Examples of persistent conversation include interactions carried out using email, mailing lists, news groups, bulletin board systems, textual and graphic MUDs, chat clients, structured conversation systems, and document annotation systems.
Persistent conversation differs from spoken conversation in interesting ways.
For example, because it leaves a perceptible trace, persistent conversation can occur asynchronously with lags of minutes to months between conversational turns, as happens in e-mail. Alternatively, the turns of persistent conversation can overlap, with many participants effectively 'speaking' at once, as often happens in on-line chats. Relaxation of synchrony is just one of the characteristics that distinguish persistent conversation from its spoken counterpart. The particular aim of the minitrack, and of its associated workshop, is to bring together researchers who analyze existing computer-mediated conversational practices and sites, with designers who propose, implement, or deploy new types of conversational systems. By bringing together participants from such diverse areas as anthropology, computer-mediated communication, HCI, interaction design, linguistics, psychology, rhetoric, sociology, and the like, we hope that the work of each may inform the others, suggesting new questions, methods, perspectives, and design approaches.