Here's the URL where you can grab PDFs of TCQ.
http://www.unm.edu/~sromano/english640/PDFs/TCQ/
Friday, February 1, 2008
Technical Communication Quarterly
Posted by Susan Romano at 8:38 AM
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This spring 2008-semester blog supports the commentary of students interested in publishing and presenting in Rhetoric and Composition.
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This Week's Assignment
Here's the URL where you can grab PDFs of TCQ.
http://www.unm.edu/~sromano/english640/PDFs/TCQ/
Posted by Susan Romano at 8:38 AM
10 comments:
Some observations on method and methodology in TCQ:
“Visual Communication in the Workplace”:
Here empirical data is gathered, displayed, interpreted, and then used to ground a proposal for action.
The method: web-based survey of technical communicators regarding the nature and importance of visual communication in their workplaces.
Methodology: The belief that a survey of this sort will render knowledge appropriate to the purpose.
The author Eva Brumberger does spend quite a bit of time on the survey instrument itself, its design, its limitations, its ability to “produce” the knowledge sought. She also spends a lot of time re-rendering textual results into visual forms—translating her data for readers. So a lot time is spent here, in essence, making the case for sound method. I’d say that the conversion of textual data to visual data is not so much about attending to readers’ needs as it is part of the argument for her method.
She uses this data to argue that academic programs need to sponsor better preparation in visual communication. So she’s arguing for curricular change (like the Comp Studies people) with her data serving as exigence or proof that there’s a need.
A couple of interesting things here:
Brumberger’s argument depends on readers’ agreement that workplace practices should drive academic curriculum. In fact this is a contested assertion, so it was interesting for me that Brumberger walked around the dilemma and simply asserted that workplace practice may and should drive academic decisions. See Carolyn Miller’s “What’s Practical about Technical Writing” for her treatment of the matter; Miller uses an interpretive method to argue against corporate need driving academic programs. Her method/methodology is common to the humanities—an interpretive reading of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
So one of Brumberger’s “moves” is to just ignore what for some readers in the field may be a problem and plunge ahead, counting on a readership that is not going to problematize her assumptions.
Note that calls for curricular change by the Composition Studies authors and Downs/Wardle do not rely on empirical data of student performance outside the classroom. Yet certainly they are grounded in student needs. So it will be interesting to go back to these articles and see what counts as “method” and how student needs are represented and argued for.
“Creating Knowledge for Advocacy: The Discourse of Research at a Conservation Organization” (Lindeman)
Here method layout dominates. Lindeman (author) uses as textual data the “gray literature” (unpublished docs emerging from a conservation NGO) in conjunction with scholarly work—both kinds of texts produced by a single writer. The second half of the article is spent on what will seem quite familiar to us—complex rhetorical situations and a writer’s attendant decisions.
But perhaps the other “news” has to do with the relationship between academic knowledge and non-academic knowledge—the overlap—the value of the place itself as a productive site. Unlike Brumberger, who does not problematize the relationship between academy and other spaces, Lindeman points to it directly, arguing that this “overlap” territory should be foregrounded, and only then performs the analysis of situated writing. Not only does he expend energy explaining the nature of the overlap its literature, he expends energy explaining HIS choice of individual writer and her documents--before the analysis. So you might wonder why the need to do this? What’s the danger of not spending this time? What are the benefits? What would readers not assent to if this time were not spent?
“’Just Roll Your Mouse Over Me’”: Designing Virtual Women for Customer Service on the Web” (Zdenek)
I can’t resist making one more comment on the TCQ collection but it’ll be short. Zdenek enters that “conversation” I was developing about the relationship between academic training (what ought we teach and why?) and the “outside” by aggressively blaming industry, corporate America, consumer driven logic, and profit motive for the rise of dumb-dumb female virtual humans (v-humans). This is cultural criticism—a fairly complex article that rehearses somewhat well the literature of gender/technology relations in rhet/comp. Thus this new landscape for rhetorical inquiry is attached to extant conversations, including the “what should we teach” conversation. Mark well the “new landscape for rhetorical inquiry” concept present in all three articles.
This is not really where I wanted to go with my observations of this journal--I really wanted to analyze a set of articles (and I may still do so--perhaps in my reading log) and reach some conclusions about what is publishable. However I found that the first article sucked me in (keeping in mind that I am a very slow reader and still hoping that we will get some really good practical tips in how to read more quickly and efficiently). Ultimately, this post is going to be content related.
Like Susan, I am commenting on "Just Roll Your Mouse Over Me." I chuckled at the provocative title, but I didn't expect to find information relating to my portfolio project. However, the second section, "GENDER AND
TECHNOLOGY IN TECHNOFEMINISM" got me reading more closely.
One of my ideas is that the architecture of the spaces used for worship has been, for many years, designed for male rhetoric and female oppression. I think there is a large space of time in which this was true. What is certainly well-documented is the Victorian idea that technology should be designed for the sexes. I find the example, gas v. electric cars, to be very interesting. I didn't even know there WERE electric cars in the early days of the automobile.
What I find of greatest interest, however, is a recurring theme--one I wasn't expecting--the idea of use giving gendered meaning to technology (including communication spaces on the internet) rather than the other way around. At the same time, we consider certain technologies ("cars and computers" according to Zdenek) to be inherently male. Is it important that I have named my car and consider him to be male? Perhaps.
I find telling his comment that "gender systems can play a constraining role, leading desingers, marketers and users to press new technologies into preexisting gender molds." Equally of interest is the idea that we as computer users give our personal computers agency (much like I do with my car). As such, we may be having subconscious internal dialogs with our laptops that give them specific gender. According to Douglas Hofstader, Pulitzer prize-winning author of GEB, our western assumptions may lead us (men and women) to "[fall] victim to unconscious pressures."
As Zdenek turns back to his topic of virtual-human design, he shows how little gender is considered by computer scientists. In spite of this, I feel strongly that those "unconscious pressures" push designers to make decisions about what is truly human in these situations. And I think they impact the design of all digital communication spaces and agents.
This does lead me to wonder if I should incorporate the idea of the computer/internet as a social agent in my project. I think that may fit well with the idea of "communities of use" we discussed in class the first night.
In response to Professor Romano's first comment:
I noticed right away how empirically-based the presentation of information was beginning with the lit review, detailed methodology, and presentation of results. What wasn’t as obvious to me—and clearly should have been!—was the implicit assumption that, as you put it, “workplace practices should drive academic curriculum.” I think I would have noticed this right away in an article on FY writing—and would have been adamantly opposed to it!—but I, too, apparently take it as somewhat of a given in technical writing. So, now I’m trying to figure out why. What’s different? Maybe because I see myself as a technical writer first (apparently before I see myself as an academic) and when I was getting my MA, my goal was strictly to become more marketable in my field. It’s a vocationally-oriented degree. But if (to rephrase a little less directly) a PW curriculum doesn't reflect workplace practices, how useful is it to our students?
I talked briefly about most of the articles in this issue of TCQ...
a) the review of Spinuzzi’s book on Genre and information design sounds most interesting when the reviewer discusses the possibility for how we think about genre within the context of information systems. The idea that a paperweight might be a genre confuses me on first thought, but within an information system the old rules for genre won’t work.
b) The review of the book on multiliteracies (reviewed by Nancy Baron) looks to me like a book that might get airplay in the WAC journal and among WAC folks. The idea of teaching about writing in a variety of “discourses” sounds much the same as writing in (or for) the different disciplines. This is one book I would like to look at because it deals with world Englishes and the idea that English Language Learning is in the midst of dramatic changes (this was written nearly eight years ago; I doubt the upheavals described in the book have lessened).
c) The article “Creating Knowledge for Advocacy…” discusses something I didn’t know about—the fact that many NGOs are commissioning or producing their own research. This has been referred to as “gray literature” for years, and has been thought to generally lower quality than real “academic research”. This article examines how the boundaries between the two are blurring. It is interesting that in this journal the setup time (the amount of background given) seems a little more extensive than some of the journals we’ve looked at. I’m wondering if this quarterly is attempting to let a lay audience into the conversation. I feel like I am able to understand most of what I’ve read in this journal, but as I’ve mentioned before I don’t see myself as being technically proficient. Is there an effort here to keep the jargon and technical language to a minimum and provide enough background so any writing teacher/grad student could read this? I really appreciate the forcasting on page 434; that first sentence reads like a thesis statement.
d) The article by Brumberger on “Visual Communication in the Workplace” is maybe even more readable than the Advocacy article. It is again prefaced with more than adequate background on the study, and it also provides visuals (lots of charts and graphs) that actually serve to clarify rather than obfuscate, which is not always the case in academic writing. I read this article carefully, and, much like other articles in this journal, I found myself able to read and comprehend outside my area of study. It is not only the macro level features of this particular text that are easy to follow. For example: the paragraph breaks, the overall spacing and typeface, the page layout, and margins (document design, I guess) make the reader’s life easier.
Something we can do for each other (and ourselves) as we read is to be on the lookout for small passages that review key scholarship or key concepts in a specialized area of inquiry. These patches of good information are not necessarily located at the beginnings of articles, and Carolyn Miller’s review of Clay Spinuzzi’s book is a good example. Carolyn Miller is considered a major genre theorist in rhet/comp—and in the course of the review it becomes clear that this expertise is what has made her a good choice as reviewer because Spinuzzi uses genre in rather innovative ways (e.g., paperweights are genres)to explain the migration of a traffic control system from its paper base to digital format. Now, Miller acknowledges that some of Spinuzzi’s work is above her head (she’s not an expert in technology) but she does claim her genre expertise in the second half of the review. I’ll copy below her final lines (note also the strong call for linkages to “prior work in rhetoric” and this is especially important to note given that Miller is the new editor of Rhetoric Society Quarterly.)
“If Spinuzzi means for genre theory to contribute a rhetorical perspective to information system design, it would be useful to make stronger connections to prior work in rhetoric. . . . . [H]e does not use or acknowledge Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s discussion of hybridization . . . . Similarly he uses the concept of genre ecology without distinguishing it from the similar notions of genre set, genre repertoire, and genre system. These are quibbles from the perspective of a traditional rhetorician.”
So if you are interested in genre as a primary term of art in your deep research, you know now that Carolyn Miller would be an author to consult, and you have the names of two other scholars, and you have some terms in hand that conceptually nuance “genre”: hybridization, ecology, set, repertoire, system.
I spotted a similar place in “Roll Your Mouse over Me” where authors rehearse in a couple of paragraphs the state of gender/technology studies and some history. Sarah’s already looked closely at that article, but supposing she had not, we’d point her to these passages.
In ‘Just Roll Your Mouse Over Me’—it was really hard for me to go beyond the actual content and see rhetorically. Much of his argument also directly applies to the analysis of visuals--images unconsciously persuade by reinforcing cultural values, beliefs and ideologies (these are the topoi or commonplaces). And the social construction of technological interfaces (‘gendered technology’) is even more transparent than in visual imagery.
The style of TCQ seems pretty straightforward academic—-purpose statement/argument explicit, right upfront, extensive building on previous scholarship, but this article also ending with a call to action--as opposed to the article on visual communication where I saw the more 'why is this impt'/'who cares?' move at the end. This more adamant 'call to action' is something I haven't seen really in the other journals.
I also noticed right away that the author is male, which I think, interestingly put him in an even stronger position to make a radical feminist argument about the ‘masculinization of technology.' If a woman had written this, I think it would have sounded like complaining. And I don't know that this subject position would have been this effective in another scenario or even a reverse scenario...
In reviewing this journal, I was immediately struck by the Nancy Barron review on the subject of multi-literacies. I attended and completed my MA at NAU, and so I am familiar with Barron's work. I felt that this particular review was really "honest." She describes how "her" university is lacking in the teaching of "multiple discourses." That's really being honest! She immediately opens her review by acknowledging that getting students to consider the contextual nature of writing is one of the hardest things to do. I would have to disagree. I think students are adept at learning what purpose is when it comes to writing. She recommends "Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures" to students and faculty in becoming more aware of global literacies and contexts. She presents the important arguments in the text, makes mention that the theorists involved are international stating that "I find very few texts that have an international presence without a U.S. researcher leading the way." So much for American scholars. I think overall, Barron stresses that learning English should not be the sole goal in an English class, but that as instructors, we should remain open to the idea that English is "flexible." English is undergoing many changes and it is our responsibility to address these changes. She encourages all who read this text to take the issue(s) of multi-literacy seriously, considering the larger social structure and how our writing is affected by this in our daily lives whether it's in the university or in workplace setting.
I found this journal to be similar to RSQ in many ways:
-the articles focus on very technical areas
-they use a variety of methodologies and a wide variety of topics (within technology)
-some focus on pedagogy but the majority talk about varieties of communication
-the issue seemed easy to read, straightforward as Candice mentioned
-but at times they do use a lot of jargon, but quickly move past it to their point/implications
I too looked at the "Roll your mouse over me" article and found it somewhat interesting. I noticed that they clearly laid out what they would do and how, citing specific websites for their research. Then they even used screen shots and dialogs from online conversations as part of their data. I felt this is pretty creative, and similar to other articles within the issue.
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