About

Douglas M. Walls is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at NC State University and serves as the director of the MS in Technical Communication program. He is also a core faculty member of the Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media (CRDM) Ph.D. program. His research interests include digital rhetorics, User Experience (UX), Information Architecture (IA), and Experience Architecture (XA), with a focus on inclusive design for marginalized or underserved communities. Currently, his work emphasizes inclusive design for public health care information and community outreach in rural-serving organizations. Walls has contributed to the field through publications in various media, including Computers and Composition, Kairos, and The Journal of Business and Technical Communication. He is also a co-editor of the book Social Writing/Social Media: Publics, Presentations, and Pedagogies. His scholarly work has received recognition, such as the Honorable Recognition for the 2016 Ellen Nold Award and a nomination for the College Composition and Communication Conference’s Best Article. Walls holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Writing from Michigan State University, along with multiple master's degrees and a B.A. from the University of Nevada. His expertise encompasses technical communication, digital rhetorics, UX, IA, XA, and participatory design.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Engineering ethics
• Human–computer interaction
• Pedagogy
• Engineering
• World Wide Web

Selected publications

• Usability Testing and Experience Design in Citizen Science

  2020 · 7 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Networked communication technologies have been deployed in efforts to engage citizens in scientific inquiry through mediated approaches. The use of digital networked technologies in the citizen science space, however, retains the same problems of usability and access that other digital experiences in terms of inclusion. A user experience research orientation to the problem of citizen science inclusivity may prove to be useful to public science projects seeking to engage with citizen-users traditionally marginalized from citizen science projects.

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 20. Safely Social: User-Centered Design and Difference Feminism

  The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado eBooks · 2018-06-19 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Social Writing and Social Media: An Introduction

  The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado eBooks · 2017-09-30 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 8. Visualizing Boutique Data in Egocentric Networks

  The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado eBooks · 2017-09-30

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Professional Work of “Unprofessional” Tweets

  Journal of Business and Technical Communication · 2017-06-19 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article examines the tactical online rhetorical choices of a young African American professional communicator, Gina. Drawing on situated analysis to show how Gina engaged with her African American Hush Harbor (AAHH) of young professionals online, the author argues that Gina used Twitter to maintain professional network ties in her AAHH community while resisting organizational discourses of surveillance. The author further argues that analyzing particular choices in boundaryless career situations allows us to see important nontask-based professional writing activity.

  PublisherDOI

• User Experience in Social Justice Contexts

  2016-09-23 · 19 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper draws on existing bodies of literature in technical and professional communication to ground these questions in the unique challenges of social justice centered UX work. First, this paper situates UX development work within the growing body of literature on social justice research within technical communication. Next, the author articulates points of tension and convergence between industry UX "best practices" and social justice UX centered projects in terms of both theory and application. Specifically, the author focuses on the differences of development cycles and user advocacy/representation in social justice UX contexts as opposed to more typical of UX development work. The author concludes the paper by articulating challenges and opportunities for UX developers interested in social justice communication design work.

  PublisherDOI

• Use What You Choose

  2016-09-23 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  This paper reports on the results of an intensive application development workshop held in the summer of 2015 during which a group of thirteen researchers came together to explore the use of machine-learning algorithms in technical communication. To do this we analyzed Amazon.com consumer electronic product customer reviews to reevaluate a central concept in North American Genre Theory: stable genre structures arise from recurring social actions ([1][2][3][4][5]). We discovered evidence of genre hybridity in the signals of instructional genres embedded into customer reviews. Our paper discusses the creation of a prototype web application, "Use What You Choose" (UWYC), which sorts the natural language text of Amazon reviews into two categories: instructionally-weighed reviews (e.g., reviews that contain operational information about products) and non-instructionally-weighed reviews (those that evaluate the quality of the product). Our results contribute to rhetorical genre theory and offer ideas on applying genre theory to inform application design for users of information services.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Access(ing) the Coordination of Writing Networks

  Computers & composition/Computers and composition · 2015-10-19 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Origin Stories and Making Writing Platforms

  2014-08-15

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age (review)

  Community Literacy Journal · 2012-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age Douglas Walls Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age Virginia Eubanks MIT Press, 2011. 288 pp. ISBN: 978-0262518130. $12.00 One of the longest and most enduring tropes of those who are interested in the intersection of community literacy and technology is the concept of the “digital divide.” Going back for at least the last fifteen years and in a variety of contexts, the idea that certain US citizens are systematically denied economic and literate “opportunity” by being denied access to networked writing technology has influenced education policy makers as well as critical theorists. And while there has been quite a bit of research into both the cause and nature of this divide as well as how community is experienced differently in online networked settings, there has been relatively little research on how communities are affected by networked technologies and the impact of those technologies in people’s off-line lives. Enter Virginia Eubanks’s Digital Dead End, a book that problematizes the notion that technological distribution or skills are the fundamental issues of the digital divide. Eubanks questions the very assumption that those who are on the “have not” end of the divide do not experience information technology daily in their lives. Eubanks’s project arises from her work in community organizing and adult education at a YWCA in Troy, New York. Her project brought her into contact with a diverse population of working poor women in efforts to address experiences with larger social-justice issues that involved information technology. These women’s interactions with technology revolve around everything from classes in PC repair to the role that information technology plays in high-stakes social-service benefits monitoring. Chapter 1 starts the project off from four points of departure. Eubanks begins the book in a manner similar to other ethnographic research projects with some quick background and reference for herself and a slice of personal background. The section moves quickly to the main point of the book, that poor and working-class women have a tremendous amount of interaction with information technology as participants in low-wage data-entry workforces and as participants in social-service systems. Such women, Eubanks argues, actually live in a sea of technological ubiquity that seeks to monitor and police their behavior in some way, a view very different [End Page 97] from the skills or material “deficiency” model that dominates digital-divide conversations. Eubanks ends the chapter by grounding the technological in her research subjects’ lives as “ambivalence not absence” (10). She recalls participant stories of engaging in IT training optimistically but with cynicism about the training’s likeliness to improve their economic situation. Both chapters 2 and 3 begin by joining a recent chorus of academic voices that critique the premise of a digital divide itself. Eubanks positions her project in terms of technology citizenship and social justice, spending most of the chapter explaining what her project is not. Most useful here is when Eubanks introduces her conceptual model for “Popular Technology” (32), positioning technology not as deficit in either skills or technology but an issue of influence, power, and ubiquity. Most interesting in these two chapters is Eubanks’s presentation of her participants’ construction of the problem of the digital divide through visualization. Eubanks creates a small cartoon of the digital divide and then asks her participants to revise the image based on their experiences. She prints many of these revisions and they are particularly interesting both in terms of how participants decide to label groups (one participant in particular labels technological “have nots” as “survivors”) and in terms of how the participants locate and draw the divide as a social rather than technological problem. Chapter 4 takes on the familiar economic argument that technological or IT jobs are new economies that can replace the loss of manufacturing for towns like Troy, New York. Eubanks is at her best here when focused on providing proof that information-based economies are often volatile and transitory. Perhaps less successful are the many pages of economic argument and tables that stand in stark contrast to all...

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Scott Schopieray

  4 shared

• Dànielle Nicole DeVoss

  University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

  4 shared

• Jennifer R. B. Miller

  1 shared

• Brandy Dieterle

  University of Central Florida

  1 shared

• Willamina H. O'Keeffe

  North Carolina State University

  1 shared

• William Hart-Davidson

  Michigan State University

  1 shared

• Ryan Omizo

  Temple University

  1 shared

• Brian Larson

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures

  Michigan State University

  2011

• M.A., English

  University of Nevada Reno

  2006