Rhetoric of present single-sourcing methodologies

Clark, Dave

doi:10.1145/584955.584959

Cited by 21 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…For us and many of our colleagues (Albers, 2000;Clark, 2002), content management as a phenomenon and a practice raises critical issues about the kinds of service professionals (or service workers) technical writers are becoming in the economy. Thus, while these cases offer encouraging narratives of how organizations might think about how to come to content management (seeking help from researchers with expertise in technical communication), they also speak to the tenuous position that writing-as-a-practice (and the writers who care for it) occupies in every knowledge organization.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Coming to Content Management: Inventing Infrastructure for Organizational Knowledge Work

Hart-Davidson

Bernhardt

McLeod

et al. 2007

Technical Communication Quarterly

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Two project profiles depict content management as inquiry-driven practice. The first profile reflects on a project for a national professional organization that began with a deceptively simple request to improve the organization's website, but ended with recommendations that ran to the very core mission of the organization. The second profile focuses on an organization's current authoring practices and tools in order to prepare for a significant change: allowing users to develop and organize content.The discussion of content management in the professional and academic discourse of technical communication has been, in large part, focused on a rather narrow range of features associated with generating multiple output formats from a single repository: single sourcing. We take a different approach in this article, focusing instead on content management as "a type of conduct" (Miller, 1989, p. 23). In so doing, we align the practical work of content management (CM) with a form of reasoning, phronesis, that permits us to explore CM as a means to guide decision making about the creation of knowledge, the arrangement of information, the selection of tools, and the design of work practices associated with the making of texts. Invoking phronesis allows us to position the focus of CM not on the making of texts, but rather on "the good of a community" for which text making is a central, sustaining activity (Miller, p. 23). This shift suggests a role for the technical communicator as advisor or consultant. Though not altogether new, this role positions the technical communicator as having authority over what are, for many organizations, the fundamentals of their mission rather than simply on matters of procedure (e.g., editorial practices, documentation strategies).To be clear, we are not borrowing Miller's formulation to argue for a new role for technical communicators so much as to describe how we have come to understand our own roles vis-à-vis organizations that we have consulted with in the last several years that were coming to content management. In many cases, our work began with rather simple requests to evaluate an organization's website or to offer a workshop on a topic like how to write for the Web-topics that we might locate in the realm of techne. Mindful of the richness of rhetorical techne (Atwill, 1998), we always expect even these types of projects to be much more than training courses or product-oriented critiques of a Web presence. But the shift we want to write about here goes beyond a view of rhetoric-as-productive that concerns itself with intervention in an organization's day-to-day work, often without explicit reference to big ideas such as an organization's mission or overall effectiveness. The shift we want to write about is a moment when an organization and its members face choices in their day-to-day work that are, perhaps for the first time, unambiguously choices about the ends toward which they and the organization work. These organizations are coming to content management and discovering, in a d...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In making this list, we especially acknowledge the work ofAlbers (2000),Applen (2002),Carter (2003),Clark (2002),Pullman (2005),Rockley (2001;, andSapienza (2002;2004;2007).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Coming to Content Management: Inventing Infrastructure for Organizational Knowledge Work

Hart-Davidson

Bernhardt

McLeod

et al. 2007

Technical Communication Quarterly

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“…Clark observes that single sourcing strategies are poised to favor the economic and organizational needs of the company over the informational needs of the user, and reminds us to "consider our ethical commitment to our users." [5] This aspect of single sourcing is often touched upon only delicately (or not mentioned at all) in most of the literature, and must be addressed directly in developing a theory of content management. Effective Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.…”

Section: Implications For Usersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Clark suggests there are essentially two ways: we can "borrow" theory from other disciplines or we can build it from the bottom up, starting with new "scholarship and significant empirical study." [5] Hart-Davidson notes a similar distinction, one of "lateral-move trajectories into other fields of inquiry" as opposed to more "ground-up" approaches. [12] The former is certainly the path of least resistance, and therefore provides the lens through which we often view what little single source theory we currently have.…”

Section: Mommy Where Does Theory Come From?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One common critique of our field's enamored embrace of such content management strategies is that they are lacking in informative theory and research. [1,5,11] Even at technical communication conferences, the majority of sessions related to content management or single sourcing are concerned with how and why to "make the leap," leaving us to determine for ourselves what this dramatic change means for our organizations, our jobs, and our users. Critics are quick to point out that what is notably missing from the discussion is an understanding of the implications of single sourcing.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Engineering creativity

Gilbert¹

2004

Proceedings of the 22nd Annual International Conference on Design of Communication: The Engineering of Quality Documentation

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In response to the steadily increasing adoption of content management strategies such as single sourcing in the practice of technical communication, many critics have noted the absence of adequate theory underlying such implementations. This article surveys the theoretical literature currently informing content management, discusses two traditional ways in which new theories develop, and proposes a third "hybrid" approach to theory creation. This approach is then applied by using a critical analysis of the Bauhaus to inform a possible theory base of content management, relying on the two fields' similar motivations and obstacles, a parallel that is illustrated with an example of reusable learning objects in e-learning.

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