A quick note about Spilka and this text… the chapters herein extend claims and arguments made Albers, Johnson-Eilola, and others. She wraps the chapters around three “new” areas of knowledge in the field [of technical communication]: 1) Rhetoric of Technology (see Brooke, notes forthcoming), 2) Information Design, and Content Management. The sum of the text is an argument that these three areas of knowledge now constitute the fundamental knowledge (and associated skills) in the field of Technical Communication.
Spilka is working through claims about how technical communicators must adapt to the effects of a digital revolution that has altered how information is gathered, assimilated, applied, recreated, repurposed, etc.
Organizing thoughts for Minor Exam 1
A few organizational points to help frame my thinking and the resulting disciplinary/theory map…
Information Architecture (IA) focuses on the system in which information resides. Information Design (ID) focuses on the information. How these two foci map Technical Communication (theoretically and practically) is what we’re concerned with here.
On ID and Tech Comm – The technical communicator’s range of digital literacy; data and information about that data (meta). In addition to the traditional focus on sentence-->paragraph-->document, the technical communicator must understand and be qualified to deal with design-->context-->reception – to be able to respond to the rhetorical exigency of information production.
ID is attentive to context by transcending sentence- and paragraph-level content and the design or written communication intended to be placed on the page; it now points toward the organization and storage of that information for future use (IA).
My new business card: “Rhetorically trained, human-centered communication specialist”
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