Dr Karl Stolley
Assistant Professor of Technical Communication, Illinois Institute of Technology
Digital Production As Inquiry
A double rainbow over Chicago; the spires on the Hancock are barely visible.
What appears to be a bug in a piece of open source software prompts me to share an argument that I’m in the early stages of developing.
Chicago, IL (Updated 6/23/2008 3:13PM)—
One of my summer writing projects is a book proposal loosely based on my dissertation. An overarching argument of the proposed book is that digital production is inquiry, both into communicating with the medium, of course, but also into the digital medium itself. (Like the dissertation, the book draws on Malcolm McCullough’s treatment and definition of “digital medium” from Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand, which ought to be required reading on every digital writing and web design syllabus--except that it’s out of print.)
The digital-production-as-inquiry argument is grounded in the idea that the digital medium is more than the relatively polished surface people encounter in production software or even simple languages like XHTML. Approaching the medium from rhetoric and technical communication, part of my own production-as-inquiry is to better understand the subterranean levels of the medium, and the effects those levels have on digital production. But to do this requires stepping back from production work (which isn’t always easy; it can be a black hole for attention) and thinking a little bit more carefully about what production is and what acts of production reveal about the evolving nature of the medium.
Case in point: today I found myself stepping back from building some examples for an article about how technical communicators might approach writing for the Semantic Web; the article attempts this by exploring microformats, which are mostly minor adjustments to HTML or XHTML code that allow web writers to share contact information, calendar events, and other small chunks of information beyond a web page (e.g., in an address book or calendar program).
Read On...
Notes
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One of the strangest bits of cognitive dissonance I’ve experienced lately is being unable to genuinely use the first-person singular pronoun “I” on a course website that’s a wiki. It just doesn’t make any sense to...and I’m probably the last person to recognize this w/r/t wikis.
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My course wikis are almost set up. And it occurs to me that the Wikka Wiki software’s support for Geshi is going to make sharing in-class code examples a snap.
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Moving sites around from server to server is enough to help anyone see more clearly how and why Web sites can always stand to be built in an ever-more portable fashion.
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Suddenly it occurs to me that so-called “div-itis"--where web writers use tons of div tags instead of structural header or list tags--is probably caused, in part, by the fact that web browsers apply no default styling to those blocks. That, in turn, takes the guesswork out of styling. Of course, a reset CSS file is a much better option all around.
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The limited view of technology as a tool and a tool only is just never going to go away.
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I am so irritated that RPI’s June 11 Webcast about the future of the Web (starring Tim Berners-Lee) requires the Microsoft Silverlight plugin. Wow. How future-oriented. Another piece of proprietary software technology.
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To read: an article in Book Forum called “Uncreative Writing.” Recommended by J.Snap.
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To read: John Muckelbauer’s The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change (recommended by Kelly P).
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To rework JFK a bit: “Ask not what your Web application can do for you; ask what you can do with your application."
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The less design, the less to eventually get sick of.
My Recent Bookmarks on Del.icio.us
- A List Apart: Articles: Mapping Memory: Web Designer as Information Cartographer
- Article that argues for adding "information cartography" alongside of information architecture. (September 04, 2008)
- Open Source Textbooks Challenge a Paradigm | Epicenter from Wired.com
- Interesting article on a start-up that's offering open source textbooks...sort of. (September 03, 2008)
- Halloween Documents
- The infamous "Halloween Documents"--memos from Microsoft--released in late 1998 and outlining Microsofts internal analysis of and plans to destroy open source software. Originally housed at opensource.org, Eric Raymond keeps the documents here. (September 01, 2008)
- Google on Google Chrome - comic book
- Comic book drawn by Scott McCloud of "Understanding Comics" fame. It touts the design strategy behind the new Google browser code(?)-named "Chrome." (September 01, 2008)
- The Chrome is out of the bag: Google's browser arrives Tuesday | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone - CNET
- Google's new browser, Chrome, will be available Tuesday. Apparently it draws from both Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's engines and source. It'll be interesting to see if it passes the Acid2 test and how it handles open standards generally. (September 01, 2008)
- Apple fans loyal despite iPod, iPhone 3G woes - CNN.com
- Interesting story, particularly the complaints of developers regarding the "veil of secrecy" surrounding the iPhone development kit, and its restrictive license agreement. (September 01, 2008)
- Clean URL support in XAMPP | drupal.org
- Gotta love the open source communities for providing cross-project help like this. Important reference for clean URLs when developing/testing a Drupal site with XAMPP. (August 29, 2008)
- Open Source in Tech Comm: Course Website Home and Latest News
- Wiki-based course website for the graduate seminar I'm teaching in Open Source this semester. (August 24, 2008)
- Information Structure and Retrieval
- Website for my course in Information Structure and Retrieval. (August 22, 2008)
- Path: readable URLs | drupal.org
- For future reference. Definitely need to hone my Drupal skillz...last time I worked with it, the path module wasn't packaged with the Drupal core. (August 19, 2008)
About Me
I’m an assistant professor of technical communication at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, IL. I completed my PhD in rhetoric and composition at Purdue University in 2007.
This fall, I am teaching graduate seminars in Information Structure and Retrieval, and Open Source in Technical Communication.
Current Facebook status: Karl is watching this prospectus take a viable shape.