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Coming to Content Management: Inventing Infrastructure for Organizational Knowledge Work
Abstract and Figures
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.
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... 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.
Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) scholars and practitioners (TPCers) see a need to intervene in a range of complex problems. Yet scholars such as Leah Ceccarelli and Lauren Cagle have noted a gap between scholarly research findings and policy changes. To address this gap, I theorize a strategic grounding framework, consisting of multiple, linked tactics that over time enable TPCers to make a case to gain a seat at the table to shape policy. I theorize this framework through a case study of Stephen J. Pyne, founder of the subfield of Fire History, who influenced national and global fire management policy. I examine Pyne's professional papers, housed in the Stephen J. Pyne Papers Collection at the Arizona State University Archives. The framework offers TPCers a series of tactics that position TPCers as change makers as they place their expertise to shape policy that addresses complex problems.
Using first-hand experience supplemented by an open-access archive, this article examines case examples of civically engaged, public-facing technical communication (e.g., training for community organizers) as well as the value of stories and storytelling for content strategy. By developing 10 best practices for content strategy in advocacy organizations, this article offers suggestions for how to design and sustain content strategy for community organizers and contributes to the field's knowledge of the content strategy of politically engaged nonprofits, particularly those with a strong digital presence.
This article is the introduction to the second of two Communication and Design Quarterly special issues focused on conceptualizations of infrastructure. While there are more continuities than differences between the themes and methodologies of articles in the first and second issues, this second issue leans towards articles that have taken up infrastructure as it pertains to writing and rhetoric. This introduction frames the value of infrastructure as a metaphor for making visible how writing and rhetoric structure and enact much of our world, especially for writing pedagogy. In addition, this article concludes by introducing the six contributions in this issue.
Drawing on qualitative data collected from program participants in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), I show how federal government assistance information infrastructure often does not remediate, and instead exacerbates, existent inequalities. I use the example of WIC's Approved Product List (APL) to show how the APL, as a genre that's part of WIC's information infrastructure, contributes to a hyper-standardized benefit redemption process that increases visibility and vulnerability for program participants. This article argues that increased attention to the genres that make up information infrastructures may help to better locate sites of inequity like the APL, and better understand how systemic/structural problems perpetuate infrastructurally.
This article theorizes infrastructures and their components as rhetorical objects for analysis and persuasive use. Though the term infrastructure has been applied broadly to several studies in the social sciences, writing, technical communication, and technology studies, infrastructures have yet to be systematically theorized as an active persuasive consideration for those engaging in communicative practice. This article makes a case for a taxonomic theoretical understanding and conceptualization of infrastructure that may lead to new methodological developments in future research. This theory builds from theories of infrastructures as relational networks of social interaction around objects. The article aims to assist the persuasive endeavors of those engaged in communicative practice in infrastructural settings.
This article contributes to a growing research area in writing studies that examines how documents perform infrastructure functions. The article uses document analysis and interviews to examine the ecology of documents necessary to establish oyster aquaculture in the state of Alabama. The results show that performative infrastructural documents exist in a larger ecology of documents and that they can embed themselves in natural environments and living creatures. This analysis extends the analytical framework of infrastructure-based writing studies by connecting writing and infrastructure with the natural world.
As one kind of designed communication, technical communication is created for readers we assume use the content for some situated purpose. Understanding users and their situations to be varied, communicators rely on simplified models of both to create usable content. In many cases, this approach works, but in some commercial sectors, companies are recognizing a need to engage with users directly and to include them in the production of communication. Including users in the production of communication may ease the burden of communicating in ways that are sufficiently detailed, accurate, inclusive, localized, and timely, but these ventures also create challenges of collaboration that direct attention to how users are situated in infrastructures that allow them to act as effective readers and collaborators. This article presents a model of users, situating them amid infrastructures that extend their ability to take rhetorical action. The authors explain and demonstrate a heuristic for analyzing infrastructure as an extension of a user's "mediated potential" for rhetorical action.
A sociocultural study of workers' ad hoc genre innovations and their significance for information design.
In Tracing Genres through Organizations, Clay Spinuzzi examines the everyday improvisations by workers who deal with designed information and shows how understanding this impromptu creation can improve information design. He argues that the traditional user-centered approach to design does not take into consideration the unofficial genres that spring up as workers write notes, jot down ideas, and read aloud from an officially designed text. These often ephemeral innovations in information design are vital components in a genre ecology (the complex of artifacts mediating a given activity). When these innovations are recognized for what they are, they can be traced and their evolution as solutions to recurrent design problems can be studied. Spinuzzi proposes a sociocultural method for studying these improvised innovations that draws on genre theory (which provides the unit of analysis, the genre) and activity theory (which provides a theory of mediation and a way to study the different levels of activity in an organization).
After defining terms and describing the method of genre tracing, the book shows the methodology at work in four interrelated studies of traffic workers in Iowa and their use of a database of traffic accidents. These workers developed an ingenious array of ad hoc innovations to make the database better serve their needs. Spinuzzi argues that these inspired improvisations by workers can tell us a great deal about how designed information fails or succeeds in meeting workers' needs. He concludes by considering how the insights reached in studying genre innovation can guide information design itself.
In What Writing Does and How It Does It, editors Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior offer a sophisticated introduction to methods for understanding, studying, and analyzing texts and writing practices. This volume addresses a variety of approaches to analyzing texts, and considers the processes of writing, exploring textual practices and their contexts, and examining what texts do and how texts mean rather than what they mean. Included are traditional modes of analysis (rhetorical, literary, linguistic), as well as newer modes, such as text and talk, genre and activity analysis, and intertextual analysis. The chapters have been developed to provide answers to a specified set of questions, with each one offering: a preview of the chapter's content and purpose;. an introduction to basic concepts, referring to key theoretical and research studies in the area;. details on the types of data and questions for which the analysis is best used;. examples from a wide-ranging group of texts, including educational materials, student writing, published literature, and online and electronic media;. one or more applied analyses, with a clear statement of procedures for analysis and illustrations of a particular sample of data; and. a brief summary, suggestions for additional readings, and a set of activities. The side-by-side comparison of methods allows the reader to see the multi-dimensionality of writing, facilitating selection of the best method for a particular research question. The volume contributors are experts from linguistics, communication studies, rhetoric, literary analysis, document design, sociolinguistics, education, ethnography, and cultural psychology, and each utilizes a specific mode of text analysis. With its broad range of methodological examples, What Writing Does and How It Does It is a unique and invaluable resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students and for researchers in education, composition, ESL and applied linguistics, communication, L1 and L2 learning, print media, and electronic media. It will also be useful in all social sciences and humanities that place importance on texts and textual practices, such as English, writing, and rhetoric. © 2004 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.