Conversation: Cathy Marshall and Claire L. Evans

Cathy Marshall is a Principal Researcher in Microsoft Research's Silicon Valley Lab. She has led a series of projects investigating analytical work practices and collaborative hypertext, including two system development projects, Aquanet and VIKI. Marshall is mainly interested in studying human interaction when mediated by technology. From her early experiences with hypertext, Marshall discovered the negative effects of having analysts work with formal representation. Marshall learned that information which does not fit in formal representation gets lost as people try to force it into this area.

Cathy has a 20-year history working with hypertext. She worked at Xerox PARC for 11 years and Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Lab for one year. Between 1993 and 1996, while working with PARC, Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall collaborated on Forward Anywhere: Notes on an Exchange between Intersecting Lives, a hypernarrative work based on electronic communication that passed between the two in which they sought "to exchange the remembered and day-to-day substance of our lives". In the essay, "Closure was never a goal in this piece," the two, (Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall) share their experiences and thoughts about collaborating in "Forward Anywhere," excerpts of which can be found in the site itself. She has also produced works such as "Do Tags Work?" which is a narrative on the effectiveness of archive tagging on the internet.

Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician. She is the singer and coauthor of the pop group YACHT, the founding editor of Terraform, VICE's science-fiction vertical, and the author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet. She is the former futures editor of Motherboard, and a contributor to VICE, Rhizome, The Guardian, Quartz, WIRED, and Aeon Magazine. She is an advisor to design students at Art Center College of Design and a member of the cyberfeminist collective Deep Lab. She lives in Los Angeles.