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SIGDOC Newsletter
December 2004
:: Volume 5, Number 4
Our Members :: Notes from the Chair
Dear SIGDOC Member,
I'm very pleased to tell you that the SIGDOC 2004 conference was a
great success. The technical program, led by the Program Chair, Shihong
Huang, was superb. The social events and local arrangements, managed
by
Michael Albers, were top notch. I've received many compliments from
people who attended the conference, and these comments reflect very
well on the efforts of the SIGDOC 2004 organizing committee, and the
SIGDOC organization as a whole. If you were not able to attend the
conference in person, the Proceedings were published by ACM Press and
are available online through the ACM Digital Library.
With 2004 coming to a close, we now begin looking forward to 2005. The
SIGDOC 2005 conference will take place Sept. 21-23 in Coventry, UK.
This marks the first time that the conference will be held outside of
North America. I'm extremely please that Bob Newman will be serving as
Program Chair for the conference. More details on the this exciting
event can be found online at www.sigdoc.org/2005.
Elections for the slate of positions in the SIGDOC Executive will take
place in 2005. Each of the positions (Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary)
will have at least two candidates. Please be sure to look for more
information on this important activity in the New Year. As a SIGDOC
member, your vote is crucial in helping determine our shared future.
Speaking of the future, SIGDOC is in preliminary discussions with a
few
of our fellow ACM SIGs to co-sponsor several high-profile events in
2005/2006. In 2004, we were a co-sponsor -- for the first time ever --
of the Asian Information
Retrieval Symposium (AIRS 2004)
that took place Oct. 18-20
in Beijing, China. Being involved in such events is a new role for
SIGDOC, and one that I think is beneficial to our members and to our
growth in the coming years.
This is the last newsletter of the season. I'd like to thank the
Editor, Rob Pierce, for his tireless efforts in making the SIGDOC
Newsletter such a welcome member benefit. And to all SIGDOC members,
please have a wonderful holiday season.
Scott Tilley
Chair, ACM SIGDOC
Department of Computer Sciences
Florida Institute of Technology
Melbourne, FL 32901
stilley@cs.fit.edu
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Our Members :: Notes from SIGDOC 2004 Program Chair, Shihong Huang
After almost one year’s preparation, SIGDOC 2004 finally took
place on October 10-13, 2004 in University of Memphis, Memphis TN. As
the program chair of SIGDOC 2004, I know deeply the success of a conference
is a group effort of people’s invaluable work and contributions.
The success of SIGDOC 2004 is no exception. I’d like to take this
opportunity to thank my co-organizers – General Chair Scott Tilley
for his work on setting up budget and answering my many general questions.
I also would like to thank our local arrangement chair Mike Albers. He
devoted numerous hours to conference local arrangements, including the
exiting tour to the Institute for Intelligent Systems, hotels, conference
room settings, and the banquet. I also would like to thank program committee
members for reviewing papers and providing feedback to authors - without
their dedication the conference would not take place.
SIGDOC 2004 started its first day with Art Grasser’s keynote, “Improving
Documentation Quality though Advances in Computational Discourse”.
His keynote and the tour to the Institute for Intelligent Systems Lab
brought us to a wonderland of how technologies change the traditional
way of our teaching, learning, and understanding. Rigo Award recipient
Alan Cooper on “Way Beyond ROI” raised questions on the important
roles executives and technical managers in reducing the high rate of
software project failure; keynote speaker Thea Teich on “Keeping
Pace with Members: the Re-Engineering (Transformation) of STC gave us
an in depth look of the new ongoing transformation of STC. STC is this
year’s Diana Award recipient.
SIGDOC 2004 was a great event that attracted participants from both
the technical communication and computer science communities. There were
18 paper presentations covering topics including documentation quality,
hypermedia documentation, documentation analysis, design of communication,
lessons learned. It also had three well-attended workshops. The Workshop,
DITA Authoring and Specialization, organized by Michael Priestley (IBM
Toronto), gave live demonstrations on using DITA as an authoring format
for technical information and as a base for defining new XML architectures.
The Workshop, Graphical Documentation, organized by Steve Murphy (IBM
Toronto), Scott Tilley (Florida Tech) and Shihong Huang (Florida Atlantic
University), focused on assessing the efficacy of using graphic documentation.
The Workshop, Legal Issues of Documentation, organized by Cem Kaner (Florida
Tech), Holger Kienle (University of Victoria), and Scott Tilley (Florida
Tech), brought us to the interesting, and yet often ignored aspects of
legal issues of documentation such as copy right and patents. These workshops
received vigorous discussions and responses from audience.
SIGDOC 2004 not only provided a forum for participants to exchange their
ideas, working results and presenting papers, it also created a social
atmosphere for people to know each other and explore future collaboration
opportunities. The four day event passed quickly, but I hope the impact
this conference created will last long. SIGDOC 2005 is already on its
way to Coventry UK. I believe it will be another great event of SIGODOC.
I hope to see you all in Coventry.
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