At the Heart of Information Ecologies: Invisibility and Technical Communication    

The ecological metaphor for technological systems provides a useful supplement to others dealing with the question of human control over technologies. However, it fails to develop adequately its own reliance on communication as the means whereby human values may be embedded in technologies, or to recognize the role of professional communicators in that process.

Ranney, Frances J. Journal of Computer Documentation (2000). Articles>Information Design>TC

Automated Current Awareness Service Using RSS Web Feed    

Web feed is an automated web content syndication and surfing technique. It is a new eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based mechanism that influences and enhances library functions and services. This paper briefly discusses web feed creation using RDF (Resource Description Framework) Site Summary (RSS) format, content syndication, and client software used to track and read the web feed contents. It also describes how libraries can use this technique to offer different Current Awareness Services (CAS)/Information Services libraries' to its subscribers.

P. Rajendiran and Indu Bhushan. International Journal for Technical Communication (2007). Articles>Information Design>Standards>RSS

Being Shallow

Information Architects are often put on the defensive by spears flung by brethren in related disciplines. In taking the accusations seriously and accepting truths within them, Grant Campbell reveals greatest strengths in shallowness, insularity, and being 'relegated' to history.

Campbell, Grant. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Articles>Information Design>Professionalism

Better Content Management through Information Architecture

Content Management Systems promise so much: content is easier to publish, easier to update, and easier to find and use. Lots of promises, but do CMSs really deliver? Masood Nasser examines why Content Management Systems often fail and shows how Information Architecture can come to the rescue.

Nasser, Masood. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>Content Strategy

Better Structuring and Designing  

There is something to be learnt from the way a good architect works: before beginning with the planning, he takes a look at the site and the future inhabitants of the building, and asks them for their requirements and desires. He takes the general conditions imposed by building regulations and the budget into consideration, and designs the construction in such a way that the inhabitants can use it optimally. And this is exactly how we as information architects should also go about our business.

Oehmig, Peter. tekom (2006). Articles>Information Design

The Big Cocktail: Cognitive and Humanistic Traits of an Information Designer  

This paper describes how our experience in striving to hire Information Designers led us to identify the very basic cognitive and humanistic traits that make up a successful technical communicator. It also shows how, once identified, such traits can be used to unveil hidden potentialities which can help turn a non expert candidate into a successful and gratified Information Designer and communicator. This paper focuses mainly on psychological traits, not on technical skills, that have been extensively discussed in a series of other papers.

Zace, Sokol. STC Proceedings (2001). Articles>Information Design>User Experience>Cognitive Psychology

Blog 101: An Overview of Weblog Technologies  

A weblog or 'blog' is a Web site with content consisting of a series of discrete postings added sequentially and presented in reverse chronological order. Historically used for personal Web sites, blogs in fact represent a form of lightweight content management that can be adapted to virtually any topic, including technical communication. The recent explosion of blogs is in part a result of the availability of publishing tools that simplify their creation. These tools vary significantly in capability, setup, and ease of use, and each offers advantages and disadvantages.

Berry, Robert R. STC Proceedings (2004). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>Blogging

A Body of Criticism  

The nature of hypertext challenges many underlying assumptions for traditional literary critics. Literary critics frequently like to think that they have objectively looked at the lexias of the work, thoughtfully considered them, and constructed a solid interpretation or analysis of the work based on those lexia. Hypertext, however, presents the possibility that two critics who are reading the same work may have differing sets of lexia from which to work. Thus, even if critics objectively consider the lexia before them, they cannot free themselves from the subjectivity of the reading performance that made those lexia (and not others) appear. This raises the concern that, if hypertext critics can only present subjective views of the text, there may be little or no benefit to reading or writing those critiques.

Higgason, Richard E. Journal of Digital Information (2003). Articles>Information Design>Hypertext>Theory

Review: Bosworth's Web of Data

In a Thursday morning keynote at the MySQL Users Conference 2005, Google's Adam Bosworth advocated an open model for data. Although he was not referring to open source, he expanded upon the example by explaining that customers like open source software because of the transparency.

Steinberg, Daniel H. O'Reilly and Associates (2005). Articles>Reviews>Information Design>SQL

Bottoms Up: Designing Complex, Adaptive Systems

Web design is under attack. Our enemy is a dangerous meme known as reductionism. This devious adversary is spreading the notion that we can fully understand Web sites as a combination of simpler components, and that we can break the process of design into lots of quick steps and clearly defined deliverables.

Morville, Peter. New Architect (2002). Articles>Information Design>Web Design

Bridging the Gap: From Raw Usability Testing Data to Design Implementation  

Learn practical ways to influence members of your company’s product engineering group with usability testing data. Putting the authors’ tips into practice will help you improve the design of your company’s products.

Leritz-Higgins, Sarah E. and Catherine J. Yaspo. Intercom (2006). Articles>Usability>Information Design

Bring the lnternet into Your Documents on Budget and on Time  

Technical communicators can mine the Internet for fresh approaches and information to prepare documents with efficiency and minimal expense.

Murphy, Avon J. STC Proceedings (1996). Articles>Information Design>Research

Building a Bridge: DITA, DocBook, and ODF

Some folks here are taking a very strong look at DITA. I'm certainly one of them. But we also have a huge legacy of documents in Solbook format (Sun's subset of DocBook). There are tools for editing such documents, and tools for processing them. and there are many people who are comfortable with those tools. So DITA isn't going to replace the world, just yet. But DITA makes extensive reuse possible. It's a format with a serious future, because "reuse" is a very big deal. It lets you single-source your information content so have one place to make an edit. That sort of thing becomes important when you have multiple revisions of a product, and/or multiple variations. It becomes important when different tools and different products use the same information in different ways. It can drastically improve quality, ensure uniformity of presentation. Finally, structured formats like DITA and DocBook create the kind of consistently-tagged information that allows for useful automation.

Armstrong, Eric. Sun Microsystems (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA

Building a Database of Graphic Files Using Microsoft Access  

Many technical communicators manage large collections of graphic files and must keep track of which graphics are used in which deliverables. An effective tool for managing a collection of graphic files is a relational database management system (RDMS) such as Microsoft Access. Before the database can be built in Access, it is necessary to 1) create detailed functional requirements and 2) build a high-level conceptual model from which the database relations (tables) can be derived. A spreadsheet program can be used to build the conceptual model and generate the relations. Normalization checks should be performed on the relations before the database is implemented in Access.

Lowe, Richard B. STC Proceedings (2005). Articles>Information Design>Databases>Microsoft Access

Building a SQL Server 2005 Integration Services Package Using Visual Studio 2005

A comprehensive start from scratch and step-by-step approach to learn this important procedure. This illustrated article is your guide to SSIS designing.

Krishnaswamy, Jayaram. ASPAlliance (2006). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>SQL

Building the Beast: Talking with Peter Morville

Polar Bear book co-author Peter Morville shares the inside stories about the making of the new edition--from its original scribblings on an airsick bag to the ideas that didn’t make it in--and his thoughts about how the field has changed since their book was first published.

Olsen, George. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Articles>Information Design

Business Information Survey    

Survey of business information services in corporate information services, based on in-depth interviews with leading business information managers. Key findings are: Business information budgets have been stable, with at least inflationary increases built in; Business conditions have been turbulent of late but this has had no real impact on the services to date; With more information rolled out to the clients' desktops, the services are all working to add value through a variety of approaches, including training, evaluation and analysis, business and client development, and generally undertaking more complex work; Some pressure on the staffing headcount in the services during the year; Recruiting suitable information professionals is a difficult process; Offshoring information and research work has not expanded significantly but more companies are considering this option; 'Techno-centric' knowledge management remains important in some companies, particularly law firms, but is fading as a practice in others; There is great interest and envisaged potential in social technology and Web 2.0 tools and techniques -- but not much serious deployment yet; Even in mature corporate information environments, marketing business information services is still seen as crucial by 90 per cent of respondents; Fifty-five percent of the services provide some kind of competitor information function, albeit not at a high level; A significant majority (75 per cent) of services support compliance functions such as 'Know your client' and anti-money laundering checks; Existing copyright provisions are seen as a barrier to effective information dissemination within companies by 80 per cent of respondents; LexisNexis takes over at the top of the expenditure league; The demand for information on Asian business markets is growing; Almost all services are committed to training users in the discovery and use of digital business information sources; The organization, management, and sometimes realignment of services is the highest strategic priority.

Foster, Allan. Business Information Review (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Information Design

Bye-Bye to Boring Page Footers

Gone are the days when a footer merely ended the page. Now it is just as likely to be an all-encompassing launchpad to other areas of the site. Typically a footer will run the full length of the layout, and it is usually used to display information at the bottom of the content hierarchy.

Collison, Simon. Vitamin (2006). Articles>Web Design>Information Design

The CAA: A Wicked Good Design Technique

Discusses Category Agreement Analysis, a card-sorting technique to help create usable information architectures.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2003). Articles>Information Design>Content Strategy>Card Sorting

Can Many Agents Answer Questions Better than One?  

The paper addresses the issue of how online natural language question answering, based on deep semantic analysis, may compete with currently popular keyword search, open domain information retrieval systems, covering a horizontal domain. We suggest the multiagent question answering approach, where each domain is represented by an agent which tries to answer questions taking into account its specific knowledge. The meta–agent controls the cooperation between question answering agents and chooses the most relevant answer(s). We argue that multiagent question answering is optimal in terms of access to business and financial knowledge, flexibility in query phrasing, and efficiency and usability of advice. The knowledge and advice encoded in the system are initially prepared by domain experts. We analyze the commercial application of multiagent question answering and the robustness of the meta–agent. The paper suggests that a multiagent architecture is optimal when a real world question answering domain combines a number of vertical ones to form a horizontal domain.

Galitsky, Boris and Rajesh Pampapathi. First Monday (2005). Articles>Language>Information Design>Semantic

The Care of Content: A Red-Pen-Wielder's Perspective

What is the world (wide web) coming to when even us blue-haired English teachers have something to say about the Net? After all, we're supposed to be consumed with the past--a time long before the binary code when writers still used quills, and men, unfortunately, wore tights. (Sorry for the visual.) Well, in defense of red-pen-wielders everywhere, I have to say that just ain't so. Technology, particularly that which furthers education, is our concern. And the Internet (yes, I just started a sentence with the world 'and') is a source of great conflict. On the one hand, it is a storehouse from which vast amounts of knowledge may be retrieved--it provides information that may otherwise be inaccessible. On the other hand, because of its nature as an abyss, it's an illimitable source for the plagiarist. So, ironically, something that should catalyze learning is actually, in a way, simply making it easier for students not to learn.

Blum, Daphne. Digital Web Magazine (2000). Articles>Education>Information Design

A Center for Research in Technical Communication: Initial Ideas and Development for a Worldwide Network

The technical communication field lacks a place for on-line research in the historical, theoretical, and philosophical perspectives. For this reason, the idea of a Technical Communication Research Center was proposed as a way to help move the emphasis off of pedagogical and towards a more evenly balanced web site for technical communication research. Other sites are currently available for on-line research in technical communication, but not everything fits into the academic genre. We have found a market for a comprehensive research site in technical communication. The end product of TCRC will be devoted to both academics and professionals interested in both old and new research in their area of interest. Besides merely a research tool, the TCRC will also be a network for those working in the field. Through databases, email and periodical updates, the ultimate result of the end product is to connect technical communicators all over the world.

Arko, Kirsti, Leroy Steinbacher, John Velat and Dennis Walikainen. Michigan Tech University. Articles>Information Design>Web Design

Centralized versus Distributed Organizational Structures  

The nature of a corporation and its product line(s) influences the optimal structure for your information-development organization. When lines of business are unrelated, information-development organizations may best function independently; when lines of business are interrelated, the groups need a unified strategy. While favored by product developers and business leaders, distributed structures can produce inconsistent information quality to customers. Centralized organizations can meet customer needs, but they are often perceived as focusing on publication quality rather than content. The best solution may be a hybrid structure that takes advantage of the strengths of both.

Hackos, JoAnn T. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Information Design>Workflow

Change Architecture: Bringing Information Architecture to the Business Domain

As information architects, we are not just architecting information; we are using information to architect change. Bob Goodman shows us how we can use business and management techniques to help us be more effective agents of change.

Goodman, Bob. Boxes and Arrows (2006). Articles>Information Design>Business Communication

Change Blindness: "You See, But You Do Not Observe"

We can't force people to look at the work we do, but if we want to make them happy, we need to provide them with the information they need in a manner that makes it easy for the top-down mechanisms to work efficiently. It's our job to help them observe, rather than just see.

Rockley Group, The (2008). Articles>Information Design>User Experience>Cognitive Psychology