As a researcher, I’ve used discourse and content analysis methods to study democratic and participatory governance, organizational theory and behavior, and user experience (UX).

My most frequent research questions address group structures such as consensual beliefs, policies, and patterns of composition, participation, or engagement. I write often about religious, non-profit, and public sector contexts.

The WMD Assessment Project

In 2006, I began a study on a 2002 British government report on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities (WMD). I used the report and related institutional documents to describe how an administration’s structure, values, and key participants influence its communications and are in turn influenced by them.

2002 UK Dossier Title Page — The September 2002 dossier on Iraq’s weapons capability sparked immediate public controversy

Hutton Report 2004 Title Page — The Hutton Inquiry (reporting 2004) recounted how the government developed the Iraq dossier and released hundreds of pages of executive branch writing into the public domain.

Butler Report 2004 Title Page — The Butler Review of Intelligence (2004) described the intelligence community’s information analysis procedures and recommended significant structural changes.

I presented preliminary findings about institutional values and rhetoric in ostensibly technical reports at the 2008 Popular Culture Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco, CA. I then expanded these findings into an analytical article for the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication.

The Public Presentation of a Hybrid Science: Scientific and Technical Communication in “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government” (2002) won an Article of Merit award from the Philadelphia Metro chapter of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) in 2009.

Key insights from that article appear in my doctoral study (2012).

The WMD Assessment Project

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