Dr Karl Stolley

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).

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