User Experience
As a technical communication scholar and professional, my research interests align at the intersection of the human and technological, focused specifically on the way rhetorical agency emerges at these interstices. As technical communication scholarship and practice extends into user experience (UX), UX design, experience architecture, and usability testing, my research offers insights into changing understandings of what we mean by the term user. This user identity is less likely to be human and more likely to be a collectivity of human activity and technological influence, including machine learning, artificial intelligence, and algorithm-mediated daily experience, a collectivity that emerges from interaction in and with digital online environments and platforms. I join such theorists as Francesca Ferrando and Rosi Braidotti in arguing that we have entered the realm of the posthuman, and our technical communication theory, pedagogy, and practice must adapt to posthuman UX in order to understand and design the systems, communications, and experiences that account for the technological activity intertwined in posthuman agency.
Prior Experience
My research focus on the emerging topic of posthuman usability in technical communication is the combination of two primary strands of professional and pedagogical experience. As demonstrated in my curriculum vitae, the path toward research and scholarship in rhetorical agency and posthuman UX has included stops in secondary and post-secondary teaching, freelance web development, secondary education administration, hypertext theory, literary analysis and cultural studies, social media management and advertising, and rhetorical theory. From so circuitous a path, I draw clear connections between two strands of prior experience and my current research into posthuman UX: web development and composition pedagogy.
Web Development: I am a self-taught professional web developer. After learning and teaching desktop publishing as a high school yearbook staff advisor, I took a free HTML class offered by our school technology specialist. After coding HTML by hand using a text editor and previewing coded content in the Mosaic web browser, I experienced the parallels between digital publishing for print and web and recognized the value of multimedia publishing for information design and wide distribution. The internet and hypermedia have had a profound affect on my professional experience. I worked over a decade as a freelance web developer and have worked as a web manager on a higher education marketing team, either part-time or full-time, for the past 18 years. I now immerse myself in the very algorithms I study and analyze as a scholar, developing and managing search and social media marketing campaigns while improving search engine optimization (SEO) through content creation, management, and marketing. Experience in web development, especially using content management systems. starkly reveals the pervasive influence that systems, networks, hardware, software, and algorithmic procedures have on users in daily life. As my research into posthuman agency has accelerated, I’ve theorized that SEO represents algorithmic usability, where human-generated content is manipulated for ease and simplicity of use by algorithmic processes that generate top-level search results. I’ve presented and published research from my experience in web development as a technical communicator in the published Proceedings of the 34th and 35th ACM International Conferences on the Design of Communication (SIGDOC).
Composition Pedagogy: Since training to become a secondary English teacher, I have taught students about writing and encouraged them to become better writers. Deeply influenced by the social turn in composition studies, I have focused my pedagogy on the collaborative social aspects of composing. Given the deeply mediated activity of writing through and with digital technologies, my research and teaching have focused on the collaborative affordances that composing platforms like Google’s G Suite (formerly Google Apps) for Education and cloud-based sharing and storage platforms like Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive provide for practicing collaborative composing. I’ve collaborated with a colleague at Old Dominion University to publish works on using Google Drive for collaborative composing in the Journal of Usability Studies, in the Proceedings of the Annual Computers and Writing Conference: Vol. 1. 2016-2017 (edited by Cheryl Ball, Chen Chen, Kristopher Purzycki, and Lydia Wilkes), and in edited collections published by IGI Global (edited by Binod Gurung and Marohang Limbu) and Utah State University Press (edited by Rich Rice and Kirk St.Amant).
Current Research
Beginning with a media studies class titled “Theories of Networks” that I took with Dr. Shelley Rodrigo (then at Old Dominion University, now at the University of Arizona) and Dr. Julia Romberger at Old Dominion University, my dissertation topic and research accelerated toward a focus on networked agency in composing. I refined this focus with a technical communication class, “Theories of Technical and Professional Writing,” taught by Dr. Dan Richards, where I discovered the field of professional and technical communication and realized that I had been working as a professional writer and technical communicator for years without recognizing the field. As a direct result of these classes, Dr. Richards is now my dissertation committee chair, and Dr. Romberger sits on my dissertation committee. Since taking those classes, I have honed my research to focus attention on tracing rhetorical agency as its emerges during online research practices. My dissertation seeks to trace, describe, and visualize the emergence of assemblage agency during online research as posthuman user experience. My object of study is a student conducting research using an academic library’s OneSearch search interface, and my mixed methods approach combines usability testing, ethnographic observation and reflection, network activity data mining from browser HTTP Archive (HAR) files, network speed measurements, and SEO methods. I’ve published my initial theoretical approach and visualizations in a special issue of Present Tense on platform rhetorics (edited by Dustin Edwards and Bridget Gelms) and presented these approaches at recent conferences including the 2018 International Critical Media Literacy Conference (Southern Georgia University), the 2018 Symposium on Communicating Complex Information (East Carolina University), and the 2018 Computers and Writing conference (George Mason University).
Hocutt, D. L. (2019). Rhetorical agency in algorithm-centered digital activity: Methods for tracing agency in online research (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ODU Digital Commons (DOI: 10.25777/jx9e-ec14)
Research Agenda
I seek to pursue and theorize posthuman UX in future research. Assemblage agency consisting of human and nonhuman entities in online experiences is relatively straightforward to theorize through work by such disparate scholars as Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, N. Katherine Hayles, James Brown, Levi Bryant, Ian Bogost, and others. Assemblage agency is devilishly difficult to trace and reveal, and the methods for doing so are clumsy and untheorized. I intend to adapt existing and explore new methods that technical communication scholars can use to uncover the black box of algorithmic and procedural rhetorical influence. The result of this work, which I introduce in my dissertation, is to provide accessible heuristics and pedagogies that can help scholars and students alike recognize, reveal, and understand the shared agency that emerges in algorithm-mediated daily life. While algorithmic literacy is a term that Cathy Davidson and Ted Striphas have introduced to describe this awareness, my long-term research goal is to develop posthuman UX studies as a practical approach to designing products, systems, platforms, and experiences that both recognize assemblage agency and make explicit the shared nature of agency that emerges when humans use algorithm-mediated networked products.
Since I started working as a web developer at the University of Richmond School of Professional & Continuing Studies in 1999, I’ve engaged in designing online experiences for human and, increasingly, algorithmic audiences. The opportunity to study and theorize the very activities I’ve engaged in daily for the past two decades excites and engages me. I’m extending a long history of pedagogy and professional experience into the realm of knowledge making, and I’m eager to keep advancing.
Peer Reviewed Publications
I’ve published independent and collaborative research in several peer-reviewed publications, both journals and edited collections. My publishing partner in research on collaborative composing using Google Drive, Maury Elizabeth Brown, is an accomplished technical and professional writer and scholar who is the founding president and CEO of LearnLarp, an educational consulting and game design company focused on the power of role-playing games as co-created participatory experiences. Our combined work on the use of Google Drive for collaborative composing is deeply intertwined in the theories of rhetorical agency I study and advocate, and also in the important but oft-unseen labor of building composing partnerships based on mutual trust and respect. Maury and I share 100% of the research and composing credit for our shared publications, determining authorship order alphabetically by last name except in rare cases of one partner’s greater involvement in getting results published in a specific publication (as seen below for the Proceedings of the Computers and Writing Conference). I value collaborative research and composing, and I advocate and participate in collaborations when possible.
Hocutt, D. L. (2018). Algorithms as information brokers: Visualizing rhetorical agency in platform activities. Present Tense – A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, 6(3). Retrieved from http://www.presenttensejournal.org
Hocutt, D. L., & Brown, M. E. (2018). Crossing wires with Google Apps: Jumpstarting collaborative composing. In C. Ball, C. Chen, K. Purzycki, & L. Wilkes (Eds.), The Proceedings of the Annual Computers and Writing Conference: Vol. 1. 2016-2017 (pp. 52-57). Ft. Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse. Retrieved from https://wac.colostate.edu/resources/wac/proceedings/cw2016-2017
Brown, M. E., & Hocutt, D. L. (2018). Glocalizing the composition classroom with Google Apps for Education. In R. Rice & K. Amant (Eds.), Thinking globally, composing locally: Rethinking online writing in the age of the global Internet (pp. 320-339). Louisville, CO: Utah State University Press.
Hocutt, D. L. (2017). The complex example of online search: Studying emergent agency in digital environments. Proceedings of the 35th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication. https://doi.org/10.1145/3121113.3121207
Brown, M. E., & Hocutt, D. L. (2017). Pervasive pedagogy: Collaborative cloud-based composing using Google Drive. In B. Gurung & M. Limbu (Eds.), Integration of cloud technologies in digitally networked classrooms and learning communities (pp. 98-119). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Hocutt, D. L. (2016). User activity in context: Technical communicators as articulators of Google Analytics data. Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication. https://doi.org/10.1145/2987592.2987611
Brown, M. E., & Hocutt, D. L. (2015). Learning to use, useful for learning: A usability study of Google Apps for Education. Journal of Usability Studies, 10(4), 160-181. Retrieved from http://uxpajournal.org
