuccessful campaigns. They found that successful campaigns featured more images, links, and gifs and more frequently included a project video than did unsuccessful campaigns. Images, links, and the presence of a project video had a positive impact on success while gifs and project galleries did not. These findings give business communicators practical guidance, develop theoretical aspects of Kickstarter research, and validate previous findings with a larger data set.
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Jun 1, 2020
Background: Technical communication, business communication, and professional communication are p... more Background: Technical communication, business communication, and professional communication are potentially overlapping disciplines with open disciplinary questions. A comparative topical analysis of research topics can identify similarities and differences between them, addressing intellectual and physical concerns for each. Literature review: Recent topical analyses have been done for technical communication. Historical topical analyses have been done for business communication. Few professional communication topical analyses exist. Some studies were done 15 or more years ago, and one related comparative study exists. Research questions: 1. What research topics are unique to each of the disciplines of technical communication, business communication, and professional communication in a corpus of research abstracts spanning 1963–2017? 2. What topics are shared among the disciplines of technical communication, business communication, and professional communication in a corpus of research abstracts spanning 1963–2017? Research methodology: I used collocation analysis on the target phrases technical communication, business communication, and professional communication from a 4822-abstract corpus. I compared words collocated with target phrases to find words unique to a single term, those shared with two terms, or those shared with all three terms. Results/discussion: Findings identified science communication as a technical communication topic; other findings corroborated previous research. Business communication findings corroborated previous research and identified an emphasis on global communication. Findings show professional communication as a rhetorically flexible term that creates a space for emerging concepts and expands disciplinary boundaries. The three shared communication, pedagogy, international, and disciplinary concerns. Conclusions: The disciplines feature some overlap but maintain distinct research foci. Professional communication is a distinctive discipline that assists technical communication and business communication by incubation of emerging concepts.
Proceedings of the 35th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication, 2017
Extra-institutional individuals are individuals who work outside of a bureaucracy. I argue that, ... more Extra-institutional individuals are individuals who work outside of a bureaucracy. I argue that, in the absence of a bureaucracy organizing their work, the professional communication of extra-institutional individuals is organized by the problems they are trying to solve. Grouping extra-institutional individuals by the problems they are trying to solve instead of their field or area allows for deeper analysis of the communication needed in individual fields. The problems-based approach also allows comparison of extra-institutional individuals across fields, which can result in interdisciplinary knowledge sharing. This interdisciplinary knowledge sharing can help designers of communication to better understand their extra-institutional users and develop tools appropriate to the needs of audiences across fields with shared problems.
Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 2016
Indie rock musicians are a group of extra-institutional individuals who play an often-vibrant rol... more Indie rock musicians are a group of extra-institutional individuals who play an often-vibrant role in urban economic development. The organizational structure that guides their professional activities has yet to be investigated. Interviews with 18 indie rock musicians provided a way to investigate organizational structure. They reported a build structure featuring the principles of audience development, slow growth, and unevenness. The constraints of the musician’s professional situation require long-term promotion of aesthetic products to a slowly growing audience in a saturated market that produces unevenness through power imbalances. This slow-growing structure contrasts with organizational structures that provide immediate benefits.
Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 2016
Indie rock musicians are a group of extra-institutional individuals who play an often-vibrant rol... more Indie rock musicians are a group of extra-institutional individuals who play an often-vibrant role in urban economic development. The organizational structure that guides their professional activities has yet to be investigated. Interviews with 18 indie rock musicians provided a way to investigate organizational structure. They reported a build structure featuring the principles of audience development, slow growth, and unevenness. The constraints of the musician’s professional situation require long-term promotion of aesthetic products to a slowly growing audience in a saturated market that produces unevenness through power imbalances. This slow-growing structure contrasts with organizational structures that provide immediate benefits.
Supplemental material, Appendix_A for Work–game balance: Work interference, social capital, and t... more Supplemental material, Appendix_A for Work–game balance: Work interference, social capital, and tactical play in a mobile massively multiplayer online real-time strategy game by Anya Hommadova Lu and Stephen Carradini in New Media & Society
Supplemental material, Appendix_A for Work–game balance: Work interference, social capital, and t... more Supplemental material, Appendix_A for Work–game balance: Work interference, social capital, and tactical play in a mobile massively multiplayer online real-time strategy game by Anya Hommadova Lu and Stephen Carradini in New Media & Society
The rapid, widespread implementation of artificial intelligence technologies in workplaces has im... more The rapid, widespread implementation of artificial intelligence technologies in workplaces has implications for business communication. In this article, the authors describe current capabilities, challenges, and concepts related to the adoption and use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in business communication. Understanding the abilities and inabilities of AI technologies is critical to using these technologies ethically. The authors offer a proposed research agenda for researchers in business communication concerning topics of implementation, lexicography and grammar, collaboration, design, trust, bias, managerial concerns, tool assessment, and demographics. The authors conclude with some ideas regarding how to teach about AI in the business communication classroom.
Creative Economy and Culture aims to develop anew conception of creative industries, a term large... more Creative Economy and Culture aims to develop anew conception of creative industries, a term largely associated with the aggregated economic activity of artists. Hartley, Wen, and Li expand the scope of creative industries by defining “creativity”as “newness” of any variety and arguing that“newness” emerges from groups communicating with each other. This wide definition of creative industries invites scholars of entrepreneurship communication and technical communication to join the multidisciplinary conversation on the creative industries. The authors’ very distributed understanding of creativity raises interesting questions, allows for the study of large-scale phenomena, and leaves open questions of precarity and devalued expertise.
This presentation discusses how technology affects the relationships between genres in a genre sy... more This presentation discusses how technology affects the relationships between genres in a genre system. The effects of technology, particularly Internet-connected technology, on communication have been discussed under many concept names, such as the concept of Distributed Work in Technical Communication, Multimodal Communication in Rhetoric and Composition, and Emerging Genres and Genre Change in Rhetorical Genre Studies. However, it has been hard to isolate the effects of technology on genres of communication amid the shifting professional, personal, cultural and social norms associated with the uptake of technology. Genre has long been studied as a social phenomenon, but I argue that technology imposes more on the social development of new communication techniques and genre use than we have previously allowed. I demonstrate this with an interview-based study of professional musicians' genre systems in the pre-internet and Internet eras.
Research Questions • What attitudes do professionals hold towards the impact of AI on society and... more Research Questions • What attitudes do professionals hold towards the impact of AI on society and their jobs? How do early adopters of ChatGPT differ from non-adopters in their attitudes towards the impact of AI on society and their jobs? Key Recommendations • Develop generative AI policies that support innovation and efficiency while putting into place legal safeguards for organizations and their employees. • Use a social contracts approach to develop generative AI policies.
Text at Scale presents corpus analysis as a methodological framework for exploring questions abou... more Text at Scale presents corpus analysis as a methodological framework for exploring questions about genre development, technological mediation, writing practice, and teaching, among many other areas of inquiry central to technical and professional communication. Arguing that corpus analytics provides a powerful approach for the field, Carradini and Swarts provide an overview of corpus analysis as a coherent set of methodological practices and frames of analysis, show how it can be used to pose and address questions about large corpora of language data, and offer practical and replicable demonstrations of corpus analysis techniques. Through their clear discussions and extensive examples, the authors offer a theoretically informed and strongly grounded approach to using corpus analysis to develop and test hypotheses against large bodies of textual data.
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Papers by Stephen Carradini
The effects of technology, particularly Internet-connected technology, on communication have been discussed under many concept names, such as the concept of Distributed Work in Technical Communication, Multimodal Communication in Rhetoric and Composition, and Emerging Genres and Genre Change in Rhetorical Genre Studies. However, it has been hard to isolate the effects of technology on genres of communication amid the shifting professional, personal, cultural and social norms associated with the uptake of technology. Genre has long been studied as a social phenomenon, but I argue that technology imposes more on the social development of new communication techniques and genre use than we have previously allowed. I demonstrate this with an interview-based study of professional musicians' genre systems in the pre-internet and Internet eras.