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SIGDOC Newsletter
September 2007 :: Volume 8, Number 3
Looking Ahead
Conferences: SIGDOC 2007
25th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication
October 22-24, 2007
El Paso, TX
Registration is now open: 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 The Third International Joint Conferences on Computer, Information, and Systems Sciences, and Engineering (CISSE 2007)
December 3-12, 2007
http://www.cisse2007online.org
Co-Sponsored by Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and University of Bridgeport
Conference Overview
CISSE 2007 provides a virtual forum for presentation and discussion of the state-of the-art research on computers, information and systems sciences and engineering. CISSE 2007 is the third conference of the CISSE series of e-conferences. CISSE is the World's first Engineering/Computing and Systems Research E-Conference. CISSE 2005 was the first high-caliber Research Conference in the world to be completely conducted online in real-time via the internet. CISSE 2005 received 255 research paper submissions and the final program included 140 accepted papers, from more than 45 countries. CISSE 2006 received 691 research paper submissions and the final program included 390 accepted papers, from more than 70 countries.
The virtual conference will be conducted through the Internet using Web-conferencing tools, made available by the conference. Authors will be presenting their PowerPoint, audio or video presentations using Web-conferencing tools without the need for travel. Conference sessions will be broadcast to all the conference participants, where session participants can interact with the presenter during the presentation and (or) during the Q&A slot that follows the presentation. This international conference will be held entirely on-line. The accepted and presented papers will be made available and sent to the authors after the conference both on a DVD (including all papers, PowerPoint presentations and audio presentations) and as a book publication. Springer, the official publisher for CISSE, published the 2005 proceedings in 2 books and the CISSE 2006 proceedings in four books.
Conference participants - authors, presenters and attendees - only need an internet connection and sound available on their computers in order to be able to contribute and participate in this international ground-breaking conference. The on-line structure of this high-quality event will allow academic professionals and industry participants to contribute their work and attend world-class technical presentations based on rigorously refereed submissions, live, without the need for investing significant travel funds or time out of the office.
International Conference on Engineering Education, Instructional Technology, Assessment, and E-learning (EIAE 07)
Topics: Instructional Design, Accreditation, Curriculum Design, Educational Tools, 2-2-2 Platforms, Teaching Capstone Design, Teaching Design at the Lower Levels, Design and Development of e-Learning tools, Assessment Methods in Engineering, Development and Implementation of E-learning tools, Ethics in Education, Economical and Social Impacts of E-learning.
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Call for Papers
Prospective authors are invited to submit full papers electronically in Microsoft Word format through the Web site of the conference at http://www.cisse2007online.org. Accepted papers must be presented in the virtual conference by one of the authors.
Paper submission deadline: October 5th, 2007
Notification of acceptance: November 2nd, 2007
Final manuscript and registration: November 23rd, 2007
info@cisse2007online.org
http://www.cisse2007online.org
Sarosh Patel
CISSE 2007 Technical Support Staff
University of Bridgeport
Bridgeport, CT 06604
Prof. Magued Iskander, Ph.D., P.E.
EIAE 2007 General Chair
Polytechnic University
Brooklyn, NY 11201
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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, lying 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 hybrid spaces and the implications for information delivery/access, individual experience, way-finding/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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Call for Papers: JBTC Special Issue on Social Software in Professional Communication
http://locus.cwrl.utexas.edu/spinuzzi/?q=node/243
Schedule:
Submissions (full manuscripts): May 1, 2008
Accepted manuscripts revised for publication: September 1, 2008
Scheduled publication of issue: July 2009
Contact information:
Send proposals in .DOC, .RTF, or .HTML to Clay Spinuzzi (clay.spinuzzi@mail.utexas.edu).
Also, please contact the Clay if you would like to be considered a reviewer for this special issue.
Dr. Clay Spinuzzi
Associate Professor
Director, Computer Writing and Research Lab
Department of Rhetoric and Writing
University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station B5500
Austin, TX 78712-1122
http://locus.cwrl.utexas.edu/spinuzzi
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ICPC Call for Participation
The 2007 Regionals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest sponsored by IBM
ICPC Web Site: http://icpc.baylor.edu/
ICPC Registration: http://icpc.baylor.edu/, find regional & register
Your institution is invited to participate in the 32nd Annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest sponsored by IBM. The ICPC is a two-tiered competition.
All teams competing in regional contests must be fully registered at least 7 days in advance and no later than November 12, 2007. Most regionals offer discounts for early registration. Last year, 6,099 teams from 82 countries competed at 205 regional sites. Hundreds of teams were turned away, so don't delay!
Reserve slots for your teams now at the ICPC Web Site, http://icpc.baylor.edu
Ninety teams will be selected to advance to the World Finals hosted by the University of Alberta during their Centenary celebration. The World Finals, sponsored by IBM, will be held at the spectacular Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel in the Canadian Rockies, April 6-10, 2008. Prizes, scholarships, and bragging rights are at stake for some of the world's finest students of computing!
Regional contests are open to all institutions of higher learning. Teams of three are given five hours to solve a series of problems that test their teamwork skills, problem-solving acumen, and programming skills in a number of different areas of computer science. Rules, past problems, and regional contest-specific information are waiting for you at the ICPC Web Site, http://icpc.baylor.edu.
Join UPE, ACM, IBM, and the world's colleges and universities in making this year's competition the greatest contest ever! Don't forget to take a look at the special opportunities for students from ACM!
Best Wishes,
William B. Poucher, Ph.D., Executive Director
The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest
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Special Opportunities for Students from ACM
There has never been a better time to join ACM! All contestants in the ICPC Regionals will receive a one year electronic student membership at no cost. At no cost, all World Finalists will receive a one-year student membership including annual subscriptions to the ACM Portal, the Online Guide to Computing Literature, the Online Computing Reviews Service, Crossroads, electronic Communications of the ACM, plus many other services, discounts, and benefits.
For information on starting a student chapter, contact Lauren Ryan at chapters@acm.org. Lauren will send you an electronic ACM Student Chapter Kit and can tune you in to opportunities for your students to increase their professional contacts and personal growth. There are special kits for Student SIGCHI, Student SIGGRAPH, or ACM-W(omen) Student Chapters. For details on ACM-W visit http://www.acm.org/women.
Special Opportunities for Students from the UPE International Honor Society.
UPE is celebrating its 40th anniversary as the premiere Honor Society in the Computing and Information Technology Disciplines. The very first ICPC contest was conducted by the Alpha Chapter of the UPE. Check out their web site at http://www.acm.org/upe for scholarships and information on how to form a chapter at your university. UPE membership means your one of the best.
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12th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics – seeking papers on Software Documentation
We invite you to submit a paper/abstract to the 12th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics: WM-SCI '08 (http://sciiis.org/WM-SCI08). It will take place in Orlando, Florida, USA, on June 29th to July 2nd, 2008.
The deadlines are the following:
Submissions: October 24th, 2007
Acceptance: November 28th, 2007
Camera-ready: February 14th, 2008
We are emphasizing the area of Information Systems and Software Documentation.
Submitted papers or extended abstracts will have three kinds of reviews: double-blind (by at least three reviewers), non-blind, and participative peer-to-peer reviews.
Authors of accepted papers who registered in the conference can have access to the reviews made to their submission so they can accordingly improve the final version of their papers. Non-registered authors may not have access to the reviews of their respective submissions.
Awards will be granted to the best paper of those presented at each session. From these session's best papers, the best 10%-20% of the papers presented at the conference will be selected for their publication in Volume 6 of JSCI Journal (www.iiisci.org/Journal/SCI) and sent free to over 220 research libraries. Libraries of journal author's organizations will receive complimentary subscriptions of at least one volume (6 issues).
Also, we would like to invite you to organize an invited session related to a topic of your research interest. If you are interested in organizing an invited session, please, fill out the respective form provided in the conference web page. We will send you a password, so you can include and modify papers in your invited session.
More details about the reviewing process, the acceptance policy, organizing invited sessions, and submission deadlines can be found at our web site.
If the deadlines are tight and you need more time, let us know about a suitable time for you and I will inform you if it is feasible for us.
Best regards,
Professor Nagib C. Callaos
WM-SCI '08 General Chair
www.sciiis.org/Nagib-Callaos
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WinWriters Information and Events
http://www.winwriters.com
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