John Gallagher

Writing moves and circulates in our world. With the ubiquity of digital mediation, audiences are now inherently participatory. As a consequence, what writers do after they publish matters as much as what they do before they publish.  This circulation, and how it shapes writing processes, is what I study.

For example, academic researchers often use social media to promote their publications. Knowing that their work will appear on social media has an observable effect on what they will write and how they frame their research.

My research consequently reframes social media users, engineers, and scientists as writers, thereby stressing the composing practices of these contexts. This perspective also allows me to apply writing theory to digital artifacts and computational processes. To study circulation in this way, I typically combine qualitative research (interviewing, observations) with quantitative audience metrics and statistics.