SIGDOC Newsletter
December 2006
:: Volume 7, Number 4
Our Members
Notes from the Chair
Dear SIGDOC Member,
For those of you fortunate enough to attend this
year's ACM SIGDOC 2006 conference, I hope you had as stimulating an experience
as I did. The
conference was extraordinarily well organized (thanks especially to General
Conference Chair, Shihong Huang, and Program Co-Chairs, Rob Pierce and
John Stamey), the presentations interesting and well attended, and the
on-site support continuously high-quality (thanks to Jean-Louis Lassez,
Steve Sheel, and the Coastal Carolina University students and staff). Planning
is already well underway for next year's ACM SIGDOC 2007 conference,
being held in El Paso, TX, from October 22-24. David Novick (U of Texas,
El Paso) is serving as General Conference Chair and Clay Spinuzzi (U
of Texas, Austin) is serving as Program Chair.
The Call for Papers is
available at http://www.sigdoc2007.org.
With a submission deadline of June 1, 2007, that should give most of
us plenty of time to begin planning
our papers! As well, since the ACM holds elections every two years for
Executive Board positions of all its Special Interest Groups (SIGs),
the ACM SIGDOC
Elections will be held this upcoming Spring in 2007. We've got a terrific
list of potential candidates running for the Executive Board positions
of Chair, Vice-Chair, and Secretary/Treasurer, so keep an eye out for
the election information as it’s made available by Kathy Haramundanis,
our Nominations Chair. The Candidate List is as follows:
ACM SIGDOC Election
Candidate List, 2007-2009
Chair:
Brad Mehlenbacher
Gloria Reece
John Stamey
Vice-Chair:
Robert Pierce
Grant Hogarth
Secretary/Treasurer:
Ashley Williams
Shaun Slattery
As part of the nominations process,
we asked if any of you were interested in getting more involved at the
board level and we received a resounding
response. Your continued energy and involvement is what makes it so exciting
to be a part of the ACM SIGDOC. Please pass on the call for papers for
next year's conference and do consider joining us in sunny El Paso! And,
in the meantime…
Happy holidays all, Brad Mehlenbacher
Associate Professor, Training and Development (ACCE),
Adjunct/Associate Professor, Ergonomics (PSYCH),
and Affiliated Faculty, PhD in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media
NC State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-7801
919.515.6242 (ph)
chair_sigdoc@acm.org (e-mail)
www4.ncsu.edu/~brad_m (url)
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Letter to the Editor
Searching for information on documentation trends
I read your feature article in the September SIGDOC newsletter….while
searching for information on documentation trends.
This prompts me to
ask you a question about efficiency and effectiveness in creating documentation:
Where should a company be looking to improve
the way it acquires, documents and shares product information….within
the company and with customers? We need to establish a repository for
snippets, images, programmer explanations, etc. that is easily available
to personnel who develop marketing collateral, customer documents, software
packages, etc. I am tired of searching through shared drives for some
elusive piece of information that I know darn well someone has already
addressed. In my current project, I have amassed a library of screen
captures on the GUI that the Knowledge Base person or training writer
could use.
And even more to the point, it would be wise to standardize
the documents. For instance, to use RoboHelp files for the navigation
features, rather
than DOC, PDF or other file formats. Please offer some insight or
suggest where I might go to learn more so I can improve the accessibility
bottleneck.
SIGDOC Chair, Brad Mehlenbacher, offered the following information
that may be helpful to others.
There's no easy way to answer this
question with a short answer ... or even a well-constructed dissertation
on document design, library/database
design, and internal versus external documentation systems.
SIGDOC
is made up of numerous professional communication designers who are
caught up in the same set of challenges you describe and there are
no easy answers for generalized contexts, although you might find
the following research publications can begin to help you strategically
approach
the challenge:
- Journal of Computer Documentation (SIGDOC's journal pre-2004)
- Journal of Business and Technical Communication
- Journal of
Digital Information
- Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
- Technical Communication
- Technical Communication Quarterly
In particular, issues related to documentation management for alternative
audience profiles strike me as a fruitful area of research in terms
of your information design goals.
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Our Members :: Notes from the
SIGDOC 2006 General Chair, Shihong Huang
Dear Colleagues:
The curtain has closed for the 24th ACM International Conference on
Design of Communication (SIGDOC 2006), which was held on October 18-20,
2006,
in beautiful Myrtle Beach, SC. The interesting and highly informative
technical program, the friendly and enthusiastic banquet and social
events, and the ever genuine and great hospitality of the local host
Coastal Carolina University—all contributed towards the success
of this great event and formed part of the fond memory with which conference
attendees left. I have attended many SIGDOC conferences before. But
I have to admit that SIGDOC 2006 is one of my all time favorites and
will forever be part of my great experience with SIGDOC.
We received a
good volume of technical papers and workshop submissions this year.
After a rigorous peer-review process, we accepted 26 high-quality
papers, two workshops and one panel discussion on research issues
in the design of communication. Three keynotes marked the highlights
of the conference. Dr. Yuzuru Tanaka from the Meme Media Laboratory from
Hokkaido Japan started the conference with his remarkable keynote, "Knowledge Media and Meme Media Architectures from the Viewpoint of the
Phenotype-Genotype Mapping." Dr. Klaus Jantke’s invited talk
on Game That Do not Exist: Communication Design Beyond the Current Limits,
and Dr. Nicholas Spyratos’s invited talk all gave us a fresh look
at the research and practice directions on design of communication.
The
Rigo Award is presented to an individual for a lifetime of significant
work in the design of communication, and is given every other year. SIGDOC
2006 was honored to have Dr. Dixie Goswami from Clemson University and
Dr. Carolyn Miller from North Carolina State University as the co-recipients
of this year’s Rigo Award. Their award speeches were inspiring
and challenged us with a lot of questions needing to be answered.
For those
who attended the conference, I hope you agreed with me that the local
arrangements were absolutely wonderful. I would like to thank
the hospitality of Coastal Carolina University for their tireless
support during the conference. I would like to thank ARAMARK Hospitality
Service
for providing excellent meals, nutrition breaks, reception and the
banquet. Dr. Jean-Louis Lassez and Dr. Steve Sheel generously provided
us with
the resources needed for the conference, including student volunteers
and administrative staff. Specially, I would like to say a special
thank-you to Ms. Sandy Mishoe from CCU for her kind help with the conference
registration,
handling conference material and answering numerous questions. Her
help during the conference was instrumental and invaluable.
I also would like to thank Ms. Lisa Tolles from Sheridan Printing for
being so patient with us when putting the proceedings together and
ensuring the publishing process was going on schedule.
Lastly, but most importantly, I would like to thank Program Co-Chairs,
Rob Pierce and John Stamey, for putting up with my numerous emails
and phone calls for the past year. It was such a great pleasure to work
with
both of them. I treasure the collegial and friendship we have and I
hope our collaboration will continue in the future. I also would like
to thank
SIGDOC Chair Brad Mehlenbacher for his constant support and involvement
in organizing of the conference. His suggestions and guidance in part
led to the success of SIGDOC 2006. My thanks also go to the PC members
for reviewing papers, and many volunteers who make the conference a
comfortable environment.
Many thanks to the ACM for their continued sponsorship of SIGDOC, and
to Florida Atlantic University, IBM Corporation, and Coastal Carolina
University for their gracious support, without which the conference
would not have been possible.
At the end of the year, there are so many things to celebrate. Say
good-bye to the old events, and welcome the new ones. SIGDOC 2006 is
over; SIGDOC
2007 is on its way. I hope to see you all again in El Paso, TX in 2007!
Until then, I hope you and your family a wonderful Holiday Season and
a very Happy New Year!
Shihong Huang
Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering
Florida Atlantic University
General Chair, SIGDOC 2006
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