#14627
And They Said Computers Were Just a Fad 
Maslowski documents the rapidly changing technologies used by the technical communication profession.
Maslowski, David S. Intercom (2000). Articles>Technology>History
#15088
April 15, 2002, through August 15, 2002
This report covers specifications, standards, and amendments received from April 15, 2002, through August 15, 2002.
Bach, Claudia. Intercom (2002). Articles>History>TC
#14665
Arthur Levitt and the SEC: Promoting Plain English
Intercom's assistant editor profiles a recent recipient of STC's President's Award. The Securities and Exchange Commission was honored for requiring plain English in all disclosure statements filed with the SEC.
Nielan, Cate. Intercom (2000). Articles>TC>History>Minimalism
#18477
As It Was in the Beginning: Distance Education and Technology Past, Present, and Future 
Many features of present-day Distance Education (DE) writing instruction would have been inconceivable when DE was first undertaken: On-demand instruction, nearly instantaneous content delivery, and virtual classrooms capable of facilitating real-time conversations between students on different continents about events that may have taken place only minutes ago, a half a world away. All of these things would have seemed as unlikely to early DE practitioners as holding classes on the moon, yet the many of the primary issues and concerns of twenty-first century DE, particularly with respect to the significance and effects of technology, have persisted throughout the many years of its existence. Now, as DE courses are being developed and carried out by an unprecedented number of university-level educators, it is time to reexamine the long history of DE in hopes of better understanding the ways in which seemingly revolutionary developments such as virtual classroom and e-mail collaborations have more in common conceptually with early iterations of DE than might be supposed. This work represents an attempt to identify some of those commonalities, with respect to both the ways in which DE technology has functioned in particular historical contexts and to their significance to the field of DE in a more global sense. It is hoped that through such investigations we will become better able to shape DE courses so as to take advantage of the functionalities of new technologies without losing the benefits of DE that have traditionally drawn students and teachers to it.
Fishman, T. Kairos (2003). Articles>Education>Online>History
#25336
Little attention has yet been paid to the unique workplace that the Hudson's Bay Company constituted and the unique discursive activity on which that workplace fundamentally depended.
Venema, Kathleen. Rhetor (2004). Articles>Business Communication>History
#25683
Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose.
Bush, Vannevar. Atlantic Monthly (1945). Articles>Collaboration>Research>History
#10348
Authority and Audience-Centered Writing Strategies: Sexism in 19th-century Sewing Machine Manuals 
This article examines audience-centered writing strategies in two very early sewing machine manuals and considers the interplay between such strategies and sexism in technical writing. It considers the difference between non-sexist and gender-neutral writing, and concludes that avoiding sexism in technical writing is difficult at best—and perhaps impossible—in any society that assigns work (and correspondingly, technologies) for use according to the gender of the user.
Durack, Katherine T. Technical Communication Online (1998). Articles>History>Documentation
#10193
With the advent of powerful networked desktop computers and the World Wide Web, authors have for the first time acquired control of the technology for scholarly communication. That radical change prompts the question of how authors have in the past fared under copyright law, and how they might fare in the future. Anglo-American copyright law has always attempted to regulate the interests of three parties: the author, the publisher, and the public. Before there was a formal copyright law, royal patents granted to the Stationer's Company created printing monopolies and facilitated state censorship. The concerns of authors were hardly considered. The 1710 Statute of Anne, our first formal copyright law, left printers the dominant power in relations between printers and authors. What is most remarkable about the Statute of Anne is that the state's interest began to shift from censorship toward the creation of a public domain for intellectual property.
Bennett, Scott. Journal of Electronic Publishing (1999). Articles>Intellectual Property>Copyright>History
#28183
Baumol's Disease: Is There a Cure?
Baumol would never have expected in 1967 that a technological innovation like the internet would make it possible to create a sealed-off labor force in a third-world country.
Hackos, Bill. Center for Information-Development Management (2005). Articles>Technology>History
#26203
The Internet Archive is one of the largest archives of digital media in existence. It contains five times more information than is in the Library of Congress and several times more information than is currently available publicly on the web. David Womack interviewed its creator, Brewster Kahle, for Loop.
Womack, David. AIGA (2002). Articles>Web Design>History
#25681
A Brief History of Human Computer Interaction Technology
This article summarizes the historical development of major advances in human-computer interaction technology, emphasizing the pivotal role of university research in the advancement of the field.
Myers, Brad A. Carnegie Mellon University (1996). Articles>Human Computer Interaction>History
#19386
Nielan summarizes fifty years of Society history and identifies key events that influenced the development of technical communication.
Nielan, Cate. Intercom (2003). Articles>TC>History
#13525
A Brief History of Technical Communication 
Civilization is a cumulative enterprise, and communication has always been a vital component of that cumulation process. From the fourteenth century on, the social system of science has depended on technical communication to describe, disseminate, criticize, use, and improve innovations and advances in science, medicine, and technology. Rapid change in technical communication has been obvious during the past few decades with the advent of computers, laser printers, the Internet, and other developments. Viewed from a historical perspective, those changes can be seen as but a portion of the evolution that technical communication has undergone. It has undergone vast changes in the means and methods that it employs and in the audience to which it is addressed, the purposes to which it is put, the roles it fulfills, and the social forces that drive and support it.
O'Hara, Frederick M., Jr. STC Proceedings (2001). Articles>History>TC
#21923
A Brief History Of Technical Illustration
A history of technical illustration, from the classics to the present.
Hulsey, Kevin. Kevin Hulsey Illustration. Articles>Graphic Design>Technical Illustration>History
#27095
A Brief History of US Fair Use
In our role as writing teachers, we’ve been asked to adopt 'post-modern practice' by releasing old-fashioned notions of single authorship and obsolete pedagogy that forbids plagiarism under a 'detect-and-punish' regime. Instead, we are to teach 'digital ethics' and Fair Use. But what exactly is 'Fair Use'? This is a doctrine we as writing teachers need to understand because while public figures such as Lawrence Lessig, Jessica Litman, and Siva Vaidhyanathan argue that the law needs to be changed, in the meantime we have classes to teach. Writing teachers increasingly teach writing on networked computers, and therefore our need to understand the basic doctrine of Fair Use is as great as our need to understand the rules of anti-plagiarism. This paper first reviews current US Copyright Law, and then briefly traces the concept of 'Fair Use' from its inception as 'fair abridgment' in 1700’s England to its current interpretation in US case law. US Copyright policy, the regime legally defining invention, imitation, compilation, and appropriation, is set through complex interactions between a variety of players. These influential interactions include the habits of writers. The tension between stakeholders who wish to share, and stakeholders who wish to contain and control information is viewed as a 'battle,' 'war,' and 'fight'. In this fight, the writing student and teacher thus become actors, willingly or not, determining how copyright operates. Because we as teachers are key players in the continual remediation of copyright policy, we should have a basic critical understanding of US Copyright Law and how Fair Use is situated within our copyright regime.
Rife, Martine Courant. Social Science Research Network (2006). Articles>Intellectual Property>Copyright>History
#27212
A persistent rule of thumb in the programming trade is the 80/20 rule: '80 percent of the useful work is performed by 20 percent of the code.' As with gas mileage, your performance statistics may vary, and given the mensurational vagaries of body parts such as thumbs (unless you take the French pouce as an exact nonmetric inch), you may prefer a 90/10 partition of labor. With some of the bloated code-generating meta-frameworks floating around, cynics have suggested a 99/1 rule—if you can locate that frantic 1 percent. Whatever the ratio, the concept has proved useful in performance tuning.
Kelly-Bootle, Stan. Queue (2006). Articles>Language>History>Minimalism
#29214
The CCCC Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Communication: A Retrospective Analysis
This article presents the history, purposes, outcomes, and significance of the CCCC Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Communication during its first five years. It analyzes the topical areas and research methods of the 34 dissertations nominated for the award from 1999 to 2003, as well as the evaluations of the judges. Methods of the nominated dissertations are interpretive (41%) and empirical (59%), but many dissertations combine methods. In the empirical category, qualitative methods (17) outnumber quantitative methods (3). The most frequent topical areas are workplace practice (8), rhetoric of the disciplines (7), and information design (6). Topics that are not widely investigated include issues of race and class and international communication.
Selber, Stuart A. Technical Communication Quarterly (2004). Articles>Research>TC>History
#25067
This is an exploratory study of reading and writing within a particular discipline. It is also an investigation of critical thinking and an examination of engagement and resistance in using language to learn about new concepts. I looked at how college history students wrestled with and sometimes worked around issues of theory, specifically theories of the causes of the Civil War. Using analysis of think-aloud protocols, I investigated how students comprehended theoretical writing about the Civil War and how they used the theoretical material to take a position in writing about these same issues. My main purpose in this article is to examine the cognitive moves students make, their ways of thinking, when working with theory, an activity which many educators today are touting as particularly important in developing students’ critical thinking abilities. I am especially interested in the stances students take toward their subject matter which promote critical reasoning, that is, which lead to engagement, as well as approaches which circumvent or stand in the way of such thinking, that is, which lead to resistance.
Durst, Russel K. LLAD (1994). Articles>Writing>History
#31531
Communicating With External Audiences During War Time
On 19 March a war with global implications began between a U.S.-led coalition and Iraq. Although some organizations will be affected by this war more than others, the articles below will help any communicator address certain immediate internal and external organizational war-related communication issues.
Shapiro, Nick. Communication World Bulletin (2003). Articles>Business Communication>History
#29033
Communicative Practices in the Workplace: A Historical Examination of Genre Development
Although studies of actual communication practices in the workplace are now commonplace, few historical studies in this area have been completed. Such historical studies are necessary to help researchers understand the often com-plicated origins of genre conventions in professional discourse. Historical research that draws on contemporary genre theory helps address this void. A genre perspective is particularly valuable for helping researchers trace a given type of document s emergence and evolution. This perspective also provides a way of accounting for the connections between communicative practices and the other activities that occupy the attention of workplace organizations. To illustrate what this perspective brings to historical research in professional communication, I examine the development of communicative practices at a national production company that relied on texts to mediate its organizational activities across geographically dispersed locations.
Zachry, Mark. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2000). Articles>Business Communication>Workplace>History
#29050
This study suggests that documentation is a complex technical communication genre, encompassing all the texts that mediate between complex human activities and computer processes. Drawing on a historical study, it demonstrates that the varied forms given to documentation have a long history, extending back at least to the early days of commercial mainframe computing. The data suggest that (1) early forms of documentation were borrowed from existing genres, and (2) official and unofficial documentation existed concurrently, despite efforts to consolidate these divergent texts. The study thus provides a glimpse into the early experimental nature of documentation as writers struggled to find a meaningful way to communicate information about their organization s developing computer technology.
Zachry, Mark. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2001). Articles>Documentation>History
#22910
Review: Counterfeit Capital: Searching for a Silver Lining in Bernadette Longo's Spurious Coin
Dr. Bernadette Longo, Ph.D., uses the metaphor of devalued currency to trace some of the roots in technological history for technical writing's lack of intellectual and cultural capital. She ingeniously incorporates early threads of management and industrial technology, like the formation of the railroad, in an attempt to contextualize her research. Academics must view Longo's text, Spurious Coin, as just one branch of what must be a webbed tree of intersecting social attitudes towards knowledge definition and science. In understanding the gaps in Longo's narrative, people interested in technical writing might find her book to act as a launch pad for better defining the questions guiding their own research. In this review, I will focus on some of the important gaps I see in Longo's research methodology as she historically situates the emergence of engineering as a discipline and then as the determining factor in technical communication's subjugated position within the academy and industry.
Trim, Michelle. Journal of Computer Documentation (2001). Articles>Reviews>Documentation>History
#31289
Every company has a story to tell, a story about people and passion, about vision and hard work. A corporate history tells these stories—but it is also a sophisticated marketing tool that presents your message and history in a professional, concise format. These historical "portfolios" are designed to attract and impress prospective customers and stockholders, and to create loyalty and a feeling of camaraderie among past and present employees.
Tyline King, Heidi. Communication World Bulletin (2006). Articles>Business Communication>History
#15108
December 1, 1999, through February 29, 2000
This report covers specifications, standards, and amendments received from December 1, 1999, through February 29, 2000.
Bach, Claudia. Intercom (2000). Articles>History>TC
#15109
December 1, 2000, through February 28, 2001
This report covers specifications, standards, and amendments received from December 1, 2000, through February 28, 2001.
Bach, Claudia. Intercom (2001). Articles>History>TC
