The Academic Job Market in Technical Communication, 2002-2003    

Analysis of the academic job market in 2002-2003 reveals that 118 nationally advertised academic jobs named technical or professional communication as a primary or secondary specialization. Of the 56 in the "primary" category that we were able to contact, we identified 42 jobs filled, 10 unfilled, and 4 pending. However, only 29% of the jobs for which technical or professional communication was the primary specialization were filled by people with degrees in the field, and an even lower percent (25%) of all jobs, whether advertised for a primary or secondary specialization, were filled by people with degrees in the field. Search chairs report a higher priority on teaching and research potential than on a particular research specialization, and 62% of all filled positions involve teaching in related areas (composition, literature, or other writing courses).

Rude, Carolyn D. and Kelli Cargile Cook. Technical Communication Quarterly (2002). Careers>Academic>TC>History

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

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

Architecting Our Profession

The change within the interface design process over the past five to ten years has coincided with an increasing number of large companies refining an industrial style model of design instead of focusing on specialization or interaction sustainability through design accuracy.

Evans, Clifton. Boxes and Arrows (2005). Design>Web Design>History

Archiving Experience Design: A Virtual Roundtable Discussion

The following discussion was conducted over a six-week period late in 2002. We invited members of Loop’s advisory board and several distinguished guests to address the question of how we, as an emerging community of interest, might begin to address the critical question of preserving the history of our field.

AIGA (2003). Design>User Experience>History

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

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

"As we are Both Deceived": Strategies of Status Repair in 19th Century Hudson's Bay Company Correspondence  

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

As We May Think

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

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

Authors' Rights  

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

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

Best of Type--Worst of Type

From a production standpoint, desktop typography is a vast improvement over phototypesetting. No more stinking chemistry or expensive dedicated systems! Also, the ability to fine tune, noodle, and tweak layouts is an immensely satisfying luxury, compared to the typographic systems of the '70s and '80s.

King, Liana. NALC (1997). Design>Typography>History

Brewster Kahle Saves the Web

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

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

A Brief History of STC  

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

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

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

But, Having Said That, ...

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

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

Certifying Technical Communicators: An Historical Perspective  

STC members have shown interest in being certified as technical communicators for at least 37 years. The Society has made at least four studies of certification. This paper reviews the work of the 1975-80, 1981, 1982-87 and 1994-1998 committees. The three, multi-year studies had essentially the same results; significant numbers want certification, but too few to make a full certification program economically viable. The studies also revealed that creating a certification program might be divisive. The 1982—-87 study revealed an interest by employers in STC having an accreditation program.

Malcolm, Andrew and Lawrence D. Kunz. STC Proceedings (2001). Careers>Certification>TC>History

The Changing Face of Technical Communication: New Directions for the Field in a New Millennium    

Identifies four different factors shaping the future of technical communication: user-centered design, corporate universities, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and knowledge management. The authors each address how factors once considered external to the field of technical communication are now becoming thoroughly integrated with it. These four studies, in conjunction, suggest how the field of technical communication is becoming increasingly complex and how participants (practitioners, researchers, and educators) will need to adapt to this new terrain.

Zachry, Mark, Kelli Cargile Cook, Brenton D. Faber and David Clark. ACM SIGDOC (2001). Presentations>TC>History

Changing to Outwit Change: Staying Motivated in the '90s  

Keeping motivation high and steady has never been easy; the changes of the 1990’s have made self-motivation even more difficult. We are expected to do more, faster, and better--with less structure and supervision. Simultaneously, other demands upon our time and energy have built, not lessened. Although the seriousness of these challenges cannot be denied, they can be met by the development of a motivational strategy requiring self-knowledge, self-discipline, and the willingness to change, as well as offering concrete ways of coping with the 90’s and making them productive, even happy. This Workshop will be a team presentation, alternating motivational theory/practice with supporting theories of brain functioning.

Weis, Monica and Alec Sutherland. STC Proceedings (1996). Presentations>TC>History

Changing to Outwit Change: Staying Motivated in the '90s  

Keeping motivation high and steady has never been easy; the changes of the 1990’s have made self-motivation even more difficult. We are expected to do more, faster, and better--with less structure and supervision. Simultaneously, other demands upon our time and energy have built, not lessened. Although the seriousness of these challenges cannot be denied, they can be met by the development of a motivational strategy requiring self-knowledge, self-discipline, and the willingness to change, as well as offering concrete ways of coping with the 90’s and making them productive, even happy. This Workshop will be a team presentation, alternating motivational theory/practice with supporting theories of brain functioning.

Weis, Monica and Alec Sutherland. STC Proceedings (1996). Presentations>TC>History