Paper 1, revised: Summary: a short history of Technical Communications as English Studies (ODU 810)

Paper 1, revised: Summary: a short history of Technical Communications as English Studies (ODU 810)

NYC Middle Schoolers online

Selfe and Hawisher consider how Technical Communicators “acquired” electronic literacy, what influenced that gain, and identify similarities to help “Technical Communicators instructors, program directors, and workplace supervisors” effectively teach electronic literacy  The inclusion of Technical Communications in the English Studies curriculum leads to a commitment to digital rhetoric in the college curriculum. Technical Communications is closely related to Digital Rhetoric. Both skills require digital literacy, which include the “practices of reading, writing, and exchanging information online, with the values associated with such practices—social, cultural, political, [and] educational”[1]. For these reasons, the study and teaching of Technical Communications and Digital Rhetoric should remain in the English Studies department, not in the growing number of more technically-oriented Communications departments.

The computer explosion took place from 1978 through 1993, which is no secret. In 1984 Gilbert Storms noted that technical communications courses be added to the curriculum, showing “how they are used in communication, particularly word processing, information storage and retrieval, and information management”[2].  Jessica Lambertson recently praised technical communication in the digital age for expanding storytelling, simplifying the documentation of teachers’ notes, encouraging a global sharing of academic findings from the highest levels of academia and government to neighborhood schools and kitchen tables. “These instances are also contextualized as signifiers of the culture’s general adoption of personal computers in writing and the office environ”[3]. Of course, we know this. But this paper covers these questions:

1. When did the subdiscipline of Technical Communication emerge?
2. What universities did it emerge from?
3. What were the exigencies for its emergence?
4. What was its relationship to the university system as a whole?

Technical Communication Subdiscipline Emerges

As early as 1980, two years into the personal computer revolution, Jacques G. Richardson of UNESCO announced the global value of the interdisciplinary responsibility of Technical

Walter J. Ong

Communicators[4]. Then in 1982, Walter J. Ong, S.J., of Saint Louis University, in “Orality and Literacy,” stated that we are born with capability for speech (what Ong calls “orality”), but that writing is a learned “consciousness-raising” activity. He foresaw a growth of what we now call eBooks and audio texts replacing books and newspapers, which can affect how we communicate orally, in electronic writing (using the technology), and digitally (changing how we think, produce text, and exchange ideas)[5]. In 2008, five years after his death, his Saint Louis University established the Walter J. Ong, S. J., Center for Language, Culture, and Media Studies, to study what he saw as the interdisciplinary departments of English, Communication, History, Theology, Modern and Classical Languages, and Philosophy[6].

The Golden Age

President Clintion

The discipline of Technical Communications in the university’s English Studies department came out of President Bill Clinton’s 1993 Technology Literacy Challenge validated teaching technology literacy to K-12 students[7]. Digitally literate high school grads were joining the entry-level workforce just when PCs were cheap and ubiquitous in all businesses. That socio-economic reality required adding Technical Communications to the college curriculum[8].  Digital rhetoric takes us a step further into a world where we structure “content for a future that’s unfixed, fluid and ever changing. Miles Kimbal, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, contends that after thousands of years of oratory and rhetoric, the early 21^st century is “the Golden Age of technical communication. [… and we] should spread it as a set of skills valuable for everyone to learn”[9]

Today’s Golden Age of Technical Communication will lead to new level of digital rhetoric, expanded on by Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch, University of Minnesota, when she explained that “issues of technological literacy related to performance, contextual factors, and linguistic activities […] provide […] a mechanism to identify and analyze a range of perspectives associated with technology and communication”[10]. This pedagogical philosophy will support the view that the study and teaching of Technical Communication as it evolves into Digital Rhetoric should remain in the English Studies department.

Bibliography

Fromm, Harold. "The rhetoric and politics of environmentalism." College English.. 59, no. 8 (Dec 1997): 946-950.

Kastman Breuch, Lee-Ann. "Thinking critically about technological literacy: Developing a framework to guide computer pedagogy in technical communication." Technical Communication Quarterly 11, no. 3 (2002): 267.

Kimball, Miles A. "The Golden Age of Technical Communication." Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Apr 2016: 1-29.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Track Chaanges. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016.

Lambertson, Jessica A. "Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing." Library Journal, 2016: 91.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge, 1982, 2002.

Regents of the University of Minnesota. "Who Was Charles Babbage?" The Charles Babbage Institute. 2015. http://www.cbi.umn.edu/about/babbage.html (accessed Sep 24, 2016).

Richardson, Jacques G. "Science and Technology as Integral Parts of Our Culture: Interdisciplinary Responsibilities of the Scientific Communicator." Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, April 1980: 141-147.

Saint Louis University. "The Ong Center Home." slu.edu. 2016. http://www.slu.edu/the-ong-center (accessed Sep 23, 2016).

Selfe, Cynthis L., and Hawisher, Gail E. "A Historical Look at Electrroinic Literacy." Journal of Business and Technical Communication, July 2002: 231-276.

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[1] (Selfe 2002)

[2] (Selfe 2002)

[3] (Lambertson 2016)

[4] (Richardson 1980)

[5] (Ong 1982, 2002)

[6] (Saint Louis University 2016)

[7] (Selfe 2002), p. 233

[8] (Selfe 2002), p. 234

[9] (Kimball 2016)

[10] (Kastman Breuch 2002)

Brief History of Digital Documentation, 1945 - 2016 (version 1)

By Howard Gold, PhD student, English Department, Old Dominion University.

re-posted September 22, 2016

Radio Shack TRS "Trash" 80 Model III in school

Writers of every ilk are indebted to mathematicians and engineers who built early information-storage and retrieval systems during the mid-twentieth century. Without those, the age of personal computing and word processing could not have exploded in the 1980s. The pervasive use and ease of digital documentation quickly replaced traditional typewriters, expanding storytelling, documented teachers’ notes, encouraging a global sharing of academic findings and more, from the highest levels of academia and government to neighborhood schools and kitchen tables. This occurred during a quick evolution of word-processor-centric computers available at retail stores, such as Radio Shack’s popular TRS-80, the WANG VS series, Commodore’s 64, leading up to the early IBM Personal Computer (“PC”) and Apple’s first MAC, all using software from WordStar to WordPerfect to Microsoft Word. “These instances are also contextualized as signifiers of the culture’s general adoption of personal computers in writing and the office environ” (Lambertson). Of course, we know this now. But how did we get here? When did digital documentation begin, and how did it become a mainstay of our culture? This essay is a brief statement of key issues for consideration.

Technically speaking…

From a technical view, we start at 1940s Princeton with John von Neumann's first data-storing computer (Atomic Archive). That led to his work (with fellow mathematicians and

USS Nautilus at sea

engineers) on the USS Nautilus, launched on January 21, 1954, which did not set sail September 30, 1954 (Submarine Force Museum). Anecdotal reports contend that the delay was caused by–among other reasons–documentation and a simple matter of physics. The documentation for everything from repairing stoves to launching nuclear missiles was reportedly heavier and of more volume than the ship itself. All the manuals needed to be digitized and capable of storing “programming information” with easy-to-read “data” as text. Previously, only numerical data for computation was stored, making this copying of files to microfiche or computer tape for storage and retrieval on board a military vessel ground-breaking.

Philosophically speaking…

In “Orality and Literacy" (1982), Walter J. Ong states that writing is a technology, but “Technologies are artificial—paradox again—artificiality is natural to human beings. Technology, [properly interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it” (Ong). In the same text, he points out that consciousness of ideas cannot be fully realized without writing. The interaction of speech, “orality”, is something that we are born with, while writing is a learned activity. Writing is an extension of orality, and is therefore “consciousness-raising.” Over thirty years ago, Ong stated that electronically or digitally produced text could replace books or newspapers, and foresaw a growth of what we now call eBooks and audio texts (Ong).

Modernist view…

So, where did we writers and students get the big idea that we can adopt technology created by mathematicians and the Department of Defense and for our tasks? Before migrating to digitized text, writers’ thoughts and even the thinking process—the order of prioritizing thoughts, documenting

Anne Rice books on Amazon

them, creating new ideas, purging unworkable ones—was already underway before 1900 when Nietzsche typed the phrase, “Our writing instruments are also working on our thoughts (Kirschenbaum). Anne Rice, who came of age in the computer era reveals that, despite writing in different genres, their thinking changed by using computers to write. Anne Rice admits, “Once you really get used to a computer and you get used to entering the information from that keyboard, things happen in your mind, I mean, you change as a writer. You’re able to do things that maybe you never would have thought of doing before.”

We creators of digital documentation, from poets to tech writers, are faced with two roles: author and reader. As authors, it is easy to let the words come out of our brains, through our fingers, across the keyboard, and onto the screen in various levels of awareness. But care must be taken, as each digital writer is also a member of their own audience. The writer can often see the working version of a draft in the same format as the audience, removing the middle-steps of production and publication. Jerome McGann’s contends that perceiving text today requires  “emulate[ing] the humanists of the fifteenth century who were confronted with a similar upheaval of their materials, means, and modes of Knowledge production” (qtd. by O'Sullivan). This new digital literacy requires new skills for authors and readers alike, bringing new phrases of like transliteracy, metaliteracy and multimodal literacy to the forefront (Stordy).

References

Jabr, Ferris. "The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens." Scientific American 11 Apr 2013. 18 Sep 2016. <http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/>.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. "Technology changes how authors write, but the big impact isn’t on their style." 26 Jul 2016. The Conversation. 19 Sep 2016. https://theconversation.com/technology-changes-how-authors-write-but-the-big-impact-isnt-on-their-style-61955.

Lambertson, Jessa A. "Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing." Library Journal (2016): 91. 18 Sep 2016. 

National Science Digital Library. "John von Neumann (1903 - 1957)." 2015. Atomic Archive. AJ Software & Multimedia, National Science Foundation Grant 0434253 . 21 Sep 2016. <http://www.atomicarchive.com/Bios/vonNeumann.shtml>.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge, 1982, 2002. 18 Sep 2016.

O'Sullivan, James. "The New Apparatus of Influence: Material Modernism in the Digital Age." International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 8.2 (2014): 226-238. 20 Sep 2016. www.euppublishing.com/ijhac.

Stordy, Peter Howard. "Taxonomy Of Literacies." Journal of Documentation 71.3 (2015): 456-476. Applied Science & Technology Source. Web. 22 Sept. 2016.

Submarine Force Museum. Submarine Force Museum, Home of the Historic Ship NAUTILUS. 2013. 18 Sep 2016. <http://www.submarinemuseum.org/nautilus/index.shtml>.