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.