Saturday, February 27, 2010

760: on whitmore's metadata and memory

I like Whitmore’s approach to this topic because his argument considers the relationship of classical, big “R” Rhetoric to technical communication. There are plenty of these arguments to be found, but Whitmore’s focus on the canon of memory is interesting in that it exposes another aspect of the non-fixed writing processes of technical communicators.

On the other hand, I find throughout the essay a sort of romantic narrative of the technical communicator – of the technical communicator has sole inventor, creator, manipulator, and producer of texts. While this may have been and continue to be the case in some organizations, by and large technical communicators have been reusing acontextual content and composing in “hypothetically egoless style so that their content could be seamlessly combined with other content” (91) for a long long time. This doesn’t diminish Whitmore’s argument, which I find compelling from a system design perspective.

Whitmore wants to make the CMS a tool that follows or adheres to "the ways in which memory can be enhanced to aid the tactical retrieval of stored knowledge during acts of composing" (95). As he admits in his footnote, some CMS vendors are using methodologies that encourage or allow users to generate custom or unique methods to retrieve and manipulate stored content (memories?) – “to better meet the cognitive needs of writers during composing so that the requirement for specialization [is] avoided” (92).

The “requirement for specialization” is something that stuck with me throughout the essay. Whitmore is coming at this issue from the perspective of the technical communicator – as if only technical communicators are users of these systems. In fact, CMSs are used regularly by a range of workers who actively locate and convert stored information into useful and actionable knowledge. To focus solely on the technical communicator – and to tie the argument into the changing role (economic, social and otherwise) of the technical communicator – fails to recognize the increasingly dynamic and important role CMSs play. They are not simple object brokers from which user guides and training manuals are created. Yes, CMSs do (admittedly) destabilize “traditional notions of authorship and ownership because writers operate at a further remove from their audiences and the information products..." (89-90). But on the shop floor, a machine operator calling a help screen of brokered objects from a CMS is likely not too concerned with “a sense of powerlessness and purposelessness” (90) as the creator of a knowledge product needed to complete a complex task.

Again, to back out to Whitmore’s broader argument, I like his concept of incorporating visual-spatial memory into content management and object brokering systems. We saw a tremendous advantage in data-driven software development with the introduction of 3-dimensional visual-spatial tools, such as OLAP. As Whitmore notes, “In fact, such visualizations would more closely match the three-dimensional metaphors such as that of the cube that other (often higher-status) knowledge workers like data miners and database engineers have employed for quite some time when attempting to visualize the structure of data in relational databases" (103).

There are lot of questions and threads we can follow with this essay: heuristics and metaphor in interface design; non-scientific taxonomies; the traditional tension between information scientists and technical communicators -- all interesting directions to go with this.

1 comment:

justin said...

Great post on this reading Mike! I really agree with you on the point you make about CMSs being used by "a range of workers who actively locate and convert stored information into useful and actionable knowledge." (wow! it sound even better when I type it).

At my previous university we implemented a Joomla! web-based CMS to replace the static library website that had been designed sometime in the late 1990s with Adobe Contribute. The result was really messy at first; however, over time and after a couple of "tech forums" our 60 & 70 year old library staff were using the CMS to provide information about staff absences (through a blog interface), creating staff event flyers (also a production based event), and referencing the numerous handbooks we digitized (a consumptive activity). Overall, they were quite proficient with the CMS in about 4 months time; however, I can assure that none of the users of our Joomla! site were worried about the "sense of powerlessness and purposelessness" as creators of the knowledge product; rather, they were absolutely thrilled to be contributing anything at all.

So, in short, I completely agree with the conflation of CMS for the technical communicator alone. There is a bit of a romanticization, or at least a desire to claim the domain for the technical communicator, when in fact those environments are - by design - created for use across a huge demographic of users with relatively little to no expertise (beyond using a web browser and a word processor anyway).

On a separate note, I have been digging around for ways to visualize information more effectively in wiki-categorization schemes. Apparently the spatialization of categories for some interfaces (like MediaWiki) is a oft-used practice initiated through the use of extensions. Though I don't know a whole lot about single-sourcing, I do wonder what sort of visualization tools are available for single-source extensions that run on open-source Web based CMSs like Drupal and Joomla!. I can definitely see these options being a lot of use. Anyhow, just curious. Will do some research and get back to you. :-)