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SIGDOC Newsletter
June 2007 :: Volume 8, Number 2
Looking Ahead
Conferences: SIGDOC 2007
25th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication
October 22-24, 2007
El Paso, TX
http://www.sigdoc2007.org
UTEP and El Paso
The University of Texas at El Paso will host the SIGDOC 2007 conference.
UTEP is classified by the Carnegie Foundation as a Research University—High
Research Activity. UTEP, the largest majority-Mexican-American university
in the nation, serves about 20,000 students.
UTEP has a striking campus, with buildings in the architectural style
of kingdom of Bhutan. The architecture was inspired by similarities between
El Paso’s mountainous terrain and that of the Himalayas. SIGDOC
2007 participants will stay in the new Hilton Garden Inn, also built
in the Bhutanese style, located on campus immediately adjacent to the
Union building, which houses our conference center.
Registration for SIGDOC 2007 includes three breakfasts, two lunches,
all snack breaks, and Tuesday’s night’s banquet at Ardovino’s
Desert Crossing. The only meal for which you will be on your own is Monday
night’s dinner. The conference Web page on Practical Information
has a dining guide that lists many of the many restaurants near the hotel.
The SIGDOC 2007 banquet, included in your registration, will be at Ardovino’s
Desert Crossing, in New Mexico. Coach service from the conference hotel
will be provided. Ardovino’s Desert Crossing is the last outpost
of the U.S., right on the lower slopes of Mount Christo Rey, which separates
the United States from Mexico. The brother and sister team of Robert
and Marina Ardovino renovated the original buildings once known as “Ardovino’s
Roadside Inn,” transforming an old ranch house and barn into a
swank new restaurant and banquet facility. Built in the early 1900’s,
the Ranch House, now the setting of the Restaurant and Mecca Lounge,
was homesteaded by Eileen Berg. An accompanying stone water tower and
windmill provided water to the ranch and the surrounding grounds.
Keynote
speaker
Michael Muller will be the keynote speaker for SIGDOC 2007.
Dr. Muller is an internationally recognized expert in participatory
design, having
co-developed participatory practices such as PICTIVE, CARD and Participatory
Heuristic Evaluation. Dr. Muller works as a research scientist and
design researcher in the Collaborative User Experience group at IBM Research
in Cambridge MA. His current research explores how people make use
of
social software, especially social-tagging services within enterprises.
His previous work focused on human-to-human coordination and collaboration
in complex work activities. In professional communities, he has helped
to open questions of democratic practices for analysis, design, and
evaluation of information systems, and spiritual experiences with information
technologies.
Dr. Muller has a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Rutgers
University. He has worked in research and practice in usability, user-centered
design,
and work analysis at Microsoft, U.S. West Advanced Technologies, and
Bellcore.
Diana award
Every two years ACM SIGDOC presents the Diana
Award to an organization,
institution, or business for its long-term contribution to the field
of communication design. Recent recipients include The
British Computer Society (BCS), The
Society for Technical Communication (STC), and IBM
Corp.
This year, we are proud to award the Diana to the University
of Washington's Laboratory for Usability Testing and Evaluation (LUTE).
The board
of ACM SIGDOC was impressed with many things about LUTE: the
balancing of its research, educational, and corporate partnership
missions; its publication
history; and its history of producing graduate-level TC research as
well as faculty research.
The Diana Award will be presented at SIGDOC
2007 in El Paso (October 22-24). Judy Ramey, Director of LUTE, will
accept the Award, and will
give an address entitled "UWTC LUTE: technology in harmony with
human performance," in which she will overview LUTE's 20-year history.
Congratulations to Dr. Ramey, LUTE, and the University of Washington!
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2007 Richard Tapia Celebration
of Diversity in Computing Conference
Dates: October 14 - 17, 2007
Location: Orlando, Florida
Website: http://www.richardtapia.org
Conference Theme: "Passion in Computing, Diversity in Innovation"
The 2007 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference,
co-sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE-Computer
Society in cooperation with the Computing Research Association, is a
celebration of the diversity of the researchers in the field of computing.
This conference will bring together diverse leading researchers from
around the world to present state-of-the art topics in the field of computing.
Topics of interest include:
- Information Security,
- Intelligent Systems,
- Human Centered Computing, and
- Computational Math and Science
Sponsors: The Association for Computing Machinery (www.acm.org) and
the IEEE
Computer Society (www.computer.org).
In cooperation with: The Computing Research Association (www.cra.org)
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Call for Papers: Special Issue of Technical Communication
Quarterly
New Technological Spaces: Mastering the Literacies of Thinking and
Doing Across Multiple Modalities
We live in an age of unprecedented information abundance, where more
information is available to us in a greater variety of modal forms
and in a greater number of places than ever before. Richard Lanham
views this abundance as symptomatic of life in an information age,
where people are just as interested in information about things as
they are in the things themselves. In The Economics of Attention, Lanham
writes that “[w]e have always had information as a perspective
on stuff, to be sure, and toggled back and forth between the stuff
and the information that informs it [but] [t]he information economy
leaves the toggle switch in the information position.” Keeping
the toggle in the information position are vast ecologies of technological
agents (e.g., texts, computer interfaces, information kiosks, signs,
etc.) that ceaselessly generate information about the world around
us. These technologies help fashion an information space, comprised
of many streams of multimodal information, laying over a physical space.
We can describe both the physical and the overlying information spaces
as having architectures, structured arrangements of resources and allocations
of space designed to support particular kinds of activity. To most
of us, the division between information space and physical space is
functionally imperceptible. When those spaces are effectively designed
and implemented, our experiences of them are seamlessly mediated by
information residing there. Consider, for example, how automatically
we interact with the signal devices we encounter at crosswalks and
intersections and whether it is possible to separate our interactions
with the space from our interactions with information about traffic
flow. Just as physical spaces support and shape social interaction,
hybrid physical/information, and virtual spaces do so also. We draw
on this information to create texts that mediate locally-meaningful
activities. Often, the texts are narrative-like in their construction,
threading fragments of information together to tell a story about an
object of work and to script the identities and relationships of the
human and non-human agents whose interactions are coordinated around
that object of work. However, the information for constructing these
narratives is available in different modal forms, each imbued with
different potentials to communicate and to persuade. Thus, participants
in those spaces must adapt existing and acquire new literate skills
to engage in the activities those spaces support. These literacies
and the settings where they are developed are the subjects of this
special issue.
The proliferation of information technologies—especially those providing
mobile and wireless access to remotely-located information—not only increase
the amount of available information, but also require that we implement and juggle
a variety of ways of interacting with it. Narrative is one way of arranging information
to mediate our interactions with information in a given space. Recent research
in linguistics, the rhetoric of science, and technical communication suggest
narrative as a powerful means of thinking about and making sense of the world.
In addition, narrative can facilitate coordination among people. For example,
anesthesia technicians create narratives about their patients’ conditions,
which mediate their work performances and their interactions with other medical
staff. The ways that the complex literacy issues involved in new technological
spaces will play out are yet unknown, but it is clear that the implications will
be far-reaching. We welcome submissions on the following:
- architectural configurations of physical, virtual, and hybridic
spaces and the implications for information delivery/access, individual
experience,
wayfinding/navigation,
narrative, etc
- emerging literate practices and the sites at which they take
place: e.g., blogging
and podcasting
- uses of multimodal technologies in the configuration and
reconfiguration of workplace
activities
- potential impact of multimodal technologies on literacy acquisition,
civic engagement,
disciplinary/professional standing, and related issues
- literacy skills required for working with multimodal technologies
- theories concerning the shifting relationship between readers
and writers or
producers and audiences
- impact of multimodal technologies on pedagogy and technical
communication programs
- new research methods to investigate the use of distributed
networks of interactive/multimodal
technologies in technical communication
-
technical communication’s potential contribution to the development
of multimodal technologies
SUBMISSION INFORMATION
Please e-mail proposals (1-2 pages max.; 500-1000 words) as .RTF
or .DOC to Jason Swarts (Jason_Swarts@ncsu.edu) and Loel Kim (loelkim@memphis.edu)
by December
14th, 2007. We welcome e-mail inquiries from potential contributors.
- Authors will be notified of acceptance by January 15th,
2008
- For proposals that are accepted, first drafts of papers
will be due by March 30th, 2008
- Finished manuscripts will be due October 17, 2008.
- Publication scheduled for Summer, 2009.
- Please contact us as soon as possible if you would like
to serve as a reviewer for this special issue.
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