Post Humanism and Tech Comm Session B3

13 March 2013

This panel responds to Carlyn Miller’s (1979) “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing”

Crowdsourcing a Conceptual Curriculum: A Posthumanistic Rationale for Technical Communication

Jim Henry

Conducted survey about Tech Writing programs to think abotu reflexive epsitemologies within Tech Writing/Comm

Areas of inquiry: 1) Tell us about your program; 2) How have tech comm curricula evolved in ph ways in different programs; 3) Re-thinking Student Centeredness; 4) Re-framing student evals; 5) Operating in Complex Ecologies

NOTE Here, it was hard to extrapolate Henry’s reading of results into note format during the presentation. An issue of mediation, methinks. ;-)

Seemed to be a strong and varied reaction to making student centeredness

Byron Hawk Writes a paper

Starts w/ Miller’s exigency: can’t get tech writing course to count as a humanities credit; states he expands

Is it the same issue? Question? Exigency? as Miller? Breaks down her argument: - Miller is in a lit-focused Eng dept, where Science/Tech are postivists

1. Works as an analog for others
2. Value and legitimacy is to be gained with a humanistic/rhetorical world-view and thereby giving our discipline validity and value too

Hawk’s expansion/update of exigencies: 1. Broader culture outside of academia that values postivism and narrowed models of skills-based writing. 2. Institution: Problematization of humanities via entrenchment in new tech new big data new 3. Disciplinary: No longer faced a change in ourselves, facing a more complicated call

Can posthumanism approach these issues? Would a turn address, confront, help engage these issues?

Responses

1. Modern Constitution (via Latour): Miller’s response trapped in “feedback loop”. By simply re-positioning tech writing into humanities, we’re still left with a binary
2. Fractional coherence (via Law and Mol): subject is fractured; Spinuzzi notes students are fractured; fractional roles and fractional intent; calls for a drawing together objects and people without centering them vs. Miller’s human-centered approach
3. Matters of Concern: Experts at drawing things together; things that are a “matters of concern” (Latour “Dingpolitik”); doesn’t address structures of power, though. Hawk seeks an approach that regulates flows of mediated socio-technical hierarchies that are mapped and inscribed; as a field, we should think about these mappings of procedures and being within particular contexts

Question: How do we address this if we do not constructing texts that are interactive?

Mapping PH Experiences

Liza Potts

How do we get builders/writer/teams/etc. to think about about the culture and context before building things?

Diagramming focuses on “activities” and thinking about processes. Wants them to think about the people and events occurring within the projected situation

Brings up UML Unified Modeling Language; very “verb-based” approach - Use cases and what actors do in this situation - Activity diagram; looks like an algorithm chart - Sequence diagram; breaks down the processes - Potts says, “Still missing context, though!” But she says industries are getting better at asking this question

What people? tech? Orgs? Events? are involved?

Potts shows slide on her interpreation of ANT; asks “how much is too much to map?”

Question: Thinking back to Big Data, where Billions and Billions of bits of data are gathered, but how do we data organize and reduce? We still always have to do this reduction and curation process.

When to Map? Early on, before building. These remind me of Alan Kay’s call for Computer Science to do this, but he calls it data structures.

1. What to map first? First noun-based strategies, the who and what.
2. Then, find patterns. (Thinking McLuhan’s call for pattern recognition, due to data over-saturation)
3. Then, relationships. Map relations between actors. (Time, interest, what actor is central, etc.)

Book pitch: Social Media in Disaster Response

All of these ideas seem to stop short of a production of something that is an interactive and demonstrating a cultural model? An ontological politic enacted. Is this a call for tech writers and humanities to develop new discursive modes that create competing models/arguments in a particular context?

NOTE I tried to ask a question about what new types of texts or discursive modes to move this mapping beyond levels of invention, because we still need to convey our findings and episteme about the situation. Complex printed texts are static and I wonder how effective they are in the public discourse. How do we convey processes in static texts that are not akin abstract models?