Annotated Bibliography

Last night, while initially trying to write this up, I learned that a good keyboard is like a good pair of running shoes--movement feels natural and unforced. Those Thinkpads? They're like trying to run in those thick rubber shoes you wore as a kid that had a plastic picture of your currently-favorite superhero on the side. The next time I buy a laptop, I'm paying an extra $400 so I can have the Mac keyboard and incidentally look more artistic for the ladies.

Freedman, A., & Smart, G. (1997). Navigating the current of economic policy: written genres and the distribution of cognitive work at a financial institution. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 4, 4, 238-255.

This article examines the way monetary policy involves complex processes of distributed cognition. The individual acts of interpretation by individuals in the bank are parts of a centralized focus. Thinking takes place through writing and is indeed enacted through it. By looking at how a financial institution makes its decisions, the article identifies how the complex process of constructing and applying specialized knowledge about the economy through distributed cognition. Writing functions as a site of enactment for knowing and decision making.

I read this article because I saw it referenced in Spinuzzi, Hart-Davidson and Zachry's article on p.44. In their reference, I saw how many workers bringing different texts to bear on a particular activity at the same time result in a text that is different from a single text. Looking at the whole gives a much different experience than looking at a single part, and I thought of online communities and dialog. A single message or Tweet in a conversation may be completely unrelated or useless in identifying a greater direction, but it may actually represent a more significant contribution when looked at in a whole.

The article makes an interesting analogy of comparing the multiple points of writing that make up something to a ship. The sea is the financial world, and the ship is the financial institution. A single job on a ship is not more important than another, but they add up to the entire ship moving in a certain direction. The same goes with knowledge or dialog. Maybe action? Anonymous versus the drug cartels indicate this well. One person basically spearheaded #OpCartel, and when the simple majority of Anonymous participants simply decided not to participate, the op fell apart.

Looks at how memos or "notes" are passed around the office and thenn prompts ofther people to write responses. The respones are points of thinking because they require writing. How much thinking actually goes into writing online, though? Blogging is very different than online message-boarding, and pro blogging is more well-thought out than mommy blogs. Still, some idea construction takes place. Do blogs belong to a "ship" they might not be aware of? Yes, because blogs have trends and themes that come and go. Mommy blogs on the way out, I think. Am I constructing an idea through writing right now?

Spinuzzi, C. (2002). Toward a hermeneutic understanding of programming languages. Currents in Electronic Literacy 6. Retrieved from http://currents.cwrl.utexas.edu/spring02/spinuzzi.html

In this article, Spinuzzi discusses paralogic rhetoric and compares it to programming code. Rather than looking at how machines use code, he argues that code is actually for programmers and for them to interpret. He also goes to an effort to point out a paper that Ruven Brooks wrote in 1983, ten years before Paralogic Rhetoric was published by Kent, and refers to this paper and Kent's work throughout. Programmers begin making hermeneutic interpretations about a program even before seeing the code itself. Hermeneutic guessing works because of triangulation. The reader looks at the text and then tries to use it and his/her own experience. Spinuzzi writes, "He argues that to gain more than a strictly functional understanding of the code--to understand the original programmer's intentions--the programmer who reads the code must understand the domain in which the program is intended to work, the problem it is meant to solve, and even the hardware on which it should run. Without that understanding, Brooks points out, the programmer will not be able to make useful sense of the program (i.e., productively refine hypotheses) or be able to modify the program in a satisfactory way. " 

This ties directly into the "Chains and Ecologies" article because it looks at how to analyze digital communication/information and shows how the difficulty of using empirical analysis for exchanged texts. The underlying assumption, I'm thinking, is that an empirical analysis is almost impossible due to the hermeneutic problems associated with communication of shared information. It really caused me to think about the way pieces of information are seen--a comment on a message board or photo, for my interests--and constantly reinterpreted.

So let's tie this into what I learned from the previous article. The pieces of information people produce through writing are like the different people working on a ship. Each contributes to the information some decision maker uses to steer the conversation/decision/whatever in a certain direction. Except the wind is blowing, and every sailor is from a different country and doesn't really speak the same language, so there's a lot of educated guesswork. The context of the situation helps everyone stay on the same page. Now that we have this information, what can we do with it? Acknowledge all conclusions must be flawed? S/HD/Z come up with the broadish model which seems to work, but they acknowledge limitations and testing that needs to be done.

Spinuzzi, C., & Zachry, M. (2000). Genre ecologies: An open-system approach to understanding and constructing documentation. ACM J. Comput. Doc. 24, 3, 169-181. doi:10.1145/344599.344646

This article, written in 2000, seems to be both a chronological and ideological precursor to the articles read for class and some of the other ones on my list. Basically, Spinuzzi & Zachry argue that open-system approaches work best in providing computer documentation. They give case studies demonstrating this point. In retrospect, the reasons for this are obvious and make perfect sense since most companies have realized this and gone to open source approaches of their own. Do you know of a company that doesn't use support forums? Why not outsource your tech support issues in an open-system way to your fans who will work for free?

However, to their credit, this article was written before the invention of Wikipedia and the explosion of user-generated content (and user-mined technical support). They use the term "Genre ecology" to describe the interplay of genres by a user, and their demonstration of this in the article is particularly useful in understanding the idea. It implies the co-dependent interrelationships the different points of information have with each other. Every piece of the ecology has an effect on the other, and the entire situation would fundamentally channge if one point of conversation were removed (rhizomic?) They write, "Genre ecology diagrams can help designers to lay out relationships, analyze the interplay among genres, and identify which genres are central or peripheral to the use of the technology. The diagrams thus can be a resource for replanning the ecology." This is cool because it gives a practical way to apply the idea of genre ecology. As a writer and someone feebly metathinking about communication, I'm a big fan of the drawing things out. Mapping the genre ecologies will put us in a place where we are able to see how the genres overlap and then look at how technology mediates those communications. 

Zachry, M. Ecology of an online education site in professional communication (2002). In Proceedings of IEEE professional communication society international professional communication conference and Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM international conference on Computer documentation, IEEE Education Activities Department, 433-442.

Did I mention I met Dr. Zachry last May? Nice guy. Ryan arranged a meeting for me, and Dr. Zachry took a lot more time out of his afternoon than I expected to explain how applying to PhD programs actually works, which was really great of him. 

Since reading the last earlier article by Zachry and Spinuzzi helped this info start to come together really well, I read this other early article by Zachry as well. This article discusses online-based chat groups--I've personally struck gold, and I should have started here--and the basic argument is that students should be free to choose which medium of communication they wish to use to facilitate real interaction and learning instead of incidentally teaching that human interaction should only be done through the most convenient technology. This article serves as a good ecological framework for developing curriculum for an online learning environment. It identifies tools and areas for interaction students may use in order to meaningfully communicate instead of being forced to communicate through a limited medium. It demonstrates that different types of ecologies can be observed, hopefully giving instructors the confidence to propose alternative ways of allowing their students to communicate without the instructor losing the ability to moderate.

I felt this article was a strong case study of seeing how to facilitate communication between different actors in a group. It could also potentially serve as an example for what we're going to be doing as a class in a  few weeks when we begin working on professional development.

The ways of communication discussed in the article (discussion boards, file sharing, etc.) were based on technology from 10 years ago. Online communication has become much less obtrusive since then. As tech writing (or composition, or whatever) instructors, are you aware of any useful tools to allow students to communicate that integrate new technologies while easily allowing you to observe? Some of the ideas in this article helped me to see how I can apply genre theory to my instruction, but the tools on Blackboard are cumbersome (traditional groan of agreement, etc. okay). However, outsourcing the communication of my class to an effective tool--email through a competent client, for example--either shuts me out or doesn't maintain the privacy the students require when discussing their papers. A Facebook comment thread doesn't seem like the appropriate place to give feedback on a revision. Anyone got any ideas? Is Google+'s circles the best way to do this?

Spinuzzi, C. (2004). Four ways to investigate assemblages of texts: Genre sets, systems, repertoires, and ecologies. International Conference on Computer Documentation (110-116). New York: ACM. doi:10.1145/1026533.1026560

Rounding up this Spinuzzi/Zachry fanfest is an article cited by Ryan in his article about the NSF. 

Spinuzzi describes four frameworks that have been used to describe assemblages of genres: genre sets, genre systems, genre repertoires, and genre ecologies. He describes the differences between each. He uses model of action, agency, foregrounded genres, perspective, and relationship between genres as ways to identify the type of framework that a genre should fit it. Genre sets are sequential and stabilizing work and looks at the product of work as the focus. Focus on information flow and information transaction. More of an individual perspective.

• Genre Systems: Spinuzzi writes, "Unlike genre sets, genre systems involve “the full set of genres that instantiate the participation of all the parties"" but only look at official genres, not unofficial genres. An expanded way to see genre sets by acknowledging additional genres in play. 
• Genre Repertoires: The most significant thing genre reps do is acknowledge the presence of overlapping genres (typing on a computer while talking on a phone). This allows genres to be amped in more of a non-sequential way, although only official genres are acknowledged.
• Genre Systems Redux: Genre systems is a term whose usage has become loose, so it is again used in a different sense. In this one, it refers to how genres function in assemblages. 
• Finally, genre ecology focuses on mediation--how genres interact with each other in dynamic ways. It's neat. 

This article is a fantastic primer if you, like me, were very confused by the seemingly synonymous terminology (hint: it's not, really). His breakdown of genres allows people like us to detemrmine actively what framework we want to use in our work owerk. Essentiually, he gives us the rhetorical tools we need to take part in scholarship. The issue of quantifiability remains, but I don't think it's going away in this field.