Creating Intelligent Content with Lightweight DITA documents the evolution of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) – a widely used open standard for structuring technical content. DITA has grown in popularity and features since its origins as an internal grammar for structuring technical documentation at IBM. This book introduces Lightweight DITA (LwDITA, which should be read as "Lightweight DITA") as a proposed version of the DITA standard that reduces its dependence on complex Extensible Markup Language (XML) structures and simplifies its authoring experience. This volume aims to reconcile discrepancies and similarities in methods for authoring content in industry and academia and does so by reporting on DITA’s evolution through the lens of computational thinking, which has been connected in scholarship and media to initiatives for learning to code and programming. Evia’s core argument is that if technical communicators are trained with principles of rhetorical problem solving and computational thinking, they can create structured content in lightweight workflows with XML, HTML5, and Markdown designed to reduce the learning curve associated with DITA and similar authoring methodologies. At the same time, this book has the goal of making concepts of structured authoring and intelligent content easier to learn and teach in humanities-based writing and communication programs. This book is intended for practitioners and students interested in structured authoring or the DITA standard.

Creating Intelligent Content with Lightweight DITA documents the evolution of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) - a widely used open standard for structuring technical content. DITA has grown in popularity and features since its origins as an internal grammar for structuring technical documentation at IBM. This book introduces Lightweight DITA (LwDITA, which should be read as "Lightweight DITA") as a proposed version of the DITA standard that reduces its dependence on complex Extensible Markup Language (XML) structures and simplifies its authoring experience. This volume aims to reconcile discrepancies and similarities in methods for authoring content in industry and academia and does so by reporting on DITA's evolution through the lens of computational thinking, which has been connected in scholarship and media to initiatives for learning to code and programming. Evia's core argument is that if technical communicators are trained with principles of rhetorical problem solving and computational thinking, they can create structured content in lightweight workflows with XML, HTML5, and Markdown designed to reduce the learning curve associated with DITA and similar authoring methodologies. At the same time, this book has the goal of making concepts of structured authoring and intelligent content easier to learn and teach in humanities-based writing and communication programs. This book is intended for practitioners and students interested in structured authoring or the DITA standard.

This collection offers a comprehensive overview of approaches to teaching the complex subject of content management. The 12 chapters define and explain content management and its accompanying competencies, providing teaching examples in areas including content strategy, topic-based writing, usability studies, and social media. The book covers tasks associated with content management such as analyzing audiences and using information architecture languages including XML and DITA. It highlights the communal aspects of content management, focusing on the work of writing stewardship and project management, and the characteristics of content management in global contexts. It concludes with a look to the future and the forces that shape content management today. The editor situates the collection within a pedagogical exigency, providing sound instructional approaches to teaching content management from a rhetorical perspective. The book is an essential resource for both instructors new to teaching technical and professional communication, and experienced instructors who are interested in upgrading their pedagogies to include content management.

This book explicates the relationships between design thinking, critical making, and socially responsive technical communication. It leverages the recent technology-powered DIY culture called "the Maker Movement" to identify how citizen innovation can inform cutting-edge social innovation that advocates for equitable change and progress on today’s "wicked" problems. After offering a succinct account of the origin and recent history of design thinking, along with its connections to the design paradigm in writing studies, the book analyzes maker culture and its influences on innovation and education through an ethnographic study of three academic makerspaces. It offers opportunities to cultivate a sense of critical changemaking in technical communication students and practitioners, showcasing examples of socially responsive innovation and expert interviews that urge a disciplinary attention to social justice advocacy and an embrace of the design-thinking principle of radical collaboration. The value of design thinking methodologies for teaching and practicing socially responsible technical communication are demonstrated as the author argues for a future in the field that sees its constituents as leaders in radical innovation to solve wicked social problems. This book is essential reading for instructors, students, and practitioners of technical communication, and can be used as a supplemental text for graduate and undergraduate courses in usability and user-centered design and research.

This collection calls for improved technical communication for the public through an embodied, situated understanding of environmental risk that promotes social justice. In addition to providing a series of chapters about recent issues on risk communication, this volume offers a diverse look at methodological practices for students, researchers, and practitioners looking to address embodied aspects of crisis and risk that incorporate UX, storytelling, and dynamic text. It includes chapters that bring embodiment to the forefront of risk communication, highlighting the cycle of content creation, dissemination, public response and decision making, continuing iterations of educational efforts, and recovery, toward increasing adaptive capacity as a whole. In addition, this work directs necessary attention to overcoming perceptual difficulties, memory lapses, definitional differences, access issues, and pedagogical problems in the communication of risks to diverse publics. This collection is essential reading for scholars and can be used as a supplemental text or casebook for courses in technical communication, environmental communication, risk and crisis communication, science communication, and public health.

This practical text offers a research-based account of the technical communication profession and its practice, outlining emergent touchpoints of this fast-changing field while highlighting its diversity. Through research on the history and the globalization of technical communication and up-to-date industry analysis, including first-hand narratives from industry practitioners, this book brings together common threads through the industry, suggests future trends, and points toward strategic routes for development. Vignettes from the workplace and examples of industry practice provide tangible insights into the different paths and realities of the field, furnishing readers with a range of entry routes and potential career sectors, workplace communities, daily activities, and futures. This approach is central to helping readers understand the diverse competencies of technical communicators in the modern, globalized economy. The Profession and Practice of Technical Communication provides essential guidance for students, early professionals, and lateral entrants to the profession and can be used as a textbook for technical communication courses.

Editing in the Modern Classroom is a research‐based collection that defines the current state of technical editing pedagogy and plots a potential roadmap for its future. It examines current academic and professional editing practices, the global and corporate contexts of technical communication programs, and the role of new challenges such as content management in order to assess what should be expected from editing courses today and how instructors can best structure their courses to meet these expectations. It provides a research foundation to determine where changes are needed, and points to areas where additional research must be done to support further curricular and pedagogical innovations. Editing in the Modern Classroom challenges instructors to look deeper at the pedagogical aspects of what makes up an effective technical editing course at undergraduate and graduate levels and provides them with comprehensive and evidence-based resources to design and teach these courses.

Detailed yet accessible, Translation and Localization brings together the research and insights of veteran practicing translators to offer comprehensive guidance for technical communicators. The volume begins with the fundamentals of translation before leading readers through the process of preparing technical documents for translation. It then presents the broader area of localization, again beginning with its key competencies. Concluding chapters examine the state of the field as computers take on more translation and localization work. Featuring real-life scenarios and a broad range of experienced voices, this is an invaluable resource for technical and professional communicators looking to expand into international markets.

This is the first scholarly monograph marking the social justice turn in technical and professional communication (TPC). Social justice often draws attention to structural oppression, but to enact social justice as technical communicators, first, we must be able to trace daily practice to the oppressive structures it professionalizes, codifies, and normalizes. Technical Communication After the Social Justice Turn moves readers from conceptual explorations of oppression and justice to a theoretical framework that allows for the concepts to be applied and implemented in a variety of practical contexts. It historicizes the recent social justice turn in TPC scholarship, models a social justice approach to building theories and heuristics, and presents scenarios that illustrate how to develop sustainable practices of activism and social justice. Its commitment to coalition building, inclusivity, and socially just practices of citation and activism will support scholars, teachers, and practitioners not only in understanding how the work of technical communication is often complicit in oppression but also in recognizing, revealing, rejecting, and replacing oppressive practices.

Peter Hanks defends a new theory about the nature of propositional content. According to this theory, the basic bearers of representational properties are particular mental or spoken actions. Propositions are types of these actions, which we use to classify and individuate our attitudes and speech acts. Hanks abandons several key features of the traditional Fregean conception of propositional content, including the idea that propositions are the primary bearers of truth-conditions, the distinction between content and force, and the concept of entertainment. The main difficulty for this traditional conception is the problem of the unity of the proposition, the problem of explaining how propositions have truth conditions and other representational properties. The new theory developed here, in its place, explains the unity of propositions and provides new solutions to a long list of puzzles and problems in philosophy of language.