Public note-taking on a digital platform as a workplace practice

Abstract

Unlike traditional note-taking with pen and paper, in which the note-taking process is only partially accessible to the co-participants, note-taking in the digitalized workplace may be done publicly, so that both the content of notes and the process of writing them are observable to the co-participants. Using multimodally oriented conversation analysis, this study focused on public note-taking in interaction sequences where the facilitator of a workplace project records the results of a workshop discussion on a digital platform. The analysis revealed that while the facilitator was entitled to decide which portions of talk are recorded, the affordances of digital technology, its publicness in particular, enabled the co-participants to monitor the writing process, possibly leading to the editing of notes. The results show that even when note-taking is publicly performed, it is oriented to as an informal form of writing.