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
- SlickSpeed Selectors Test
- MooTools-hosted test of different JavaScript library speeds/abilities. (January 04, 2009)
- Out with "localhost"
- Great tutorial for mimicking a domain name, rather than 'localhost' on XAMPP. (December 07, 2008)
- WordPress › Blog » Usability Testing Report: 2.5 and Crazyhorse
- Interesting post about the usability testing behind the new administrative interface in WordPress. (October 30, 2008)
- Bush Signs Law Creating Copyright Czar | Threat Level from Wired.com
- Just what we need...although it appears we can thank the congress for this one. (October 13, 2008)
- Slashdot | Rights to Virtual Property In Games?
- Interesting story about "virtual property." (October 13, 2008)
- Online Scientific Repository Hits Milestone
- arXiv, the open-access clearinghouse for scientific research, now hosts over half a million scientific papers. (October 08, 2008)
- WIRED NEXTFEST
- In Millennium Park 9/27-10/12. Thanks to JS for passing along. (September 29, 2008)
- WordPress › Podcasting
- Podcasting plugin for WordPress. Not that I'm switching to WordPress. (September 25, 2008)
- The Freenet Project - /index
- Freenet project--an open, distributed project meant to avoid censorship on the Internet. (September 23, 2008)
- People's Republic of China: State control of the internet in China. | Amnesty International
- Report Benkler refers to on pp. 266-271 of The Wealth of Networks. (September 23, 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.
On Twitter: @terynjay Mine's showing the right date. Maybe there's a rogue tower near you.