Abstract: Toward Dialogue Documents as Creative Conversational Tools

In this paper I proposed the creation of a dialogue document for making available the knowledge contained within a creative conversation process. I discussed three main issues: the role of ordinary documents, the need to better represent conversation processes rationally, and the costs of editing conversation. I looked at the reasons why we rarely see the knowledge from the conversation process recorded in documents, even though this knowledge is in same cases as important as the result of the conversation. The dialogue documents I propose are documents of edited actual transcript for readers. My argument is that such documents in dialogue form, are the most effective way to provide access to the knowledge included in the conversation process, because the dialogue documents allow readers to become virtual audiences in the conversation. This means that dialogue documents convey not only explicit knowledge but also allow access to some tacit knowledge by relying on the reader's active formulation of the experience. Perhaps, this is the essential value of dialogue. To crystallize my notion of the dialogue document, I discussed its features in contrast with those of a transcript of conversation as well as an ordinary document. I analyzed the dialogue document from the perspective of 'production costs and benefits ' and 'message quality and editing time'. Finally, I considered the possibility of IT support for the dialogue document production process and I discussed the implications of both the technological and social aspects of dialogue documents production and use