moving toward me1

In preparing for minor exam 1, I'm recovering a Sullivan & Porter essay that considers how writers view and use usability information. I'm finding a constructive framing position in the following conclusion they draw from this and previous studies: "... the writer's use of information is guided by that writer's rhetorical orientation, particularly his/her view of the audience/user."

While this all may seem obvious, its a position that I can use to foreground my on the exam. I need be conscious of -- and describe -- my rhetorical orientation and how it will/does guide my interpretation of usability results. This is important, as the exam will not be the usability and IA analysis, it will only be a discussion of the results of the analyses.

My rhetorical orientation is going to filter the results. So how does one go about recognizing and describing one's rhetorical orientation? I can start by asking a set of questions that Sullivan & Porter presented to their study subject:

• What are my general beliefs about the way discourse works -- what is my model of communication?
• Where do I place priority in writing -- who do I measure effective writing?
• What are my attitudes toward authority -- who do I look to for validation of my perceptions an conclusions?
• To what degree am I an advocate for the texts/systems I will be evaluating?

The difficulty here is that we all observe from a particular rhetorical stance. There really isn't a neutral or objective stance, even if it is something occasionally babbled on about by an old-school technical writer.

random connections: idde

I'm recovering a thread I started to follow a few years ago that considered TC's and Comp's treatment of heuristics. My coordinating theme was Speech Act Theory. I argued then that TC departs from Comp's treatment of heuristics at the point were traditional rhetorical techniques fail to help readers adequately learn complex tasks. Such tasks require representations at a level higher than what is possible with traditional rhetorical tropes and techniques; readers/users can see their conceptions described in the documentation.

As with most of my writing, thinking, and teaching, things look so much more narrow and limiting through the lens of experience. However, I do still space for Speech Act as a bridging theory for TC and IDDE. In a recent re-reading of a few Redish essays, I'm again intrigued by the way she invokes the reader/user as an active participant in the writing process. More importantly, her treatment of "reading to do" and "reading to learn" activities places the TCer in the same design/development space as the IDer when creating particular types of information products. Reddish illustrates this common location by having us consider the tutorial as a specific type of information product -- one that requires the user to read "to learn to do." "... treating reading-to-learn-to-do materials like traditional reading-to-learn materials doesn't work. Tutorial users will not read long prose passages, advanced organizers, or prose summaries... we have to build knowledge through their use of the product, not by giving them pages and pages to read."

This is the point at which I see TC looking toward IDDE. While there are a few TC programs that include exposure to instructional design theory, most practicing TCers "do" ID without much theoretical framing. Consider this comment from Tom Johnson, a highly respected practitioner and TC blogger: "From what I could gather reading Kulman’s blog, the basics of instructional design are fairly intuitive. Create active versus passive learning, give the user control, help the user apply the learning while he or she is learning, select content using the 80/20 rule... Not sure I would need a PhD in instructional design for this, but surely the same could be said of tech comm."

I'm digressing a bit here... I'm still trying to fit activity theory into this space between creating "reading-to-learn" and "learning-to-do" information projects. In a very tangible way, activity theory gives the TCer the means by which to shape text in such a way as move the reader to learn and to do.

More on this to come.

bridging, linking, and lenses

Harkness-Regli, Susan. “What is the Relationship Between Professional Writing and Rhetoric?” in Professional Writing and Rhetoric: Readings from the Field. Ed. Tim Peeples. Addison Wesley, 2003.
A quick re-reading of this essay because I needed a way to bridge Rhetorical Analysis (one of Clark’s 4 Categories of Rhetorical Technology) and the Rhetoric of Technology (one of Spilka’s 3 Areas of Knowledge for TC). Brooke provided a design link, but I recalled Harkness-Regli’s (HR) early essay as an attempt to recover big R Rhetoric from within TC practices.

Here HR is reclaiming invention, as an act of meaning making, as the TCer’s activity. Similar to Brooke’s move to cast the five cannons as performance, HR is arguing that the TCer’s expertise in invention lies in an ability to adapt rhetorical heuristics “to situations of interdisciplinary collaboration.” This aligns nicely with Alber’s later model of the TC interdisciplinary/practice hub: IA, ID, Human Factors, and Management; with TC in the hub position.

HR asks: “If we believe the technical writer is a professional rhetor and not simply a document technician, we have to ask ourselves where is the expertise the technical writer contributes to the invention process?” My marginalia indicates that HR should see Brooke for an answer. In the meantime, she provides a model in which the TCer is a rhetor who treats knowledge as an activity. “…the rhetor’s expertise lies in knowing how to perform knowledge in a communal, dialectical context…”

Specific to my purposes (and my initial reason for revisiting HR) is her treatment of information structure analysis as a TC meaning making activity. Before IA was the label de jure, HR was claiming that practicing TCers have a “deep understanding of how information is typically structured according to the principles of grammar, usage, and genre conventions…” This is the most succinct statement about the traditional relationship of TC to IA that I have found. It is perhaps so because HR does not identify IA as such, and perhaps because she writes of a place of practice from which I came.

look, up in the sky

Johnson-Eilola, J. Datacloud. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2005.
I wanted to bring in some notes from this text simply as a means to create continuity with my previous placements of Johnson-Eilola’s work across my major exam. In supporting my minor exam efforts, Johnson-Eilola (JE) provides a lens through which we can consider the activities of information-based (actually, information-saturated) cultures. From this expansive position, we can narrow the focus to individuals (symbolic-analytic workers) who perform specific meaning making activities.

JE is asking us to see culture and technology as contingent, multi-dimensional, fragmented and constructed locally rather than universally. “Technologies are not isolated and neutral things that can be moved from context to context without change. “…technological inventions are not simply dropped from the sky… we integrate them into our specific, local situations. We create, import, use, and misuse them… often for purposes their inventors never intended.” – Spinuzzi’s point in his ethnography of DMV workers; Brooke’s point about why we need to understand the rhetorical nature of modern technologies and the way they shape and are shaped by culture. In direct alignment with Brooke’s rhetorical performances, JE claims “Information is not a tool, record, or plan of work: It is the environment for work and the work itself: the datacloud. Moreover, information is not something to be rigorously controlled and structured: it is not something to be easily understood: it is something to be played with, challenged, and confused by, experimented with and transformed. These are all aspects of postmodern work.”

Technology creates profound shapes and patterns of working, living, and communicating. Akin to Spinuzzi’s workplace analysis and ethnographies… “We have come to work with information as a primary environment and resource… Rather than established frameworks and ground rules early on, users [learn and create] on the fly… the users manipulate preexisting data, filter, cut, paste, and move…” – My point exactly in regard to the ubiquity of technology and the devaluation of the TCer’s position.

The necessity for Information Architecture as a modern practice and discipline? “We live in a cloud of data – the datacloud – a shifting and only slightly contingently structured information space. In that space, we work with information, rearranging, filtering, breaking down and combining. We are not looking for simplicity, but interested in juxtapositions and commonalities.” The knowledge worker as practicing IAer.

For my purposes, I want to focus on JE’s use of symbolic-analytic work in his framework. “People in this type of work identify, rearrange, circulate, abstract, and broker information and symbols to produce reports, plans, and proposals.” Pre-1990s this was a functional description of the TCer. Recently, this is a job description for an IAer. Practically speaking, this is what every knowledge worker in an information economy does. There should be no surprise why scholars such as Albers, Still, Mazur, and Carliner continually seek ways to re-value TC as a practice.

JE uses a simple observation to make an important point: How we use computers has changed dramatically in the last 50 years. Specific to his position, JE is demonstrating hwo the “space” of the computer interface has changed the way we interact with information – how we shape and are shaped by various conceptual objects that are tangible and ephemeral, present and inferred, explicit and implied.

Specific to my focus and reading, I want to make an equally important point: Who uses computers has changed dramatically in the past 50 years. The ubiquity of computer-mediated communication, information processing, and knowledge creation has led to the rise of the symbolic-analytic worker and the skills such a worker needs to function. My claim is that these skills were in the traditional toolkit of the TCer. As the toolkit became democratized, TCers began to look for alternate specialized skills. Hence, the move toward IA and UX, among other practices and disciplines.

“Where previously work was enmeshed in a social context – and learning how to work involved a process of education over time – work now is increasingly fragmented and flattened… In effect the interface is not simply a tool, but a structure for work…”

“Nearly every type of symbolic-analytic or articulation work requires the ability to work at an advanced level with information spaces… Unfortunately, formal education often fails to provide the complex environments necessary to teach students these skills.”

Specific to my exam: IA as a means of exploring the new information spaces of work. IAers bring order to space, balance form and function. “Yet information architecture… is not capable of providing and environment proper for articulating symbolic-analytic work in the datacloud.” IA’s short-comings: IAers work “under the assumption that order can and should be brought to chaotic information… Symbolic-analytic work is an ongoing oscillation between chaos and order.”

IA provides a starting point – it is not the goal.

ewe ex

Redish, Janice. Technical Communication and Usability: Intertwined Strands and Mutual Influences. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, vol. 53, no. 3, September 2010
I’ve mapped usability (user experience or UX) to the Human Factors spoke on Albers’ Technical Communication hub (TC at the center of IA, ID, Management, and Human Factors). I also find a relationship among Digital Literacy, Information Literacy, and Human Factors – particularly in regard to the practices, activities, and performances of UX professionals (workflow visualization, work process analysis, usability evaluation, and user-centered design).

Here Redish reinforces the relationship of IA-like activities to the traditional position of the TCer within design and development teams. While she agrees that UX professionals come from many different origins, (“[U]sability, user-centered design, and UX design also come from technical communication"), her narrative documents TC’s progression toward usability, mirroring some of my own experiences. Redish writes of interdisciplinary design teams in the late 1970s in which TCers performed front-end user analysis, task analysis, context analysis, and evaluation. TCers, she notes, were performing these tasks as natural extensions of their training in rhetoric and communication years before the term “user experience” was used in a job title. “Not all realize that while technical communication is a practice, it is also a field with underlying theory and research – in rhetoric, discourse analysis, conversational analysis, Speech Act Theory, pragmatics, information design, typography, and cultural studies.”

In a corollary published two laters, Redish and Carol Barnum revisit Redish’s earlier claims and expand the position looking at UX/uasbility from the inside out. This allows them to show the interdisciplinary nature of UX/usability in much the same way TC has done over the years. Yet I find in this positioning some amount of reaching to demonstrate how the continuing expansion of TC roles and responsibilities is reason enough to place TCers at the center of UX/usability. When Barnum states that “… technical communication has grown and expanded beyond the basic tenets of rhetoric and become a discipline,” I have to wonder why so many TC scholars continue to find it necessary to express TC’s relationship to Rhetoric and its shared DNA with Composition.

At a practical level, the corollary does help to further flesh out my map by identifying a range of UX/usability positions, formally held by individuals with “technical writer” on their business card (information architect, usability specialist, user experience designer, usability consultant, user experience architect, etc.).

what's yours is (was) mine

Salvo, Michael. “Rhetorical Action in Professional Space: Information Architecture as Critical Practice.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication, January 2004.
Salvo carves out a more detailed position in the proximal space that Still and Albers identify between the TCer and the end user. Here, Salvo is looking at IA as a practice – as an activity; some set of procedures accomplished rather that something conceptual. Specifically, he wants to see IA become a critical practice for the TCer. In this way, Salvo is looking for TC to not only reclaim activities recently lost to HCI, IA, and usability studies, he wants to claim IA’s activities as those belonging to TC.

Ah, the discipline wars…

“Technical communicators are not necessarily technical experts; they are information architects who practice a rhetorical craft necessary to build solutions that address the contextual needs of users.”
Salvo see the TCer as an “informed rhetor” who moves away from the common practice of describing the world to a practitioner who interacts with and engages the world (there are hints of Brooke in this call). “The technical rhetor interacts with technology … by creating the context for technological design … the metaphor information architect … ably represents the demands made the technical rhetor.”

Similar to Still’s and Albers’ proximal space, Salvo sees IA (as activity) occurring between analysis and performances that inform the technical rhetor’s design. IA as an art, science, and business of organizing communication. Yet going to back to my earlier comments, when scholars attempt to move IA this far into activity and performance, it feel more like ID.

Back to the TCer doing more than describing: the challenge is to move from describing the rhetorical situation to engaging the situation. “I do not expect technical communication practitioners and faculty to look beyond documentation as the predominant activity of technical communication professionals [thank you!] … Information architecture presents an opportunity to shift the focus of TC from end-user documentation, and from short-term needs, to the critical articulation of the technological future of organizations and in culture at large… Information architecture is not a protected space from which to observe technocultural development but a place within and among technology users and designers where technical rhetoricians engage technologies and social relationships.”

Salvo is making this call in reaction to the devalued position of the modern TCer. He cites outsourcing as one cause of this devaluation, but it is more complicated than that. The ambiguity of technology and information production tools is more to blame than outsourcing. As knowledge workers develop the skills to create and manage information products (see Spinuzzi), the role of the TCer is marginalized. Casting about for traction, IA (as a discipline) becomes a space in which the trained TCer can feel comfortable – the nomenclature and language is the same. A deeper look at once inside reveals that applied IA theories look strikingly similar what the TCer has been doing for a good long time. With a simple tile change and new business card, the TCer is now an Information Architect value, which went unrecognized in the past, back to the organization.

In this way I see IA not as something entirely new or unique. The TCer has long performed the activities associated with IA. Labeling these activities as such – as a new discipline, practice, and field – allows the TCer to draw a distinction between the practices of the skilled and self-taught knowledge worker and the formerly educated and trained TCer – the informed rhetor.

proximal spaces

Still, Brian and M. Albers. “Technical Communication and Usability Studies.” IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Vol. 53, N0. 3, 2010. 189-.
Still and Albers provide a brief editorial outlining a direction for TC. Their call for TC’s movement toward (into) usability practices is one area of disciplinary overlap for TC and IA.

Still and Albers are claiming that the TCer’s perspective is valuable (and therefore should not be ignored) as usability practices increasingly require knowledge from user experiences, which were previously ignored. While their claim is heavy with presumption about the range of skills and tools available to the TCer, it does highlight the TCers traditional (modern?) position in proximity to the end user. This proximity – actually, the space between the TC and the end user – is where I see IA trying to stake out a piece of HCI and usability studies. I similarly see this space as a territory formerly occupied by TC, yet increasingly encroached on by IA, HCI, Usability, and other more timely, modern, and sexy disciplines.

“… technical communicators have a vital role to play in retooling usability… Poised on the line between quantitative and qualitative, theory and practice, producer and user, science and rhetoric, and information and knowledge, technical communicators have important insights that have the potential to make usability studies into a more relative and more relevant discipline.”

further organization and orientation

Foundational Information
Information architecture has somewhat different meanings in different branches of IS or IT architecture. Most definitions have common qualities: a structural design of shared environments, methods of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, and online communities, and ways of bringing the principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.
Example definitions include:

• The structural design of shared information environments.
• The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities, and software to support findability and usability.
• An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.
• The combination of organization, labeling, search and navigation systems within websites and intranets.
• An emerging discipline and community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

Debate
The difficulty in establishing a common definition for "information architecture" arises partly from the term's existence in multiple fields. In the field of systems design, for example, information architecture is a component of enterprise architecture that deals with the information component when describing the structure of an enterprise.

While the definition of information architecture is relatively well-established in the field of systems design, it is much more debatable within the context of online information systems (i.e., websites). Andrew Dillon refers to the latter as the "big IA-little IA debate". In the little IA view, information architecture is essentially the application of information science to web design, which considers, for example, issues of classification and information retrieval. In the big IA view, information architecture involves more than just the organization of a website; it also factors in user experience, thereby considering usability issues of information design.

ia and tc - again

Morrogh, E. Information Architecture: An Emerging 21st Century Profession. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall (Pearson), 2003.
I started with Morrogh some weeks ago and then went off on the threads dangling out of this narrative. From a historical perspective, this is a great foundational text (similar to Adams and Connors within Tech Comm). I’m wrapping this up here just to get a sense of closure and to affix a working definition of Information Architecture to my theory/practice map.

I recommend this text for anyone interested in the history of computing and related technologies. In that regard, it’s a really quick and fun read. For my purposes, Morrogh provides a timeline for the practice of information architecture and identifies the point at which that practice becomes formalized as a discipline.

Starting with ENIAC and ERMA, we see the emergence of a need to consider how computerized information technologies are and could be used by multiple types of end users for multiple purposes. With the advent of personal computing, this need becomes a necessary focus – the first usable conception of information architecture. “… professionals from multiple disciplines (information architects) are developing an orienting vision that is inclusive of new computing technologies, the individual human intellect, the conceptual structures humanity has collectively developed for managing information over many centuries, and the unique and pragmatic needs of clients and users” (64).

Specific to the relationship of TC to IA – the need to document, communicate, and instruct users each time new organization, navigation, interaction, flow, etc. is introduced in the information product. At this point the TCer begins to practice information architecture. Moving the TCer closer to the design phase (a move which began in the early 1980s) required a broader understanding of IA and an awareness of how the multimedia information space is more complex than traditional print and static information spaces (see Brooke). “This new kind of information space was complicated, confusing, undefined, and defied the traditional conceptual models used by information designers to design usable and coherent information environments” (69).

IA begins to emerge as a recognized field in the late 80s/early 90s when organizational computing and personal computing shifts away from a communications-engineering point of view toward an information-centric point of view. “From this conceptual shift emerged the notion of cyberspace, an information space that exists apart from, rather than stored in, any single of multiple computing device.” This shift causes the TCer to emphasize interaction with information (rather than the interface) and the design of information within computer-mediated information environments (see Spinuzzi).

Jump ahead to the era of the web. “Because the Web is a networked, multiuser, multimedia environment where users communicate, collaborate, and interact … it shares organization, navigation, interaction, and flow characteristics with all the information and communication technologies that predate it. All of these characteristics have yet to be fully synthesized in the Web information space. This monumental task is the focus of the emerging profession of information architecture” (93).

Morrogh's narrative starts to break down for me when the he moves toward defining IA. My position is that when IA becomes a design process, it shifts into Information Design (ID). It's the "big IA / little ia" debate. So for my purposes, at this point I’ll recover an earlier effort to clarify the shift.

Similar to IA, ID carries multiple definitions and applications. In web contexts, ID ranges from developing maps and signage to simple web pages. As a practice, ID has been described as an interdisciplinary approach that combines skills in graphic design, writing and editing, illustration, and human factors. On a more ephemeral level, ID has been described as a position or stance one takes. Beth Mazur has likened this stance to a political or moral stance that we take the design or an information product to improve the quality of the communication. More specific to [my understanding of IA]; ID has been described as the act of designing and deploying content in such as a way to achieve the performance objectives for specific end users – objectives captured during IA analysis.

Of most value to my mapping effort, Morrogh identifies trends in IA curricula development. Clearly, IA is an interdisciplinary discipline – co-opting aspects of other disciplines in much the same way that IDDE has evolved. At the graduate level, library science and information science programs hold sway. At the undergraduate level, there is ample space for IA in the TC classroom – particularly a classroom based on the studio model. “A design studio/laboratory approach to teaching IA would help to situate the discipline among design professionals, would provide models for IA pedagogy, and would also provide a path and model for the professional development of individual practitioners and for the profession as a whole” (141).

of cannons and new media

Gifford Brooke, Collin. Lingua Fracta : Toward a Rhetoric of New Media. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 2009.
Admittedly, I came to Brooke with the purpose of building out the theory/practice map for my first minor exam. I realize he is not speaking directly to the relationships among various disciplines. However, his emphasis on new media has implications for practicing information architects (IAers) and technical communicators (TCers). While his interest is clearly on teachers of Comp and Rhet, the extension to those who practice in these spaces is logical (or so I will claim). My reading below is therefore well short of a critical summary, and likely rife with misinterpretations.

In regard to my mapping effort, Brooke aligns nicely with Clark’s rhetoric of technology (the hub/spoke metaphor is working well so far). Brooke’s sandbox is hypertext – specifically the claims and arguments of the post-hypertext era. He places his call for a modern treatment of hypertext between technology (new media) and rhetoric (more accurately, his re-imagining of the five cannons). “We shape our technologies even as they shape us.” Brooke is concerned with practices of new media technologies that enable and assist – and this is precisely the point of intersection where IA and TC practices occur and overlap.

Technology as a linga franca – connections and crossings of boundaries.

Specific problem in IA and Human-computer Interaction (HCI): “… we frequently assume that our individual (or even community) experiences with various technologies can be extrapolated for all users, or that the values of those experiences are the same at every level of interaction.”

“Any rhetoric of new media should begin with an understanding that our unit of analysis must shift from textual objects to medial interfaces.” What are the implications for teaching this shift in the TC classroom? What does this shift look like at the curricular level? Brooke is calling for a disciplinary bridge – “… teachers and student of writing … are indeed uniquely positioned to contribute to discussion and debates about new media … this presumes that we reorganize the various contributions that information technologies make to rhetorical situations.”

This is where IA and TC can help! The implication for IA – and by extension TC: “… we must begin to move from text-based rhetoric, exemplified by out attachment to the printed page, to a rhetoric that can account for the dynamics of the interface.” This move Brooke calls for is based on his re-imagining – really a modern interpretation – of the five cannons: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. This re-imagining asks us to consider the practices associated with the cannons (cannons as activity, rather than static objects) against new media and the rhetorics of technology.

Invention: “… practices of invention, writing, and reading do indeed differ from those associated with print technology” – this is a critical point understanding for the IAer and TCer. These differences are realized through a broader understanding of invention not as a singular activity with a single end point, but as an ongoing activity – a continual process of rhetorical activity.

Arrangement: Brooke pulls arrangement back out of invention and delivery, recasting it as “arrangement of pattern.” This re-imagining is only possible in a context of technology-mediated production and products. Implications for IA – “The model of [online] space … is an active one when compared to the passive conception of space as container … attend to the spaces that we build through the creation of [online] presence… work ourselves free of the regularity of sequential media…”

Style: We must consider style in terms of “interfaces” rather than static texts. Implications for IA – “… new media interfaces … help us move from the abstracted single perspective of the reader of a static text of the viewer of a painting to the multiple and partial perspectives necessary for many form of new media.” The modern IAer must allow for an expanded concept of style as interface that encourages examination of the viewer/user/reader. “Just as we look at and through interfaces, we also look from a particular position … an emergent quality of a specific interaction among user, interface, and objects.”

Memory: Implications for IA – we need to understand the effects that changes in technology have on conceptions of individual memory. “…we need to think of memory not simply as storage of data, but also in terms of the construction of pattern…” This expanded notion of memory is complicated by the “persistence” of information and technologies that support and create that persistence. “…new media challenges our traditional notion of memory as storage … its ability to emulate … background processes … through new tools … aggregation…”

Delivery: Implication for IA – delivery as performance in the context of new media – more precisely the technologies that enable this performance. IAers and TCers need to understand delivery as performance if they are to fully understand the rhetorical complexities of communicating with and through new media. “Although we understand at some level the idea of performing a role or particular identity, however, the notion that discourse is performed is largely foreign, except in certain contexts…”

My reading only, with humble apologies to an accessible scholar, a wonderful teacher, a candid mentor, and all-around good guy…

ia/tc and ...

Clark, D. “Shaped and Shaping Tools: The Rhetorical nature of Technical Communication Technologies” in Digital Literacy for Technical Communication: 21st Century Theory & Practice. Routledge, 2009. Ed. R. Spilka.
Clark provides another useful organizational structure for my purposes. I’m already seeing an intersection with Brooke and Albers. Similar to Spilka, Carliner, Albers, Johnson-Eilola, Selber, etc., Clark is making a claim for an expanded understanding of Technical Communication theories and practices. His specific claim is that technical communicators need to be actively aware of the rhetorical nature of the technologies they use in their work. Echoing Spinuzzi’s claim and abutting much of Brooke’s argument, Clark is drawing off activity theory, rhetorical theory, and genre theory to buttress his position. “Technologies are tools with rhetorical constructions and implications.” With this simple statement, Clark seems to move the tools vs. writing debate to a meta level. What does it mean to be a rhetorically savvy user of technology?

Clark’s rhetoric of technology is based on four extremely useful categories which, like Spilka’s “areas of knowledge”, serve a heuristic function in my mapping effort. 1) Rhetorical Analysis, 2) Technology Transfer, 3) Genre Theory, and 4) Activity Theory.

IA/TC and Rhetorical Analysis: thinking about technological problems from a rhetorical perspective. “We must argue for a rhetorical approach to technological designs and implementations that place users, rather than systems, at the center of our focus…” (93).

IA/TC and Technology Transfer: the study of the process by which technologies are moved into an organization and adopted or rejected. The rhetorical approaches of vendors, customers, and users… the marcom and RFP – the evaluation documentation. I’ve been on all sides of this transfer at different places in my career. I do read a bit of anti-objectivist/positivist sentiment in Clark’s claim here – if not “anti” it’s certainly a less objectivist position than others. “There is no clearly objective fact or physical entity that proceeds uninterrupted from the lab to the market. The entire process is one of interpretation, negation, and adjustment.” This just feel like a position on one side of the Science Wars debates of the 1990s, but I do appreciate Clark’s position and sentiment.

IA/TC and Genre Theory: focuses on the rhetorical construction of the information product. Miller’s definition helps here: Genre is “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations.” Genres are not different formats; they are regularized structures (of concern to the Information Architect).

IA/TC and Activity Theory: the social perspective; designates structural ways for incorporating discussions (of concern to the Information Architect). Groups or individuals are analyzed with a triangular approach that emphasizes the multi-dimensional interconnections among subjects (individual, dyad, group), mediational means or tools, and the object or problem space on which the subjects act.

first minor exam

Spilka, R. Digital Literacy for Technical Communication: 21st Century Theory & Practice. Routledge, 2009.
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”

hubs, spokes and extensions

Albers, Michael. “The Future of Technical Communication.” Technical Communication Volume 52, Number 3, (2005): 267- 

Longo, Bernadette. Human + Machine Culture: Where We Work in Digital Literacy for Technical Communication: 21st Century Theory & Practice. Editor Spilka, R. Routledge, 2009.
I’m bundling Albers and Longo here because they provide a nice transition into my first minor exam, which considers the relationship of Technical Communication to Information Architecture (IA). Both Albers and Longo are addressing the expanding role (more precisely, the expanding skill set and tool box) of the modern technical communicator. IA and related activities (web design, information modeling, human-computer interaction, etc.) are very much a part of that expansion, which provides one space of intersection between the disciplines.

With Albers, we see a re-articulation of the tools vs. technology issue (DreamWeaver is a tool which you might teach in the tech writing classroom; markup languages used in DreamWeaver are technologies that you might also teach in the tech writing classroom). His central point is one that we made for WRT 417 – we tend to confuse tools with technology (RoboHelp is a tool, but help authoring is comprised of various technologies).

“More than dealing with issues of how to use one tool to perform a task, we need to teach and consider how using various tool’s features or technologies affect the documentation process” (Albers 267).

Albers does provide a useful schematic of the relationship of various activities to Technical Communication. Albers’ schematic places Technical Communication as a hub within a wheel. Spokes emanating from the hub connect to Information Architecture, Information Design, Management, and Human Factors. Technical communicators need to “coherently participate in the conversation occurring around the cross-functional and interdisciplinary team table” (Albers 269).

The terminal points at the end of the spokes will, no doubt, have spokes of their own as we move through the remainder of the readings. I’ll use the schematic as the foundation to an argument/position map similar to the one developed for the major exam.

Longo (who I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed -- every practicing technical communicator should be required to read Spurious Coin), is also making a claim that practicing technical communicators need to be aware of technology – of how computer mediated environments shape cultures based on those the technology includes AND excludes. “Technical communicators especially need to understand the human + machine culture, since we operate within it and it profoundly influences the communications we craft and their effects on groups of people… technical communicators also have the power to invite people into the community with/through technological knowledge and teach them the rules – or not… technical communication is a techno-scientific tool through which value is assigned to knowledge” (148-54).

A heady piece – the implications of digital literacy on conceptions of culture, community and knowledge. In the past decade, scholars such as Longo and Albers have used these claims of disciplinary expansion and inclusion to align the discipline and practice of technical communication with the likes of information architecture, information design, and human-computer interaction.

balancing acts

Selber, Stuart. “Beyond skill building: challenges facing technical communication teachers in the computer age.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan and Stuart A. Selber. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. 449-464.
I’m going to come back to Selber here to begin my departure from my major exam readings and finish up in transition to my first minor readings with Longo, Spilka, and Albers. With that, I like this statement from Selber as a framing claim to move away from technology-mediation: “The most significant pedagogical issues are not necessarily (and sometime not at all) tied to technological developments.”

Like Johnson-Eilola, Selber is imagining what we should be doing to prepare technical communication practitioners. Specifically, he is looking at how computer technologies influence and shape the discursive activities surrounding their use. “As writing technical communication teachers, we should concern ourselves with such changes and encourage computer literacies in our classrooms that consider the rhetorical, social, and political implications of computer-mediated communication and work” (450). How does this claim align with the “teaching tools vs. teaching writing” debate? Selber seems to be on the side of writing. “As we introduce and use computers in technical communications classrooms, our job is again complicated by the need to consider our humanistic goals or preparing responsible students with critical and rhetorical, as well as technical, skills” (451).

Selber lays out three challenges facing Technical Communication. Not surprising, the discipline (and the field of practice) continue to wrestle with these challenges half a decade later.

1. Balancing technological literacy and humanistic concerns – this goes deeper than the teaching tools vs. teaching writing debate; this speaks directly to the call for a more humanistic and less objectivist/positivist curriculum.
2. Re-envisioning our computer-related curriculum – reinforcing my own claim that Computers & Writing / Writing with Technology pedagogies are located within the core of Technical Communication’s pedagogies.
3. Educating teachers who use computers in their classrooms – see above.

The first challenge Selber identifies is one I’m intimately familiar with, as I struggle to move my instruction in WRT 401/402 further away from common tropes, generic practices, typifications, and objectivism. “… if we spend a majority of our time narrowly preparing students for work in such environments, we thus diminish or even lose sight of the literacy and humanistic issues surrounding computer use” (460).

As a transitional reading, Selber leaves me wondering how the tool-heavy or “emancipatory” course align (or oppose) the courses that Brassuer and Hendl dissect?

tracings

Spinuzzi, Clay. Tracing Genres through Organizations: A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design (Acting with Technology). The MIT Press (2003).
I’ll start with Spinuzzi’s framework – computer-mediated work. More succinctly, he is framing his research methodology (genre tracing) and claims with acts of technology-mediated work, not limited to computer-based technology. The application of Spinuzzi’s study to the practice of technical communication is obvious. So much of what the practitioner does is mediated by technology…

Spinuzzi draws on genre theory and activity theory to identify official and unofficial genres and to trace their development and transformation through an organizational system. He uses genre as a unit of analysis for studying how innovations are made and evolve in response to recurrent problems, tasks, and challenges in the workplace. He positions this method of analysis as an alternative to user-centered design analysis as a means of forefronting innovations “as organic and necessary ways that workers adapt information to support their own endeavors.” Ultimately, Spinuzzi is providing a method for evaluating and guiding information design.

At a practical level (and wow, does Spinuzzi talk about levels and scope), I see Spinuzzi making a case for requiring technical and professional communication courses across the curriculum. Symbolic-analytic workers are not waiting for professionally trained technical communicators and information designers to come along and solve their problems (which Spinuzzi describes as the worker-as-victim narrative). Rather, symbolic-analytic workers are creating innovative solutions using the tools and means available to them. They are performing work traditionally reserved for the technical communicator, documentation specialist, instructional designer, information designer, etc. What Spinuzzi is illustrating is the decentralized decision making environments in which workers develop unique and often personal solutions to recurrent work problems.

Artifacts (instruments, tools, etc.) regulate and transform the way workers perform tasks. In some cases, mediating artifacts qualitatively change the entire activity in which they are used – in which workers engage. I like this claim because it aligns with the more tangible definition of genre I was looking for after working through Miller and Bazzerman. But here is also the point that Spinuzzi deviates from earlier attempts to define genre as tools – as typifications. He argues that Miller, Bazzerman, and Russell do not account for the deeper socio-cultural qualities of genres. Spinuzzi draws from Bahktin when he states, “Genres are not discrete artifacts, but traditions of producing, using, and interpreting artifacts – traditions that make their way into the artifacts as a form shaping ideology” (41).

While I don’t think earlier attempts to define genre can be recast that easily, I do appreciate how Spinuzzi stretches genre as a sort of “social memory”. Genres embody a “galaxy of assumptions, strategies, and ideological orientations that the individual speaker may not recognize. [A genre] represents others’ thinking out of problems, whose dialogue has been preserved in the genre” (43). This definition and differentiation is necessary for Spinuzzi to frame his research methodology – genre tracing – and the methods it employs.
Specific to my purposes and my mapping efforts, Spinuzzi’s treatment and definition of genre helps solidify the relationship of genre theory to rhetorical theory, activity theory and technical communication practices – practices served by Technical Communication’s core pedagogies (around which rhetorical theory and activity theory are clustered). And while Spinuzzi provides the researcher with a useful methodology, he doesn’t move the study of genre theory any closer to the Tech Comm core. In fact, he illustrates how difficult it would be teach genre as he defines it; in such a way as to address genre’s socio-cultural characteristics – of introducing the idea of genre ecologies and demonstrating all of the “interconnected and dynamic sets of genres that jointly mediate activities” (63).

I move again to the practical level. I find ready application of Spinuzzi’s (and Zachary’s) treatment of open-systems design to technical documentation activities. In such systems, writers and information designers “recognize and design for workers’ tendency to adapt artifacts… This awareness of compound mediation leads us to explore design approaches that make it possible for workers to consensually modify the system’s genres and add their own genres to the system” (204).

genre, divergence, and intersection

Bazzerman, Charles. “Genre as Social Action.” Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Routledge.
Genres are the “available and familiar patterns of utterances [that] provide clues that allow people to make sense of each other’s utterances and to frame utterances meaningful to ones interlocutors … genre identifies the recognizable utterances we believe we are producing and receiving.”

Bazzerman picks up nicely with Miller’s typification. For Bazzerman, genres are “the resources of language that are socially and culturally available and that have been typified through histories of social circulation… the process by which language users create order and sense so as to align with each other for mutual understanding and coordination.”

Bazzerman’s definition and treatment of genre aligns with Miller’s in that he has us place the “object” of genres in socially constructed spaces – mediated by specific conventions of language – to understand how and why genres work to help users (writers, readers, speakers) make meaning through particular actions.

Bazzerman, like Miller, addresses how genres align the intent of the author with the meaning created by the reader (how genres work to correct the “thinness of the written sign”). “Meaning is not fully available and imminent in the bare spelled word. Interactants’ familiarity with domains of communication and relevant genres make the kind of communication recognizable: established roles, values, domains of content, and general actions which then create the space for more specific, detailed, refined utterances and meanings spelled out in the crafted words.”

Specific to Bazzerman’s “pragmatism” – he reveals one intersection of Composition and Technical Communication, without identifying it as such. In both classrooms, Bazzerman illustrates how an understanding of genre as a social (inter)action can help students read and write in “situations with which they are less familiar…” The use of genre in the classroom allows the instructor to expose the explicit nature of the communicative situations, organizations, activities, and contexts in which the students are (and will be) writing. “Making explicit the organization and dynamics of communicative situations helps students know more concretely what their options are and how they might frame their goals, enhancing potential for communicative success.”

In relating Genre theory to Language theory (two of the principals theories I’ve clustered around Technical Communication’s core pedagogies), Bazzerman proposes: “… words are effective within the situation to align participants and achieve local actions. This view is consistent with theories or reading that suggest we make hypotheses about the meaning of texts based on our previous knowledge and experience, the encounter with the text prior to the current moment.”

Bazzerman claims that genre typifications result from a process of pyscho-social category formation. Here I see Spinuzzi’s departure point and the application of Genre theory in his later work: “Genre taxonomies can be useful to define wide-spread functional patterns in robust social systems.” As a segue into Activity Theory: “What provides for communicative stability is not the genre itself, but the activity system it is part of… material, social, and textual universes surrounding each document are indexed and made relevant in the document by explicit representation or implicit assumption, establishing knowledge to be mobilized in reading the document. Thus we can say that knowledge is created and reside within specific genre and activity systems.”

Bazzerman proves useful for my efforts by placing genre at the intersection of social constructionism and activity theory – at the point where individuals (students) learn to participate and contribute in specific genres, activities, and knowledge systems.

the ever-evolving map

A note about the theory/pedagogy map as it stands tonight:

After working through Miller and Bazzerman (notes forthcoming), I have a cluster of theories (Genre, Action, Language, and Social Constructionism) surrounding what I perceive are Technical Communication's core pedagogies: Collaborative, Process, WAC, and Computers & Writing / Writing with Technology.

This is my view -- and my biases.

Outlier pedagogies (Transactional pedagogies) that serve to shape the core and emerge in various instructional spaces in the Composition and Technical Communication classrooms include Rhetorical, Expressivist, and Radical (Feminist, Marxist, Dissensus, etc.).

genre and pragmatic forces

Miller, Carolyn. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, no. 70, (1984) 151-167.
A well-suggested segue from Berkenkotter to another seminal essay. In 1984 Miller was clearly probing the fringes of Composition and Rhetoric for a tangible space in which to work through aspects of both disciplines that were dismissed or under attack from English. I wasn’t aware until just this past re-reading that this essay was based on Miller’s dissertation. That fact illustrates her standing and tenure as a scholar deeply interested in technical communication as an academic discipline AND field of practice.

Here Miller is reacting to Rhetorical Criticism’s failure to define “genre” as something more than a category or a kind of discourse. She is looking at the relations of genre to situation. She wants to limit genre to a specific type of discourse classification “based in rhetorical practice … open … and organized around situated action” (155). As an extension of this typification, Miller is interested in the knowledge created by and through these situated actions and associated practices. “Because human action is based on and guided by meaning, not by material causes, at the center of action is a process of interpretation. Before we can act, we must interpret the intermediate material environment… the new is made familiar through the recognition of relevant similarities; those similarities become constituted as a type” (156-7) – as a genre.

Genre associated with a typified reaction to a typified situation. Specific to my exams, Miller is “proposing how an understanding of genre can help account for the way we encounter, interpret, react to, and create particular texts” (151). This is important for my mapping effort because it sets up later scholarship (some already noted across this space) that considers the role of genre in the actions performed by technical communicators. At the same time, Miller’s argument exposes some of the difficulties of teaching genre in the Comp and Tech Comm classrooms.

While I don’t see any direct relationships (yet) to activity theory, Miller is emphasizing the activities surrounding the creation, use, and re-use of genres – of genre’s role in the rhetorical relationship between situation and discourse. “… a genre [is] a complex of formal and substantive features that create a particular effect in a given situation” (153).

This is a departure from the rule-bound prescriptive treatment of genre found in positivit/current-traditional pedagogies. “… a closed set, usually consisting of few members – a neat taxonomic system that does not reflect rhetorical practice so much as an a priori principle” (153).
Implications for Composition: Genre is typically treated as a means to, “describe a closed, formal system based nominally on intention but described according to form: exposition, argumentation, description, narration” (155) – a simple means to classify discourse.

Miller is casting genre theory through a social constructivist lens. She is working with Burke’s ideas of exigence as rhetorical motive; carrying the actions of these motives – and the circumstances surrounding them – forward to describe genres as, “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations … of discourses that are incomplete … circumscribed by a relatively complete shift in relational situation” (159).

As I attempt to place genre theory within my map, I’m finding a gap between it and Rhetorical pedagogies – the bridging element – the generic fusion – I think lies within Social Constructionist theories concerned with the production of knowledge. “The understanding of genre that I am advocating is based in rhetorical practice, in the conventions of discourse that a society establishes as ways of acting together … genres serve as keys to understanding how to participate in the actions of a community” (163-65).

Miller reviews Speech Act theory and hierarchical relationships of form, substance, and context to create meaning – as action. I think I understand why and how she uses this to substantiate her argument, but it seems a bit too abstract here. I feel like the bridging element I’m look for needs to be more substantial – “… a coherent pragmatic force” (164). Miller refers to this pragmatic component as a way to understand genre as action. Bazzerman and Spinuzzi, writing much later, deliver some of this pragmatism.

Berkenkotter, Carol. “Genre Systems at Work.” Written Communication, vol. 18 no. 3, (2001) 326-349.
Berkenkotter is looking at genre as a means to expose meaning about organizations, human activity, and the “systems” in which certain genres are called into being – institutional genres.

Genre theory addresses the processes by which texts are produced and mediated through their relationship with prior discourse. Consider the simple specification templates used by many software development organizations -- a genre system within the specific domain of a larger institutional system – a particular configuration of genres (specifications, use-cases, test scripts, etc.) in particular relationship to each other.
Berkenkotter is claiming that professions are organized by genre systems, and that their work is carried out through genre systems. “Genre systems play an intermediate role between institutional structural properties and individual communicative action” (329).

Genres and their systems instantiate structures of social and institutional relations… Again, let’s consider the specification template used in a software development organization. Who created the initial template and for what purpose? Who is it used by and why is it used? The intertextual aspects of the specifications produced using the template are transformed by the template – the prior text – and used to restructure existing specs when the template changes.

I’m intrigued by Berkenkotter’s description of meta-genres – genres around which professional activities (and their genres) are organized. Back to the specification example: We have the spec itself (a particular genre), which contains and is based on a series of meta-genres (use-case analysis, risk assessments, project constraints, etc).

Genre theory (and activity theory) are complicating my mapping effort. Where do they fall in relation to other theories and pedagogies?

Brasseur, Lee. “Contesting the objectivist paradigm: gender issues in the technical and professional communication curriculum.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan and Stuart A. Selber. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. 475-489.
Brasseur ties in nicely to Herndal at this point. Her principle concern: The rationalist and objectivist traditions of technical communication neglect “othered” voices. Specific to feminist theory – “These critics hope to replace a discourse model which emphasizes expediency at the expense of social and cultural awareness with one that speaks to multiple positions…” (477).

Brasseur’s argument is similar to Herndal’s – “… while traditional discourse models … may contribute to successful communication within an organization, they may also promote enculturation … which diminishes peoples’ voices…” (478).

That’s the extent of what I’m finding here. Brasseur does bridge this argument between Herndal and Berkenkotter, whom looks at this issue of enculturation from (for me) a more material and tangible perspective – that of the physical information product (re)produced by the technical communicator.