Dr Karl Stolley
Assistant Professor of Technical Communication, Illinois Institute of Technology
Digital Production As Inquiry
A double rainbow over Chicago; the spires on the Hancock are barely visible.
What appears to be a bug in a piece of open source software prompts me to share an argument that I’m in the early stages of developing.
Chicago, IL (Updated 6/23/2008 3:13PM)—
One of my summer writing projects is a book proposal loosely based on my dissertation. An overarching argument of the proposed book is that digital production is inquiry, both into communicating with the medium, of course, but also into the digital medium itself. (Like the dissertation, the book draws on Malcolm McCullough’s treatment and definition of “digital medium” from Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand, which ought to be required reading on every digital writing and web design syllabus--except that it’s out of print.)
The digital-production-as-inquiry argument is grounded in the idea that the digital medium is more than the relatively polished surface people encounter in production software or even simple languages like XHTML. Approaching the medium from rhetoric and technical communication, part of my own production-as-inquiry is to better understand the subterranean levels of the medium, and the effects those levels have on digital production. But to do this requires stepping back from production work (which isn’t always easy; it can be a black hole for attention) and thinking a little bit more carefully about what production is and what acts of production reveal about the evolving nature of the medium.
Case in point: today I found myself stepping back from building some examples for an article about how technical communicators might approach writing for the Semantic Web; the article attempts this by exploring microformats, which are mostly minor adjustments to HTML or XHTML code that allow web writers to share contact information, calendar events, and other small chunks of information beyond a web page (e.g., in an address book or calendar program).
Read On...
Notes
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One of the strangest bits of cognitive dissonance I’ve experienced lately is being unable to genuinely use the first-person singular pronoun “I” on a course website that’s a wiki. It just doesn’t make any sense to...and I’m probably the last person to recognize this w/r/t wikis.
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My course wikis are almost set up. And it occurs to me that the Wikka Wiki software’s support for Geshi is going to make sharing in-class code examples a snap.
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Moving sites around from server to server is enough to help anyone see more clearly how and why Web sites can always stand to be built in an ever-more portable fashion.
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Suddenly it occurs to me that so-called “div-itis"--where web writers use tons of div tags instead of structural header or list tags--is probably caused, in part, by the fact that web browsers apply no default styling to those blocks. That, in turn, takes the guesswork out of styling. Of course, a reset CSS file is a much better option all around.
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The limited view of technology as a tool and a tool only is just never going to go away.
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I am so irritated that RPI’s June 11 Webcast about the future of the Web (starring Tim Berners-Lee) requires the Microsoft Silverlight plugin. Wow. How future-oriented. Another piece of proprietary software technology.
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To read: an article in Book Forum called “Uncreative Writing.” Recommended by J.Snap.
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To read: John Muckelbauer’s The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change (recommended by Kelly P).
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To rework JFK a bit: “Ask not what your Web application can do for you; ask what you can do with your application."
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The less design, the less to eventually get sick of.
My Recent Bookmarks on Del.icio.us
- 2008 Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS) · Home
- Home page for the 2008 DHCS. (August 13, 2008)
- Council for Programs in Scientific and Technical Communication
- Home page for the 2008 CPTSC conference. (August 13, 2008)
- Thomas R. Watson Conference , Watson Conference — University of Louisville
- Home page for the Watson conference. (August 13, 2008)
- hAccessibility - The Web Standards Project
- Key article about accessibility issues with microformats. (June 24, 2008)
- molly.com » Interview with Håkon Wium Lie
- Excellent interview. (June 24, 2008)
- Chicagoland Bookstore Directory
- As big of a bookstore directory as I've found. (June 10, 2008)
- uncreative writing - bookforum.com / in print
- Another recommendation from colleague JS. Not quite sure what to do with this one, though. (June 06, 2008)
- Fellowships at Digital Humanities Centers
- Due 9/15. Need to examine further. (June 05, 2008)
- Color Palette Generator
- This is great; I use it for simple color palettes to quickly get HEX values; need to cross-check it for accuracy, though. (May 17, 2008)
- PhpDelicious - a wrapper class for the del.icio.us API
- Documentation and a download link for simple-looking PHP class that accesses the Delicious API. I have yet to test this, but it looks cool. (April 29, 2008)
About Me
I’m an assistant professor of technical communication at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, IL. I completed my PhD in rhetoric and composition at Purdue University in 2007.
This fall, I am teaching graduate seminars in Information Structure and Retrieval, and Open Source in Technical Communication.
Current Facebook status: Karl is really happy with how voraciously his students are tearing into XML.