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SIGDOC Newsletter
June 2005
:: Volume 6, Number 2
Looking Ahead
Conferences
SIGDOC 2005 -
http://www.sigdoc.org/2005
The 23rd International Conference on
Design of Communication
September 21 – 23, 2005; Coventry, UK
Theme: Documenting & Designing for Pervasive Information
For the
first time ever, SIGDOC will be held in Europe: in Coventry, UK. Coventry,
the capital of the ancient kingdom of Mercia, with a history
of over 1000 years, is situated in the Midlands of England, with easy
access to cultural and historic sites such as Stratford-on-Avon, Warwick
and Kenilworth Castles, Birmingham Royal Ballet and Symphony Hall. Coventry
is 15 minutes by train from Birmingham International Airport, with direct
flights to the USA and continental Europe.
Pervasive computing delivers information technology into new environments
for new purposes – in everyday products, in implanted and wearable
devices, in global sensor networks, and in micro-machines. Innovation
is needed, both to describe and document these systems, and to understand
and exploit their potential for information gathering and retrieval.
SIGDOC is a multi-disciplinary forum, bringing together communicators,
information designers, computer scientists and others. We now invite
these communities to propose and report the research that will produce
this innovation.
Important Dates:
•
Notification to Authors: July 8, 2005
•
Camera-Ready Due: August 5, 2005
More information on SIGDOC 2005, from the Program Chair, Bob Newman
SIGDOC 2005 will open up some new horizons for the SIG for two reasons.
The first is that it will be held outside North America for the first
time. The location is the historic city of Coventry, in the heart of ‘Shakespeare
country’ in England. We hope that the location will open up the
conference for the European communications design community, while still
being readily accessible to our established supporters in the USA and
Canada, for whom it offers the opportunity to sample British and European
history and culture for travel costs which are in the same ball park
as internal long distance flights within North America.
The second new horizon is the theme of the conference. Recently, and
quietly, the title of the SIG was subtly changed, so that ‘DOC’ now
stands for ‘Design of Communication’, rather than ‘Documentation’.
This broadening of the remit of the SIG is reflected in the theme of
the conference which is ‘Documenting and Designing for Pervasive
Information’. While there is still a strong emphasis on documentation
systems, we are also very interested in the philosophy and practice of
design. The final part of the theme invites us to look forward to the
rapidly developing technologies that are providing pervasive information
systems, information delivered ‘anywhere’, on mobile systems,
and sourced from ‘everywhere’. Our emphasis is the design
of documentation systems in environments such as these, rather than the
retrieval or mining of information (although these are also interesting
topics in the context of document design). We believe that the theme
encompasses much of the subject coverage that we’ve seen at SIGDOC
in the past, including document design methodologies, single sourcing
in ubiquitous information environment, usability (particularly with respect
to the new presentation media and devices), cultural and organizational
aspects of document design and document authoring and structuring systems,
but it also provides an opportunity and challenge for other communities
to join the SIGDOC forum. We are hoping for contributions from the disciplines
of Computing, Technical Communication, Information and Graphics Design,
Cultural Studies, Language and Linguistics, Cognitive Psychology and
others to explore the future of design of communication for the world
of pervasive information systems.
back to top Call for Proposals: Technical Communication in the Age of Distributed
Work
(A formatted version of this CFP is at http://babbage2.cwrl.utexas.edu/~spinuzzi/spinuzzi_drupal/?q=node/162.)
Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin are excited about it and see it as
a moment of new liberation and choice for consumers and workers alike.
Gilles Deleuze saw it as horrifying, even worse than the disciplinary
society Michel Foucault described. It goes by many names: Distributed
capitalism, the control society, the informatics of domination, the support
economy. Whatever its name, the characteristics are the same: control
over organizations is as distributed as ownership is in managerial capitalism;
digital technologies play a vital enabling role; consumption is individuated,
taking the form of the desire for unique identities and unique experiences;
direct relationships between customers and businesses become more important;
and customers look for stable beneficial relationships among consumers
and producers that support these individual experiences. These needs
are supplied not by large, vertically integrated companies but by temporary "federations" of
suppliers for each individual transaction. These federations are endlessly
recombinant. Work is fragmented temporally, geographically, and disciplinarily.
Lifelong employment is replaced by what Zuboff and Maxmin call "lifelong
learning" - what Donna Haraway calls continual deskilling and retraining.
We can see the early signs of distributed work in the service sector,
in the outsourcing of technical support, and in places like eBay and
Craig's List. But we can also see it in the rise of homeschooling, the
weakening of unions, the shift from stable identity politics to unstable
subsegments, and the popularity of automobile customization. We can detect
it in the proliferation of time management methods, the popularity of
distance education, the increasing importance of content management systems,
and the early success of Howard Dean's campaign. We can trace its contours
in Brenton Faber's discussion of corporate universities; Johndan Johnson-Eilola's
explorations of dataclouds; and Teresa Harrison and James Zappen's development
of online community spaces and attendant research methods.
What does distributed work mean to us as technical communicators? How
is it changing our field? Should we adapt to it, critique it, or resist
it?
In this special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly, we will discuss
distributed work's implications for technical communication theory, methodology,
pedagogy, ethics, and practice. In particular, we will consider topics
such as:
- How is technical communication practice changing, and how
will it change in the future, as it adapts to distributed work? How
will it accommodate,
resist, or redirect?
- How do we teach technical communicators who expect to go into the
support economy? What are our political-ethical responsibilities and
our
logistical challenges? What changes do we need to make to pedagogical theory?
- What roles will technology play in an economic climate in which
knowledge, expertise, and intelligence are widely distributed? For
instance,
how can software documentation survive when users routinely Google for answers?
- What theoretical frameworks are useful for theorizing the shift
to distributed work? What case studies can be used to illustrate it
and explore
its implications for technical communication?
- What research methods do we need
to adapt or develop to apply to distributed work in technical communication
research? What methods should we
abandon?
- Finally, what are the contours of distributed work? What are its promises
and horrors?
Schedule:
•
1-2 page proposal for paper: March 15, 2006
•
Full paper (if proposal is accepted): June 30, 2006
•
Scheduled publication of issue: Summer 2007
Contact information: Send proposals in .DOC, .RTF, or .HTML to Clay
Spinuzzi at
clay.spinuzzi@mail.utexas.edu. Also, please contact the editor by email
if you would like to be considered a reviewer for this special issue.
Other events of interest Content Modeling and Structured Authoring
June 28-29, 2005 -- Research Triangle Park, NC
(Bright Path Solutions)
More info: http://www.rockley.com/workshops.htm
Tri-XML Annual Conference
July 28-29, 2005 -- McKimmon Center
(North Carolina State University)
http://www.trixml.org/confindex.shtml
WinWriters Information and Events
http://www.winwriters.com/
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