Socio-Technical Journeys: Utilizing Digital Narratives for Management and Community Support

The pervasive integration of technology into everyday life and the rising tendency to share journeys, particularly major life transitions, within supportive online spaces, position these journeys as inevitably socio-technical. Emotional well-being is vital for individuals navigating these emotional rollercoasters, as it helps them maintain resilience and informs their decision-making. This dissertation broadly introduces a notion of socio-technical journeys, drawing on community-centered digital narratives as avenues to examine how emotional experiences shared online through individuals' journeys pinpoint areas requiring support and how they guide context-aware, effective management. This dissertation includes three studies using long-distance hiking on the Appalachian Trail as a context of focus. The first study develops a systematized dataset from hikers' community blogs, capturing their lived experiences. The second study investigates hikers' use of blogs, the gratifications they seek, and employs emotion analysis and topic modeling to identify factors influencing their emotional states, enabling implications for digital reflective tools. The third study examines how technology-facilitated records of hikers' experiences can support cooperative and sustainable trail and visitor use management. Together, these studies demonstrate how digital narratives deepen community understanding, raise ethical considerations, inform the design of reflective technologies, and offer data-driven strategies to enhance support and effective management during complex life transitions.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science & Applications

Department dc:contributor.department

Computer Science and#38; Applications

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Saaty, Morva

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• McCrickard, Donald Scott

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Misra, Shalini
• Aran, Oya
• Hasan, Shaddi Husein
• Luther, Kurt

• Socio-technical Journey
• Emotion Recognition
• Long-distance Hiking
• Social Computing
• Natural Language Processing
• Sustainable HCI
• Management
• Visual Analytics

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:45367

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/141060