|
|
SIGDOC Newsletter
September 2005
:: Volume 6, Number 3
Looking Ahead
Conferences SIGDOC 2005
The 23rd International Conference on
Design of Communication
September 21 – 23, 2005; Coventry, UK
http://www.sigdoc.org/2005
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.
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 here.)
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.
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.
back to top Digital Citizenship: Technology, Documentation, and the Divide
Editors: Adrienne Lamberti and Anne R. Richards
The practical and ethical responsibilities of professional communicators
have been greatly complicated by the digital divide. Because of the increasing
reliance on new media to convey information previously conveyed in print,
critical inquiry into the accessibility and usability of digital documentation
is needed.
The editors of the anthology Digital Citizenship request abstracts for
papers responding to the following broad questions: How might cultural
critique of the accessibility of new media shape our understanding and
teaching of digital documentation? How can digital documentation be designed
to better reflect a sensitivity to human factors? How are the conceptualization,
writing, and testing activities traditionally associated with print documentation
influencing digital documentation? What are the social consequences of
this influence? Abstracts should address one of three loose categories:
Constructing the Profession, Documenting the Organization, and Instructing
the Consumer. Examples of relevant areas of inquiry follow.
Constructing the Profession. How has the move from print to digital
documentation hindered/promoted professional change? What roles has digital
documentation played in defining the professions/their norms? To what
extent should/does professional documentation reflect access differences
among members and/or potential members? How has professional outreach
been affected by digital documentation?
Documenting the Organization. To what extent have questions of class,
gender, ability, ethnicity, and/or age influenced analyses of the audiences
for digital documentation within organizations? How have organizations
used digital documentation to integrate across national/ethnic/linguistic
boundaries? How have organizations balanced access concerns against financial
incentives to digitize?
Instructing the Consumer. To what extent have differences between print
and digital document audiences' reading responses been incorporated into
the construction of usability tests, and how have these differences been
conceptualized and measured? How should/do professional communicators
shape effective documentation for "global" audiences? How should/does
class, gender, ability, ethnicity, and/or age shape the teaching and
practice of digital documentation for the marketplace?
The schedule for participating in Digital Citizenship is as follows:
- Deadline for submission of 500-word abstract: December 1, 2005
- Notification of acceptance: December 27, 2005
- Deadline for
completed chapter: April 15, 2006
Submit abstracts to A. Lamberti by December 1, 2005; email either editor
with queries:
Adrienne Lamberti
lamberti@uni.edu
319-277-2627
Department of English Language and Literature
Professional Writing Program
University of Northern Iowa
119 Baker Hall
Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0502
Anne R. Richards
Anne_Richards@kennesaw.edu
678-797-2038
Department of English
Kennesaw State University
1000 Chastain Road
Kennesaw, GA 30144-5591
WinWriters Information and Events
http://www.winwriters.com
back to top
|
