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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 focus...
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... we compared the results of the user task survey to the analysis of the site structure, we saw a mismatch. There was little correlation between the most commonly pursued tasks and the main site sections or even links from the home page. While we recognized that more research was needed to determine exactly what users’ goals and expectations might be across all user categories, our analysis suggested that the current site did not reflect users' demands very well. In many ways, this finding was similar to our work with NPO: the structure of the site as understood in terms of user tasks was different from the structure of the site as understood by the library. Because the lib.msu.edu site mirrored the Libraries’ Organizational Chart, a user’s first visit to the site requires her to navigate using terms that correspond to the division categories already established. In response to this finding, we took an in-depth look at two of the second level pages on the site with the most frequent traffic, one being the services page (an LSP) and the other being the grants page (an ASP). After examining the pages by using a card sort for three different audiences (undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty), we made a determination that the navigation and content on these pages did indeed reflect their organizational chart rather than a structure that related to user expectations for the page. Our card sort also revealed that undergraduate students had difficulty determining the definition of certain section headings used on the site. The term “Circulation” seemed to be a term that many struggled to understand, influencing their difficulty to predict the contents of a page with that heading. Moreover, most undergraduate students wanted to place items in the sort under a “Help” category. Overall, our card sorting and task survey analysis revealed a common theme: users are task-oriented when using the website. Users generally enter the site to search for a journal periodical or to check on their library account. In addition, many of the graduate students and faculty surveyed enter the site to find information about grant-related content. When they categorize information, they want and expect categories that map to their goals and tasks. Undergraduate users expected “Help” to be available from any landing page, for example, because they have a goal in mind and often need assistance to accomplish it. Our investigation also focused on the current roles and workflows of content developers, and our findings here are complex, as workflows are influenced by a number of factors, many tied to the diversification and growth of lib.msu.edu over the years. Our research indicated that outdated and unclear institutional guidelines lead to workflows that are heavily influenced by access to and understanding of content development technologies. Further, intermittent communication between developers and across departments was reduced timeliness in the creation and deployment of content. First, from our conversations with Libraries staff and their responses to our survey, we observed a need for structured training, templates, style guides, or development procedures for writers to follow. While one staff member did reference and provide a copy of an older style guide from 1996, staff members generally agreed that workflows are not governed by any formal rules, and this absence of formal guidelines results in ad-hoc “rules.” Second, our analysis of the technologies used to create content revealed that while the development of Web content did not appear to be guided by formal procedures, the development of different pages did seem to be based on the level of expertise and job responsibilities or physical location of staff members. Our survey results indicated that a range of technologies—including Microsoft Word, Dreamweaver, LibData, Notepad, and ColdFusion—are used by staff when creating and updating content. The charts below demonstrate our analysis of one of the first and second-level landing pages accessible off the Libraries’ home page, demonstrating the range of technologies used. We explained that the diversity of production tools and development environments was not necessarily a negative, but could pose problems when the choice of tools and environment is not made for strategic reasons but rather for reasons related to lack of awareness of other systems, lack of training, or limited access. Fig. 1 represented the current editing tools and work responsibilities for one of the more heavily-trafficked pages on the website. Figure 2 represented our recommendations for transforming the workflows. Third, we observed that there was minimal communication between developers and across departments, which made writing less efficient and timely. We suggested that the diversity of possible technologies used for developing content may also be related to the minimal formal communication avenues available between developers. While some staff members did indicate turning to other staff for assistance during the content development process, it did not seem as though staff had the means for communicating with each other to share knowledge regarding either technical assistance or content development. Asked to describe the strategies and workarounds they have developed, staff members noted limited interaction between content developers, but it was mostly in the form of copying one another’s work. Following our analysis of the genres, delivery methods, and workflows in place at the Libraries, we offered two global recommendations, both of which were meant to foster an overall conceptual view of lib.msu.edu as what Nardi & O’Day (1999) term an “information ecology,” a metaphor that allows us to highlight issues of sustainability and diversity as important goals for the growth and maintenance of the library site. The first global recommendation was to make explicit the content strategies, roles, and work patterns associated with the site as a way to embrace an ecological approach. Our second and more progressive recommendation to the Libraries web team was to focus on how users could become more than just consumers, but also actual creators, editors, and manipulators of content. Our analysis of the site revealed that the only way to ensure that the Libraries can remain a vibrant and central aspect of the university experience for students, faculty, and staff is to rely on users to contribute to the information ecology in meaningful ways. We indicated that the web site is the means to this exciting end. Users, as active participants in the ecology, help it to grow and change by creating, editing, arranging and indexing content, all with the guidance of what Nardi & O’Day (1999) recognize as the “keystone species” of library ecologies: librarians. From these global recommendations, we offered several specific recommendations: 1. The Libraries should create user role-based views that act as “landing pages” for target user groups. Ideally, these views would reflect the goals and activities of users. In the short term, these might be designed as role-based views. In the longer term, more dynamic views created from aggregating user choices or even user-customized views could be implemented. 2. Currently, the most visited pages on the library site are of two distinct types: one type that contains information about services, branches, programs, etc., and another type that stands apart from the main library as a stand-alone “destination” for users. Rather than think of these as links from the home page –as “level two” pages that are static – the Libraries should consider how best to integrate library services information into role-based views. Stand-alone or destination sites need to develop user profile information of their own and provide role-based landing pages that suit their users goals and activities. 3. Content development, review, and maintenance practices within the Libraries need to be made more explicit in order to ensure that the diversity of development tools and environments in the library ecology are used wisely and strategically. The Libraries should undertake a process of self- study to understand and fine-tune production and content management processes associated with the services pages as well as the autonomous unit pages. 4. Having described in detail the content development strategies already functioning within the Libraries, we identified a number of areas where users could potentially contribute as authors: • Allow users to contribute reviews and comments on appropriate content types such as catalog items, research guides, etc. • Consider staff member blogs that allow individuals to contribute updated info about their areas of expertise and to aggregate posts from other sources about issues and events. • Make content from the catalog holdings easier to get via lib.msu.edu by showing popular or recent searches, top journal holdings, etc. in lists available from users login or welcome pages. • Consider explicitly licensing some or all of the library-created content using a “some rights reserved” license that provide protection against unlawful commercial use, but open up the possibilities for educational use. With broader circulation, library research guides and other materials could circulate widely and boost the credibility of the MSU Libraries as the source for this knowledge with faculty, with ...
Citations
... There was early concern about what it meant for technical communicators whose employers enhanced efficiency by adopting CMSs and single-source publishing (Clark, 2002;Hart-Davidson et al., 2007). Yet, scholarship has become more encouraging or at least more accepting (Hart-Davidson, 2010). ...
... The ASAE model includes 16 tactics, which share much in common with previously noted actions taken in the move to content management (Hart-Davidson et al., 2007). The reported adoption of those 16 tactics by participating content professionals is displayed in Figure 2, according to the maturity level of their employer. ...
While technical communication consultants and researchers agree that content strategy requires attention to both customer needs and business goals, we found no evidence that technical communication educators promote an accurate understanding of business goals among their content strategy students. Through industry–academia collaboration, we integrate two existing models, using content tactics within organizational characteristics that define the maturity level of an organization's content operations. Analyzing the current state of maturity for each characteristic highlights gaps that can define a content strategy with prioritized tactics and, ultimately, encourages the growth of technical communicator leadership and the empowerment of our profession.
... Nonprofits target stakeholders-which include clients, employees, volunteers, and donors-with diverse needs. Since the modern web provides nonprofit organizations with low-cost infrastructures for communicating their organizational goals to their stakeholders, non-profits need to think strategically about content management and need to integrate their users' needs with their organizations' mission (Hart-Davidson et al., 2008). In order to accomplish this, we argue that what nonprofits really need is a non-profit content strategy that integrates a holistic approach to content, including a concrete sense of goals, channels, and audiences (Content Marketing Institute, 2016;Hart-Davidson et al., 2008;Lauth, 2014;Pope, Isely, & Asamoa-Tutu, 2009). ...
... Since the modern web provides nonprofit organizations with low-cost infrastructures for communicating their organizational goals to their stakeholders, non-profits need to think strategically about content management and need to integrate their users' needs with their organizations' mission (Hart-Davidson et al., 2008). In order to accomplish this, we argue that what nonprofits really need is a non-profit content strategy that integrates a holistic approach to content, including a concrete sense of goals, channels, and audiences (Content Marketing Institute, 2016;Hart-Davidson et al., 2008;Lauth, 2014;Pope, Isely, & Asamoa-Tutu, 2009). This strategy must be mapped out and documented in written form so that all current and future stakeholders of a given organization can understand and enact the steps. ...
Purpose : Contemporary non-profit organizations must reach a variety of audiences in order to sustain themselves and must compel these audiences to take action on behalf of a specific cause. At the same time, past research has indicated that non- profit professionals often lack the necessary training and expertise to leverage digital technologies for effective communication. This research study explores how technical communicators can assist non-profits by helping them develop effective content strategies.
Method : This report of research findings is based on an ongoing Participatory Action Research (PAR) project, which included a series of focus groups with representatives of thirteen different organizations as well as interventions with several other organizations. The goal has been to learn about and help improve non-profit content strategy in the community of Greenville, North Carolina.
Results : We found that while non-profits do rely on a variety of media to fulfill their goals, they prefer pre-digital media. Our participants also defined audiences in a very loose manner, used content in a non-targeted way, and favored existing organizational processes over content strategy best practices.
Conclusions : Ultimately, we provide several ways technical communicators can assist non-profits through low-cost or free consulting and the development of educational materials. We hope that fellow professionals will engage in this necessary work because non-profits in the United States form an important "third sector" of the economy that provides essential services to countless individuals.
... As a result, establishing and maintaining a good business reputation has become increasingly difficult (Khong, 2005); the result of internal division, which customers notice and comment on, is now visible globally in the era of the social customer. To address fragmentation, an organization's philosophy and culture must change so that everyone analyses the influence of policy, decisions, and actions on customers (Hart-Davidson, Bernhardt, McLeod, Rife, and Grabill, 2008;Kostelnick, 1998). Human interaction at all levels of the organization can have a positive or negative impact on the customer experience; even one disgruntled customer can deliver a body blow to a company (Pennington, 2007). ...
The study examined the customers/banker's relationship and bank performance in Nigeria: An appraisal of Bank services. The specific objectives are Customer demand, Information technology, banker/customer, bank services and bank performance. Primary data were sourced through the use of a structured questionnaire while one hundred and twenty questionnaires were administered to customers of which eighty were returned and used for this research. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used. The descriptive involved frequency and percentage while inferential are regression and Correlation analysis. The results revealed that banker/customer and bank performance (r[80] = 0.975, p<0.01); customer demand (p< 0.05) and banker/customer and information technology (r[80] = 0.818, p<0.01). The study concluded that formal training of bankers on how to treat customers improves customer satisfaction and likewise, the effective policy on banker/customer relationship facilitates banks efficiency, there is high satisfaction of customer demand of bank services which means that there are effective and efficient services that enhance customers' satisfaction and with the way they treat their customers and the introduction of information technology has been of a benefit to customers and the banks which has a greater impact in attracting the customers to the bank.
... To analyse the page, I used a content and views analysis as described by Hart-Davidson, Bernhardt, McLeod, Rife, & Grabill (2007), which builds on the work of Rockley & Kostur (2003) and their ideas of content auditing. For the analysis, the "content" portion "is a straightforward list of the content types available on the site" (ibid., 17). ...
This ground-breaking collection of essays examines the scope and consequences of digital vigilantism – a phenomenon emerging on a global scale, which sees digital audiences using social platforms to shape social and political life. Longstanding forms of moral scrutiny and justice seeking are disseminated through our contemporary media landscape, and researchers are increasingly recognising the significance of societal impacts effected by digital media.
The authors engage with a range of cross-disciplinary perspectives in order to explore the actions of a vigilant digital audience – denunciation, shaming, doxing – and to consider the role of the press and other public figures in supporting or contesting these activities. In turn, the volume illuminates several tensions underlying these justice seeking activities – from their capacity to reproduce categorical forms of discrimination, to the diverse motivations of the wider audiences who participate in vigilant denunciations.
This timely volume presents thoughtful case studies drawn both from high-profile Anglo-American contexts, and from developments in regions that have received less coverage in English-language scholarship. It is distinctive in its focus on the contested boundary between policing and entertainment, and on the various contexts in which the desire to seek retribution converges with the desire to consume entertainment.
Introducing Vigilant Audiences will be of great value to researchers and students of sociology, politics, criminology, critical security studies, and media and communication. It will be of further interest to those who wish to understand recent cases of citizen-led justice seeking in their global context.
... The role of technical communication is closely tied to knowledge-making practices. From discussions about the transfer of technical knowledge to general audiences [16] to the focus on the role of content management in creating organizational culture [17,18] to the role of social justice and ethics in communicating with publics [19], the field has drawn a tight connection between how information becomes knowledge and the social and cultural impact of the process on audiences and practitioners. ...
bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:
In this article, we address the use of metatags as a form of community knowledge formation and gatekeeping within digital platforms.
Situating the case:
The subReddit KotakuInAction is a well-known hub of the GamerGate community on Reddit, but one that has avoided the bans common to other aggressive subReddits and GamerGate communities on platforms such as 4chan and GitHub. We contextualize the aggressive nature of the subReddit and the reasons why participants' uses of metatags are meaningful for understanding subReddit culture and moderation practices.
Methodology:
To better understand the destructive behavioral patterns of KotakuInAction, we coded for the frequency of certain behaviors, such as linking and tagging, as well as the shift in certain keywords and vocabularies between the front facing or predetermined tags and the user-customized or admin-altered tags. We also examined how tags shifted over time and whether certain users dominated particular tags.
About the case:
What we found was a hybrid culture on KiA that applied Chan culture values and flaming, but increasingly localized the behavior to KiA rather than direct readers out of the site. We also found key shifts in topics away from gaming and activism toward broader complaints about social justice. In addition, we found that a tiny core group of nine influencers (out of tens of thousands of users) accounted for 20% of the top conversations.
Conclusions:
We suggest a closer examination of how communities self-organize around meta naming structures. Knowledge of this activity can help with predicting and engaging with aggressive and hostile communities by describing how topics shift over time, how they adapt to platform moderation, and who the influencers within a community might be.
... Similarly, scholars like Hart-Davidson et al. (2008) and Johnson (2014) have investigated the relationship between rhetoric and protocol (e.g., workflows), represented in systems like those of information or institutional infrastructure, in order to understand how technical communicators-among others-might effect change in regards to such systems. Warnock and Kahn (2007) considered the ways that informal and self-directed exploratory writing practices might impact programming practices as a means of more clearly tying together programmers' approaches to writing and thinking. ...
Winner of the 2017 Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Book Prize Software developers work rhetorically to make meaning through the code they write. In some ways, writing code is like any other form of communication; in others, it proves to be new, exciting, and unique. In Rhetorical Code Studies , Kevin Brock explores how software code serves as meaningful communication through which software developers construct arguments that are made up of logical procedures and express both implicit and explicit claims as to how a given program operates.
Building on current scholarly work in digital rhetoric, software studies, and technical communication, Brock connects and continues ongoing conversations among rhetoricians, technical communicators, software studies scholars, and programming practitioners to demonstrate how software code and its surrounding discourse are highly rhetorical forms of communication. He considers examples ranging from large, well-known projects like Mozilla Firefox to small-scale programs like the “FizzBuzz” test common in many programming job interviews. Undertaking specific examinations of code texts as well as the contexts surrounding their composition, Brock illuminates the variety and depth of rhetorical activity taking place in and around code, from individual differences in style to changes in large-scale organizational and community norms.
Rhetorical Code Studies holds significant implications for digital communication, multimodal composition, and the cultural analysis of software and its creation. It will interest academics and students of writing, rhetoric, and software engineering as well as technical communicators and developers of all types of software.
... Data analysis consisted of further analyzing the inventories of each audit by user roles (what roles are supported with these content types and views?), goals (what user goals do these content types and views support?), and task alignment (would users be able to fi nd the tasks they seek here, given these content types and views?) (Hart-Davidson et al., 2008). This analysis helps us discover whether HealthCare.gov's content matched its declared mission for the American public. ...
This study audits and analyzes the online content provided by the U.S. government for The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). In order to both educate Americans about the ACA and enroll those who needed insurance into plans offered by the U.S. and/or state governments, policy analysts, communication designers, and web developers at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) created and published a substantial array of online content. These policy statements, infographics, blog posts, videos, forms, and other resources were designed to engage the public and translate the complexities of the ACA into usable information for patients. However, a content audit and analysis of ACA-related online content reveals the ways that this content did not provide a navigational structure for patients newly insured (or already insured) to find them, as over time the e-commerce function of the site buried its educational purpose. From this analysis, designers of online public policy information will gain a better understanding of how to design as a part of a strategy to balance multiple, critical user roles and tasks.
... 39). latour's ANT helps us understand the impacts of human and nonhuman actors on a given network's configuration, and his approach to ANT has been adopted methodologically by several thinkers in the field of technical and professional communication (Hart-Davidson, Bernhardt, Mcleod, Rife, & Grabill, 2008;Johnson-Eilola, 2005;Potts, 2009;Spinuzzi, 2008). As Spinuzzi (2008) explains, ANT provides a political and rhetorical view of networks that foregrounds the continual recruiting of new allies-both human and nonhuman-to strengthen particular network configurations over others (p. ...
... This way of thinking invites technical communicators to not only work proficiently to help sustain organizational networks, but to act for "the good of a community" by actively caring for the actors involved in organizational networks and their knowledge-making processes (Miller, 1989, p. 23). Following Hart-Davidson et al. (2008), such a shift "suggests a role for the technical communicator as advisor or consultant" (p. 10). ...
... 184). Because the modern web provides nonprofi t organizations with low cost infrastructures for communicating their organizational goals to their stakeholders, nonprofi ts need to think strategically about content management and need to integrate their users' needs with their organizations' mission (Hart-Davidson, Bernhardt, McLeod, Rife, & Grabill, 2008). We argue that, to accomplish this, what nonprofi ts really need is a nonprofi t content strategy that integrates nonprofi t marketing strategies (Content Marketing Institute, 2016;Hart-Davidson et al., 2008;Lauth, 2014;Pope, Iseley, & Asamoa-Tutu, 2009). ...
... Because the modern web provides nonprofi t organizations with low cost infrastructures for communicating their organizational goals to their stakeholders, nonprofi ts need to think strategically about content management and need to integrate their users' needs with their organizations' mission (Hart-Davidson, Bernhardt, McLeod, Rife, & Grabill, 2008). We argue that, to accomplish this, what nonprofi ts really need is a nonprofi t content strategy that integrates nonprofi t marketing strategies (Content Marketing Institute, 2016;Hart-Davidson et al., 2008;Lauth, 2014;Pope, Iseley, & Asamoa-Tutu, 2009). The objective of such a strategy is to effectively utilize modern technologies such as social media, organizational websites, and e-newsletters in a persuasive, audience-focused manner. ...
... 275). These trends indicate that nonprofi ts may need to consider organizational goals when designing their websites instead of fi xating on surface details, such as visual elements (Hart-Davidson et al., 2008). Smith (2007) advocates a two-way symmetrical model of communication that incorporates feedback mechanisms and "strives for outcomes that benefi t both the organization and its publics" (p. ...
Nonprofits must reach a variety of community audiences to sustain their organizations, and these audiences include potential volunteers, donors, and clients. With the increasing availability of open-source, freely available, and inexpensive communication technologies, many nonprofits can now develop a robust web presence that targets a variety of audiences via a variety of channels. In this article, we present a three-part heuristic to help nonprofits better manage digital content. This heuristic is comprised of developing audience awareness and interaction, making use of emerging technologies, and building sustainable partnerships. Using a project designed to help a homeless shelter improve its content strategy, we explore this heuristic and its implications for helping technical and professional communicators improve local nonprofit digital capacities.
... Content management (CM) is a means of storing, securing, and distributing information [1], but it is also an inquiry-based method for guiding decision making about the creation of knowledge and the design of tools and practices that surround workplace texts [1], [2]. As Andersen and Batova [3] explain, this method for storing and disseminating information creates new approaches for considering the relationships between humans and information, approaches that privilege practices such as modularity and reuse [4]. ...
... Key journals in technical and professional communication including Technical Communication, Technical Communication Quarterly, the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION were reviewed to find articles concentrating on CM from a design perspective. Useful research in this area was found in the work of several scholars [2], [5], [7], [10]. These searches led to additional literature that was used to more carefully investigate aspects of creativity in relationship to product design. ...
... The "content" stored within a CMS is "the product and service-related information that organizations provide to their customers" [9, p. 253]. CMSs are sometimes broken down by genre or function, such as by considering web CM independently from CM, or CM from enterprise CM [2], [18]. ...
Background: This paper examines creativity in content management (CM) by presenting a case study analysis of an original, open-source, web-based learning-management system (LMS). It explores existing literature and suggests new ideas about creativity and CM. Research questions: How can we conceptualize creativity in relation to CM? How can creativity be operationalized into specific design practices within CM? What dimensions of creativity should be considered when designing or evaluating creative CM systems? Situating the case: Theoretical research in content-management systems (CMSs) and LMSs has revealed a gap in our field's current understanding of how creativity relates to CM. Research studies related to the measurement of creativity have provided insight into characteristics and methodologies that could be adopted and adapted to evaluate creativity in CM. Studies from the learning sciences have investigated where LMSs fall short and suggested where new opportunities exist to better facilitate the informational needs of users. These works have pointed to a need for research on integrating creativity and CM, both in content and in the systems that manage content, and have laid the groundwork for this study. Methodology: This research investigates theories of creativity as they relate to CM by conducting a case study analysis of unique instructional software designed to deliver content to students enrolled in a university course. The primary evidence is taken from notes about the design and evaluation of the software and from survey data illustrating students’ user experiences. About the case: We developed a classification strategy for exploring creativity along three dimensions—importance, novelty, and affect—and then used this strategy to explore a unique system's approach to deal with content challenges in each of those areas. User experience impressions provide evidence of successes and failures of experimental CM in these domains. Conclusions: The study finds that this original LMS design did contain features that exhibited novelty, importance, and affect, and that such features can be used to identify creativity in product design as well as to assess the design of complex software systems such as CMSs and LMSs. This detailed analysis of an original design for an LMS suggests new ideas for implementing and using CMSs and LMSs in technical communication. The study concludes by presenting a rubric for evaluating creativity in CMSs and LMSs, or for designing such systems with creativity in mind.
