Field Of Technical Communication Research Articles

Профессиональная подготовка лингвотехнолога в вузе: проект образовательной программы

Современное состояние технологического развития определяются уровнем разработки и общим потенциалом процессов автоматизации в промышленности (Промышленность 4.0), а также способами представления и качеством информации, которая предназначена для автоматизации работ над проектами (Информация 4.0). Актуальные стандарты характера и качества информации во многом определяются относительно новой областью знания – технической коммуникацией. В ее растущем поле наблюдается спрос на профессионалов – «технических коммуникаторов», квалификационные требования к которым растут вместе с увеличением сфер внедрения технической коммуникации. В статье оценивается необходимость подготовки специалистов – лингвотехнологов, готовых решать задачи переработки текстов на этом новом уровне развития техники и технологии, рассматриваются особенности подхода к этой специализации в России и за рубежом, а также концепция разработки специальных направлений обучения для профессиональной подготовки лингвотехнолога на базе классического филологического / лингвистического образования.

Strategies for Managing Cultural Conflict: Models Review and Their Applications in Business and Technical Communication

In the field of business and technical communication, scholars have called for research on dealing with cultural conflict for a long time. But the limited study on dealing with cultural conflicts, along with the current political context in the United States, calls for efforts to systematically address diversity issues and cultural conflict in our research and teaching practices. One obstacle to advance effective communication strategies on cultural conflict in business and technical communication is the lack of communication with other disciplines. Through an interdisciplinary perspective, the current article introduces the concept of cultural conflict, examines strategy models to address cultural conflict in different fields, and provides an example on how to identify a strategy model to resolve cultural conflict in business and technical communication practices. This article concludes by emphasizing that there is not a best model that can be applied to handle cultural conflict in all circumstances and calling for research on exploring and identifying effective strategy models to resolve cultural conflict in business and technical communication practices.

Networking in a Field of Introverts: The Egonets, Networking Practices, and Networking Technologies of Technical Communication Entrepreneurs

Research problem: Although labor statistics document a steady rise in contract, contingent, and entrepreneurial labor, knowledge about the professional communication practices that build and sustain independent careers in the field of technical communication (TC) largely emerges from broad survey analysis, cultural/social critiques, or individual anecdotes. From these statistics and stories, we already know that independent technical communicators face challenges ranging from legal issues to establishing marketing visibility when they start and maintain businesses. Drawing on thick qualitative description from semistructured interviews, this article responds to the need for more systematic research tracing the networking practices, technologies, and relationships that enable entrepreneurial work. Research question: How do established individual entrepreneurs in TC describe the social relationships, networking practices, and networking technologies that shape their careers over time? Literature review: This project extends prior research at the intersections of entrepreneurship, technical communication, and social networks. Entrepreneurial studies research indicates that strong social ties and embeddedness influence venture performance; however, systematic scholarship on the networks or networking practices of independent or entrepreneurial technical communication practice has been limited. Methodology : The project used semistructured interviews to analyze the professional communication practices of eight technical communicators with considerable experience working independently as consultants or small-business owners. We used an online search to identify experienced entrepreneurs in the interdisciplinary field of technical communication. After recruiting participants via email, we conducted semistructured interviews to gather employment narratives, while prompting participants to share information about career-relevant ties, networking practices, and networking technologies. We then analyzed data through two iterative qualitative coding passes. Results and conclusions: Our participants, made up of experienced TC entrepreneurs, have used networking over at least two decades to advance personal business outcomes and evolve technical communication as a field and profession. Findings detail how networking is central to professional social knowledge construction, as TC entrepreneurs establish transactional contact with others, practice learning, and enact exponential reputation-building that addresses the isolation of working outside traditional organizations. Since this is a qualitative study based on self-report, the results are not generalizable but provide a foundation for future larger-scale research building from these qualitative themes.

Human-Centered Design and the Field of Technical Communication

In this special journal issue, we explore the turn toward human-centered design (HCD) in research and higher education. We begin with a discussion of how HCD emerged in scholarly work at the edges of our field in places such as design, psychology, art, and engineering. Following this, we consider how an HCD perspective is manifesting itself in academic programs in different institutional contexts. We then discuss how this trend is further illustrated by the transformation of our department at the University of Washington, which shifted from being the Department of Technical Communication to becoming the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering. Finally, we discuss the work of a group of researchers who contributed articles to this special issue. Each of these articles offers a perspective from someone within our field about how an HCD perspective has influenced their thinking and research.

Surviving Outsourcing and Offshoring

Major trends, such as outsourcing and offshoring, and field-specific factors, such as the advent of content management systems, have fundamentally changed technical communication in recent years. These changes have been widely discussed in the literature of the field, and this article traces their impact on technical communicators in Finland, a high-cost country where downturns in the export industry and the downsizing of major employers are currently coinciding. Through the framework of activity theory, the article looks at the historical changes in the industry as sources of tension and contradictions that need to be understood in order to support professionals in the industry. With the help of interview data, the authors explore the tensions experienced by technical communication professionals in the face of such changes. This analysis leads to the formulation of a hypothesis of historical contradictions currently at play in the field of technical communication. Developmental potentials stemming from these contradictions are outlined as potential ways forward for technical communicators who notice similar tensions in their own environments.

Game Design as Technical Communication: Articulating Game Design Through Textbooks

ABSTRACTThis article examines the framing of the designer’s role in game development in textbooks published and circulated over the past decade. The authors investigate the discursive ways coding is downplayed within game design texts as a means of promoting design as a form of creative expression. This speaks to ongoing tension in the games industry of coding and technology versus art. The authors argue that, in their presentation of game design, leading textbooks attempt to frame the field as one of artistry and technical practice, presenting game design as a type of technical communication. The authors ultimately consider the potential and pitfalls of considering game design as a technical communication field and suggest that this framing presents lens for considering the recently professionalized field.

The Roles of Technical Communication Researchers in Design Scholarship

Design has come to be understood as an essential aspect of the work that technical communicators claim. As a result, research in the field of technical communication has approached studies of design in numerous ways. This article showcases how technical communication researchers assume the roles of observers, testers, critics, creators, and consultants in their handling of design artifacts. Such a model regarding these roles may help us to better understand the design relationships researchers presume as they further knowledge of design within our field. This article offers a framework to leverage into a comprehensive and integrated model for explaining our work on design to others outside of technical communication.

Content Strategy: An Integrative Literature Review

Research problem: Content strategy, whether narrowly focused on the production of web-based materials for customers or managing the data, information, and documentation of an entire enterprise, has become the latest in a series of movements and methods that have sought to improve the integration of professional and technical communication with the marketing, training, and business processes of organizations. Research questions: How is content strategy defined and described in professional and scholarly literature? What do these definitions and descriptions suggest about the direction of the field of professional and technical communication? Literature review: The theoretical foundation of this study is Classical Rhetorical theory which, for thousands of years, has provided critical methods and vocabularies for the analysis of discourse; my purpose in using it here is to rely on a consistent lens that has served professional and technical communicators well. Classical rhetorical principles can give us useful insight into content strategy, the latest in a series of movements that have captured the attention of professional and technical communicators because they have promised to expand the scope of the work and move the work from the fringes of organizational activity to the center. Previous movements include knowledge management, single sourcing, and content management. Methodology: Because content strategy is an emerging area, I conducted an integrative literature review to characterize this emerging field. This involved a systematic search of peer-reviewed and professional literature on content strategy that met specific qualifications, reading and collecting information from each source about its answers to the research question and its authorship, and analyzing those data to find patterns in them. Results and conclusions: Because only two peer-reviewed sources existed on content strategy, the majority of the literature reviewed emerged from the trade press. I survey the definitions of content and content strategy provided by this literature, and found that almost every definition uses content as part of the definition, leading to some lack of clarity in all of those definitions. But three areas of consensus exist among the definitions: that content strategy is: (a) more inclusive of the lifecycle of content (addressing the processes of creating, revising, approving, publishing, and revising material), (b) integrated with technical and business requirements, and (c) largely focused on material used by customers and, therefore, focused on marketing and support documents. It primarily focuses on traditional genres of content and overlooks emerging genres. The literature suggests that content strategy provides a pathway to make the work of technical communicators more central to organizations. But the literature offers only broad advice for doing so, with few examples (other than some specific templates, which primarily benefit those who already have experience with content strategy). The advice primarily comes from authors working in consulting firms and, as a result, might not reflect the challenges that professional and technical communicators who work internally experience.

ReVITALize gynecology

As state and federal legislation continues to regulate women's reproductive health, it follows that the field of technical communication must continue to develop methodologies to facilitate stakeholder participation in health policymaking practices. Scott's (2003) scholarship on HIV testing and his "ethic of responsiveness" serve as a foundation for methods to broaden stakeholder participation. Yet, as current legislation attempts to regulate health decisions of female bodies, more explicit feminist methods inviting feminist perspectives to resist such anti-feminist legislation must be developed. Frost's (2013, 2014a, 2014b) apparent feminism serves as a useful methodology that builds upon Scott's methods to enact feminist interventional methods. This article provides a case study of the reVITALize Gynecology infertility initiative, a health intervention project that appears to function as an ally of apparent feminism. Applying an apparent feminist analysis to the initiative reveals limitations of the project's feminist commitments. To address the limitations of the initiative, the article articulates the need to expand apparent feminism's methodology by accounting for stakeholder participation throughout health intervention projects. This article posits that expanding feminist approaches to designing public stakeholder input is vital to upholding technical communication's commitment to advocacy and an ethical feminist commitment to facilitating spaces for all citizens to contribute as public intellectuals.

From a Marketplace to a Cultural Space

Culture as a research site and tool has been well established in the field of intercultural business and technical communication. In recent years, the perspective of culture as an ongoing process responding to contextual forces has been widely embraced in the field. Acknowledging the dynamic nature of culture helps communicators make contextual evaluations in intercultural business communication practices. While researchers strive to examine the dynamic nature of culture and contextual factors’ influence on culture and communication, little efforts has been made to examine the process of a cultural element’s generation, development, and transmission. To understand the notion of culture as a dynamic process for effective intercultural business and technical practices, it is necessary to conceptualize or describe how a cultural element or unit originates and develops along an evolutionary path. In this study, we focus on how the online meme serves as an empirically useful unit of culture, explore an online meme’s evolution process when it successfully transfers from an online marketplace to cultural space, and identify the qualities that constitute the success of the online meme.

The emergence of content strategy work and recommended resources

In my last column, I wrote about the need for a more integrated view of the field of technical communication. I suggested that the more our field is able to collaborate and integrate with other fields that have a stake in content management (CM), the more our field's unique perspectives, knowledge, and strategies will be recognized for the value they add to the CM discourse. This discourse, which includes a collective of industry conferences, publications, blogs, online discussions and workshops and Webinars, focuses a great deal on how best to integrate organizational and user generated content as well as disciplines and departments, expertise and roles, and business processes and tools.

Social Network Analysis and Professional Practice: Exploring New Methods for Researching Technical Communication

This article provides background on social network analysis, an innovative research paradigm that focuses on the importance of social networks. The article begins by giving background on the development of social network analysis and different methods used by social network analysis researchers. The article then examines how these methods can be used in the field of technical communication by focusing on how technical communicators form social networks and connect diverse audiences.

New Perspectives on the Technical Communication Internship: Professionalism in the Workplace

This article argues for developing linked courses in technical communication where the instructor facilitates a service-learning curriculum and then serves as faculty advisor within subsequent internships. In these linked courses, students write technical documents before moving into internships where they write similar documents. Specifically, the article examines the results from one such class and offers both theoretical and practical advice for collaborating with nonprofit and creating internships that are beneficial for both the students and the nonprofit. In addition, the discussion highlights students' preparedness to enter the field of technical communication, as evidenced through their internship work and their final reflections. Through careful consideration of the nonprofit' responses, I suggest making changes to professional and technical communication curricula for linked courses and internships, including the addition of an objective of professionalism that teaches students to not only write in a professional manner, but to also consider their actions and responsibilities within the context of an organizational culture.

Toward a more integrated view of technical communication

For the past few years, I have attended a number of industry conferences focused on content management (CM); reviewed a wealth of CM-focused publications, including trade books, white papers, newsletters, and blogs; and followed numerous CM-focused online discussions. Through these experiences and readings I have learned a great deal about the affordances and challenges of CM. But the message that has most impacted my thinking about CM---and what it means for the field of Technical Communication (TC)---is this: the era of document-based information development (ID), which has shaped all aspects of TC research, training, and practice since the field's inception, is coming to an end.

Solving Problems in Technical Communication

Overall, the chapters in "Solving Problems in Technical Communication" provide an accessible introduction to major topics in the theory and practice of technical communication. The texts' focus on the context of communicators makes the book appropriate for technical communication majors at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Instructors of technical communication, including those who teach nonmajors, will find the discussion questions and literature overviews particularly useful. The editors of the book (Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber)state that the book is intended for "students who are learning about the field of technical communication" or professionals "interested in keeping up with new developments in the field." As members of the second cohort, the reviewers agree with that choice of audience wholeheartedly. As teachers of technical communication in an engineering college, they agree that the text is appropriate for students, but we would restrict the audience further, to students who plan to become technical communicators.

From research to design

As a scholarly researcher and architect working in industry, the most critical questions facing communication designers tackle complex ecosystems of people, technologies, and culturally situated practices. The field of Technical Communication is uniquely equipped to tackle these challenges (Hart-Davidson, 2001). Carolyn Rude (2009) states that scholars in the field of Technical Communication must explore how "texts (print, digital, multimedia, visual, verbal) and relative communication practices mediate knowledge, values, and action in a variety of social and professional contexts" (p. 176). She argues that research within the field must be situated at the intersection of creative practices that produce different types of texts, the cultures that provide meaningful context to such activities, and the technologies that support the production of both texts and meaning. But, where does Rude's call to action point Technical Communication as a field, now? What new research questions have emerged at the intersection that she describes?

Navigating increasingly cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, and cross-organizational contexts to support social justice

We believe that one of the major research questions that will drive the field of technical communication during the next 5--10 years is, "How can technical communication scholars navigate increasingly cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, and cross-organizational contexts to support social justice through better communication?"

Exploring accessibility as a potential area of research for technical communication

This position paper proposes the undertaking of a systematic research agenda on the tangled questions of accessibility, technology, and disability from the perspective of Technical Communication field. O'Hara (2004), Oswal and Hewett (2013), Palmeri (2006), Porter (1997), Ray and Ray (1999), Salvo (2005), Slatin and Rush (2003), Theofanos and Redish (2003 and 2005), and Walters (2010), have approached accessibility issues in various Technical Communication contexts and have emphasized the need for more attention to accessibility in our research, teaching, and practice. Likewise, the major journals in our field-- Technical Communication, Technical Communication Quarterly and the IEEE Transactions in Professional Communication ---have also published at least one special issue EACH on the topic of accessibility. While all this sporadic research has appeared on accessibility-related topics in different venues, this research has not yet gained the type of traction one would generally expect from an area with such a growth potential. As a user-centered discipline, we also ought to remember that presently 57.8 million Americans have one or more disabilities. Among the U.S. veteran population alone, 5.5 million are disabled. And, if we consider the reach of our Technical Communication work via the World Wide Web, this planet has 1 billion people with disabilities who can be affected by our accessibility research (National Center for Disability, 2013).

ADVICE FROM A PROFESSIONAL: The DNA of a Technical Communicator

Unlike our peers in the US or UK, the technical communicators in the Danish/Scandinavian region have not had the luck of easy access to formal education within the field of technical communication. I claim that most of us technical communicators in the Danish/Scandinavian region do not have a formal technical communication degree. We have learned on the job – spiced with relevant courses (such as Information Mapping), and we have kept ourselves up to date by attending conferences, reading books and articles. For the past 10 years or so we have been blessed with the growing wealth of information on the Internet to keep us in the loop and the social media to exchange views and experiences.This article discusses the evolution of a technical communicator profile as known in the Danish/Scandinavian region and what it takes to become a good technical communicator. What is indeed the skill set of a good technical communicator? Is there at all a future for technical communicators - and is it a promising career path?

Educating Technical Communication Teachers: The Origins, Development, and Present Status of the Course, “Teaching Technical Writing” at Illinois State University

Since the early 1980s, Illinois State University’s English Department has educated numerous technical communication practitioners as well as dozens of teachers of technical communication throughout the United States. Today, the program’s faculty members are nationally recognized for their contributions to scholarship and education and its Ph.D. and M.A. students are sought after to teach in the technical communication programs of other universities. A critical component of this success was the development of the graduate course, Teaching Technical Writing in 1990. This essay situates the development of that course in the history not only of the technical communication program at Illinois State University but in the history of the technical communication field, particularly since 1950. Although the essay focuses on one course in one midsized, Midwestern U.S. University, it is, I believe, exemplary of the development and current status of technical communication pedagogy throughout the U.S.