My focus is on people. People acting with technologies.
I research professional writing in digital environments. Mostly.
I'm an Assistant Professor of English—Rhetoric and Writing Studies—at Ball State University, and a Fellow with the Emerging Media Initiative.
Academic Research
In studying professional writing in digital environments, I'm really trying to understand how people work and interact.
Tracing the writing that people do—in all its forms—helps me trace how they get things done, how they make meaning from the work they do, and how they share that meaning with others.
Since writing is a technology, and since so much contemporary writing work is carried out in emerging media environments, I also study how people act with technologies, following Kaptelinin and Nardi (2006).
Current Projects
I'm currently running two very different qualitative studies, with a third to begin in early 2011.
“Exploring Ideation Sessions as Knowledge Work” is an investigation of contemporary professional communication practices at an emerging media intensive workplace site.
“Embodied Interactions in Sacred Space” is a study of gestural and material rhetorics exploring how participants in a recurring religious practice come to know and understand their faith via embodied interactions.
Consulting
I offer consulting services in three broad areas: training, organizational communication, and curricula.
With 9 years of experience in the financial services industry—including 7 years in compliance and oversight—I understand how business communication works.
I can also help you design curricula that balances theory and practice while privileging student inquiry—at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Recent Publications
If you'd like to read something that I've written, but can't find it on the web or in your library, just drop me an email. I'd be happy to send it over.
10 / 2010
McNely, B. (2010). Locus Communis: Twitter as digital commonplace. Journal of the International Digital Media and Arts Association 7(1), 34–43.
10 / 2010
McNely, B., Teston, C., Cox, G., Olorunda, B. & Dunker, N. (2010). Digital publics and participatory education. Digital Culture and Education 2(2), 152–171.
09 / 2010
McNely, B. (2010). Exploring a sustainable and public information ecology. In SIGDOC ‘10: Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Design of communication. New York: ACM Press.