Workshops

SIGDOC is excited to offer three workshops this year. You can sign up for one or more workshops when you register for the conference. Workshop abstracts below:

Workshop -- Visualizing Patterns of Knowledge Work in Organizations
Sunday, October 4
Oak Room, 11:00-5:00
This six-hour workshop explores an approach to creating meaningful accounts of knowledge work in organizations. The approach includes data collection, analytical, and visualization techniques.

Knowledge work encompasses a complicated, ill-defined set of activities that make organizational activities possible in the global information economy. In multiple domains, researchers operating along different axes are actively engaged in making sense of such work. A particularly promising approach to understanding knowledge work is to frame and consider such work in terms of the communicative practices through which it is mediated. Because knowledge work is fundamentally tied to communication, research that yields insight into how communication facilitates knowledge work seems to hold some promise for conceptualizing key dimensions of knowledge work as it is enacted through multiple means (e.g., digital and physical forms) and in varied contexts (e.g., distributed spaces).

The workshop will address how to understand the complexities of knowledge work through research-based models. Specifically, the workshop will introduce an approach to visualizing the material and virtual dimensions of knowledge work. Our approach is new, framing knowledge work as an informatics problem with rhetorical dimensions. The purpose of this approach is to conceptualize knowledge work in a way that provides insight into how multiple forms of interaction make the work of organizations coherent when the participants, resources, and technologies involved are distributed. The visualization technique, accordingly, is robust and flexible.

Workshop #3 -- Mapping Genre Fields
Tuesday, October 6
Sassafras Room, 1:45-3:00
This 75-minute workshop will introduce the components and methodology of genre field analysis and engage participants in mapping genre fields in which they are currently immersed.

The design of any document is influenced by the writer(s), the genre, the material conditions in which the document is formed, the hierarchical landscape in which the document acts, the technological limitations and expectations imposed on it, the timing, outside material forces, and so forth. The dialectical ecology, or genre field, in which a document exerts influence is vast and complex. Many document designers view genres as a functional technology, something that they can use and control when needed, but because genres are technologies, they are imbricated in social and cultural power structures that act on the writer as much as the writer acts on/with them. With its theoretical foundations in genre theory and play theory, genre field analysis is a method for mapping complex systems surrounding any document genre. Ultimately, the purpose of this type of mapping allows the writer to understand where transformative moments in a document's life cycle occur in order to intervene and use those moments to obtain a desired purpose or goal (such as winning a grant, having a proposal adopted, keeping complex projects orderly, and so forth).

Workshop -- Graphical Documentation: Documenting SOA-Based Systems
Wednesday, October 7
Sassafras Room, 8:30-11:00
This three-hour workshop is the 7th in a series of events exploring graphical documentation in the context of aiding system understanding.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a way of designing, developing, deploying, and managing enterprise systems where business needs and technical solutions are closely aligned. Because SOA-based systems can be so large and complex, the role of documentation as a means of conveying information about them is very important. Unfortunately, there is currently little concrete guidance available on how to do so effectively. This workshop will explore the current state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice in documenting SOA-based systems. The goal is to learn from past experience in documenting other software-intensive systems, including the use of graphical documentation techniques relying on the Unified Modeling Language (UML), but taking into account the unique features and challenges inherent in SOA-based systems (e.g., how to properly document issues related to governance).