This article explores the dialogic negotiation processes that can enable professional communication academics and practitioners to collaborate in designing, implementing, and writing up research. Drawing on our experiences conducting a collaborative academic-practitioner case study of technical sales presentations in an executive briefing center, we outline the ways in which we dialogically negotiated research questions, data collection and analysis, theoretical frameworks, organizational contexts, identifications, and interpersonal connections. We then discuss potential limitations of academic-practitioner collaborations and conclude by offering a tentative, contextual list of "best practices" for facilitating successful collaboration across the academic-practitioner divide.

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Issues in desktop publishing are discussed as they relate to the use of computer databases. The design and development of software to automate the production of conference programs by linking databases to a desktop publishing system is described. The discussion covers: the redesign of the existing conference program; specifying styles in Ventura Publisher; setting up dBASE II databases; writing the conference program generator software; and using Ventura Publisher to produce camera-ready copy.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

The card-sort technique and cluster analysis were used for determining an effective organization for a help menu in Unix EMACS. Similarity data were gathered for with a card-sorting task using EMACS commands, and a hierarchical cluster analysis of the data was performed. The results indicate that differences among novices, intermediates, and experts appear with computer-based concepts such as windows and buffers, but that the sorts are more similar than they are different. It is argued that cluster analysis may aid designers in determining a functional organization, but that in the domain of this study, this organization may not help users bridge the mapping from real world tasks to computer tasks.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>