TITLE: A Rhetoric of Objects

AUTHORS(s) & AFFILIATION(s):  Jonathan Price, The Communications Circle, USA

KEYWORD(s): objects, rhetoric, XML, tags, content, architecture

PRESENTER / CONTACT PERSON: Jonathan Price

CONTACT EMAIL: jprice@swcp.com

ABSTRACT:

As we move documentation onto the Web, we carve up the original documents into smaller pieces identified with tags created in XML, then put together various collections of those little chunks, assembling pages on the fly with content tailored differently for particular groups or individuals. In this situation, our old ideas about documents no longer hold. We are creating discrete units of information that can be reused in many contexts, sending messages to each other, appearing and disappearing, fitting together into multiple structures.

Now, instead of thinking about a speech having a natural sequence of parts, or a document having an introduction, chapters, and appendices, we are contemplating an array of meaningful objects. Instead of making a book, we are discovering classes of information, building information structures, populating databases, and issuing answers to queries. But unlike a database developer, our goal is to communicate with other people—and, increasingly, with software agents acting on behalf of those people. Because we still care about “talking” with other people in this new environment, we need to come up with a new way of thinking about the process we go through when we invent new material, the media we work in, the things we arrange, and the many audiences we address. In effect, we need a rhetoric of objects.

The rhetoric of objects borrows concepts from object-oriented programming, but focuses on communicating content—not building transactions, or processing data. This approach is theoretical; it does not depend on any particular software. In fact, the evolving rhetoric of objects can sharpen our awareness of structural patterns in existing documentation, improving the efficiency of editing, and making writing go more smoothly—even on paper.

Details

What’s a rhetorical object?

The thinking is a bit abstract. First we define a class of rhetorical objects—a pure form, a concept, a category of information. Then we write a particular instance of that class. So we start with the idea of a class called Procedure, and then write many specific procedures, throughout our user guide. An instance of the class, then, is an actual, tangible chunk of content.

The rhetorical object’s class defines:

•  The responsibility of that type of object, which is to answer a particular type of question from users. For instance, a step answers the question, “What do I do next?”
•  The relationships between this object and other objects. For instance, a step is contained by a procedure.
•  An internal structure. For instance, a procedure contains components such as an introduction, steps, and explanations.
•  The attributes of this kind of object. For instance, a procedure might have attributes such as the date created, date modified, subject, and author. Each instance of a procedure, then, might have different values for these attributes.
•  Messages that the object can send out, or receive. Essentially, these are links, requesting another object to show itself.

From such raw materials we create a conversation, exchanging electronic artifacts with our users, inventing structures on the fly, adapting to the media we “speak” through. The task of a digital rhetoric is to describe this evolving virtual conversation.

Last modified October 28, 2001 by Scott Tilley.