In place of (or as a complement to) “user experience research,” we propose “reader experience research” as a technique for tracing how contemporary readers make meaning through a host of social-semiotic modes. Significantly, such modes are always already conditioned by cognitive, social, economic, and technological factors. To illustrate how reader experience research can account for such factors, we describe the emergence of our institution’s Reader Experience Lab. We illustrate through three experiences how the lab (and reader experience research, in general) offers opportunities for gaining insight into how contemporary readers make meaning in and/or despite what Dan Keller terms a “culture of acceleration.”

To understand how human readers navigate a literate landscape that newly includes AI-generated prose, we asked participants (n=76) to read and make decisions about who and/or what is responsible for writing anonymized, “ambiguously-authored” texts. Findings suggest that readers’ assumptions about who and/or what wrote a text are rooted in “felt sense.” Prompting participants to make their “felt sense” explicit allowed us to catalog the evidential warrants participants relied on when making authorship decisions. Enabled by a modified grounded theory approach to analysis, we constructed two main themes. First, readers are “triggered” by certain textual cues that, when combined with prior experiences and knowledge, evidentially warrant assumptions about who and/or what wrote a text. Second, after recognizing the consequences of making one’s felt sense explicit, some readers experience what we call an “axiological crisis.” Axiological crises emerge when participants meta-cognitively hear or see themselves attributing certain characteristics and values to an AI text-generator or human author. We conclude by reimagining the axiological crisis as an opportunity for improving metacognitive awareness about how felt sense affects our reading practices.

The CIA's Operation PBSuccess represents a pivotal moment in Cold War securitization that illuminates technical communication's role in security contexts. We use Haas and Frost's apparent decolonial feminist (ADF) rhetoric of risk to trace how communicators mediated security logics across cultures and networks while exploiting technological asymmetries between the US and Guatemala. Building on theories of risk and (in)security framing, we demonstrate how the scriptwriters and hosts of Radio Liberación , as technical communicators, functioned as security actors complicit in the decades-long aftermath. We conclude by calling on technical communicators to approach risk communication through continued decolonial praxis.