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.

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...

Be the first to comment.

Notes

My Recent Bookmarks on Del.icio.us

Open Source in Tech Comm: Course Website Home and Latest News
Wiki-based course website for the graduate seminar I'm teaching in Open Source this semester. (August 24, 2008)
Information Structure and Retrieval
Website for my course in Information Structure and Retrieval. (August 22, 2008)
Path: readable URLs | drupal.org
For future reference. Definitely need to hone my Drupal skillz...last time I worked with it, the path module wasn't packaged with the Drupal core. (August 19, 2008)
Creating a Custom Home Page in Drupal Using Views | A Padded Cell
There may be a better tutorial out there, but this one is pretty good. (August 19, 2008)
Parallels Plesk Control Panel Flash Tutorials
Plesk 8.4 tutorials. So much to learn. (August 14, 2008)
Aaron Gadberry » Blog Archive » Using Plesk and vhost.conf
Helpful discussion on working with Plesk and vhost.conf for working with PHP and Apache. (August 14, 2008)
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)

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 getting all of his ducks in a row. An infinite row that stretches to the horizon, it seems. Yeesh.

Contact