Winner of the 2007 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Award for Best Collection of Essays on Technical and Scientific Communication The first book to focus on the intersection of cultural studies and technical communication, Critical Power Tools draws on various traditions of cultural studies to develop new or expanded theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical approaches to technical communication. Offered as a sourcebook for the field, the book is organized into three parts. The first section, emphasizing theory building, reconceptualizes key concepts or practices, such as usability, through a cultural studies lens. The second section illustrates alternative research methods through several case studies. The third section offers critical and productive pedagogical approaches, including specific assignments, applicable to both undergraduate and graduate courses.

Grounded in authentic workplace scenarios, the step-by-step approach of POWER TOOLS FOR TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION prepares students for real world communication and workplace problem solving.

A unique, integrative, team-centered approach to writing and formatting technical documents Technical Professionals: Do you have difficulty producing high-quality documents with multiple contributors when faced with a tight deadline? Do you need a process that enables global team members to collaborate online as they produce sophisticated documents? Do you prefer the ease of a WYSIWG desktop publishing tool like Microsoft Word rather than more complex software like LaTeX? Professors and Graduate Students: Do you want to streamline the process of writing multi-investigator papers, reports, proposals, and books? Do you spend a lot of time formatting documents instead of thinking and writing? Do you write research papers in Microsoft Word and then need to convert them to LaTeX for your thesis? Do you write research papers in LaTeX and then need to convert them to Microsoft Word when embarking on collaborations with your colleagues from industry? Undergraduate Students: Do you need to write a research paper and don't know where to start? Do you need to collaborate with classmates on a long paper and find yourself lost in organizational details rather than immersed in the content? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, Technical Writing for Teams: The STREAM Tools Handbook is for you. It provides an easy-to-learn system that streamlines individual and collaborative writing, allowing you and your teams to instantly become more productive and create the highest quality documents in a minimum amount of time. Introduced here are the STREAM Tools—Scientific and Technical wRiting, Editing, And file Management Tools—which unlock your collaborators' potential and addresses team dynamics, separation of duties, and workflow. You'll see how to ensure compatibility among multiple writers, achieve consistent formatting, organize content, integrate bibliographic databases, automate the process of document preparation, and move content between Microsoft Word and LaTeX. Checklists, guidelines, and success stories are also included to help you operate as efficiently as possible. From planning and editing documents to solving common team writing problems to managing workflow, Technical Writing for Teams: The STREAM Tools Handbook is the one-stop reference that allows teams to collaborate successfully and create unified, effective documents.

Drawing on social justice methodologies and cultural studies scholarship, Key Theoretical Frameworks offers new curricular and pedagogical approaches to teaching technical communication. Including original essays by emerging and established scholars, the volume educates students, teachers, and practitioners on identifying and assessing issues of social justice and globalization. The collection provides a valuable resource for teachers new to translating social justice theories to the classroom by presenting concrete examples related to technical communication. Each contribution adopts a particular theoretical approach, explains the theory, situates it within disciplinary scholarship, contextualizes the approach from the author’s experience, and offers additional teaching applications. The first volume of its kind, Key Theoretical Frameworks links the theoretical with the pedagogical in order to articulate, use, and assess social justice frameworks for designing and teaching courses in technical communication. Contributors: Godwin Y. Agboka, Matthew Cox, Marcos Del Hierro, Jessica Edwards, Erin A. Frost, Elise Verzosa Hurley, Natasha N. Jones, Cruz Medina, Marie E. Moeller, Kristen R. Moore, Donnie Johnson Sackey, Gerald Savage, J. Blake Scott, Barbi Smyser-Fauble, Kenneth Walker, Rebecca Walton

The field of technical communication is rapidly expanding in both the academic world and the private sector, yet a problematic divide remains between theory and practice. Here Stuart A. Selber and Johndan Johnson-Eilola, both respected scholars and teachers of technical communication, effectively bridge that gap. Solving Problems in Technical Communication collects the latest research and theory in the field and applies it to real-world problems faced by practitioners—problems involving ethics, intercultural communication, new media, and other areas that determine the boundaries of the discipline. The book is structured in four parts, offering an overview of the field, situating it historically and culturally, reviewing various theoretical approaches to technical communication, and examining how the field can be advanced by drawing on diverse perspectives. Timely, informed, and practical, Solving Problems in Technical Communication will be an essential tool for undergraduates and graduate students as they begin the transition from classroom to career.

Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work provides action-focused resources and tools—heuristics, methodologies, and theories—for scholars to enact social justice. These resources support the work of scholars and practitioners in conducting research and teaching classes in socially just ways. Each chapter identifies a tool, highlights its relevance to technical communication, and explains how and why it can prepare technical communication scholars for socially just work. For the field of technical and professional communication to maintain its commitment to this work, how social justice intersects with inclusivity through UX, technological, civic, and legal literacies, as well as through community engagement, must be acknowledged. Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work will be of significance to established scholar-teachers and graduate students, as well as to newcomers to the field. Contributors: Kehinde Alonge, Alison Cardinal, Erin Brock Carlson, Oriana Gilson, Laura Gonzales, Keith Grant-Davie, Angela Haas, Mark Hannah, Kimberly Harper, Sarah Beth Hopton, Natasha Jones, Isidore Kafui Dorpenyo, Liz Lane, Emily Legg, Nicole Lowman, Kristen Moore, Emma Rose, Fernando Sanchez, Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Adam Strantz, Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq, Josephine Walwema, Miriam Williams, Han Yu

Veterinary medicine has long been recognized as one of the more neglected areas of medical history. One of the main stumbling blocks to research is the lack of comprehensive information regarding the survival and availability of primary source material. Veterinary Medicine: A Guide to Historical Sources redresses these issues for the first time, offering researchers an unparalleled tool with which to approach the subject. The book opens with a brief history of veterinary medicine and the veterinary profession from the fourteenth to the beginning of the twenty first centuries, identifying the key dates and events that shaped their development. There then follows a chapter on the nature and uses of the records covered by the book, outlining the types of records found, the type of information they contain and their likely uses by different types of researcher. A brief user's guide then explains how to use the book. After these preliminary sections, comes the main body of the book, the lists of records. It is here that the various practices and institutions covered by the book are listed, together with the types of records they hold, the dates they cover and where they are kept. A short biographical history is also included with each entry where appropriate. Taken as a whole this volume will prove to be an invaluable aid for any scholar, researching the history of veterinary medicine in Britain.

Scholars, teachers, and practitioners of organizational, professional, and technical communication and rhetoric are target audiences for a new book that reaches across those disciplines to explore the dynamics of the Holocaust. More than a history, the book uses the extreme case of the Final Solution to illumine the communicative constitution of organizations and to break new ground on destructive organizational communication and ethics. Deadly Documents: Technical Communication, Organizational Discourse, and the Holocaust—Lessons from the Rhetorical Work of Everyday Texts starts with a microcosmic look at a single Nazi bureau. Through close rhetorical, visual, and discursive analyses of organizational and technical documents produced by the SS Security Police Technical Matters Group—the bureau that managed the Nazi mobile gas van program—author Mark Ward shows how everyday texts functioned as “boundary objects” on which competing organizational interests could project their own interpretations and temporarily negotiate consensus for their parts in the Final Solution. The initial chapters of Deadly Documents provide a historical ethnography of the SS technical bureau by closely describing the institutional and organizational cultures in which it operated and relating organizational stories told in postwar testimony by the desk-murderers themselves. Then, through examination of the primary material of their documents, Ward demonstrates how this Social Darwinist world of competing Nazi bureaucrats deployed rhetorical and linguistic resources to construct a social reality that normalized genocide. Ward goes beyond the usual Weberian bureaucratic paradigm and applies to the problem of the Holocaust both the interpretive view that sees organizations as socially constructed through communication and the postmodern view that denies the notion of a preexisting social object called an “organization” and instead situates it within larger discourses. The concluding chapters trace how contemporary scholars of professional communication have wrestled with the Nazi case and developed a consensus explanation that the desk-murderers were amoral technocrats. Though the explanation is dismissed by most historians, it nevertheless offers, Ward argues, a comforting distance between “us” and “them.” Yet, as Ward writes, “First, we will learn more about the dynamic role of everyday texts in organizational processes. Second, as we see these processes—perhaps inherent to all organized communities, including our own—at work even in the extreme case of the SS Technical Matters Group, the comforting distance that we now maintain between ‘them’ and ‘us’ is necessarily diminished. And third, our newfound discomfort may open productive spaces to revisit conventional wisdoms about the ethics of technical and organizational communication.”

The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, comprising of seven volumes, now in its fourth edition, compiles the contributions of major researchers and practitioners and explores the cultural institutions of more than 30 countries. This major reference presents over 550 entries extensively reviewed for accuracy in seven print volumes or online. The new fourth edition, which includes 55 new entires and 60 revised entries, continues to reflect the growing convergence among the disciplines that influence information and the cultural record, with coverage of the latest topics as well as classic articles of historical and theoretical importance.

English Studies Online: Programs, Practices, Possibilities represents a collection of essays by established teacher-scholars across English Studies who offer critical commentary on how they have worked to create and sustain high-impact online programs (majors, minors, certificates) and courses in the field. Ultimately, these chapters explore the programs and classroom practices that can help faculty across English Studies to think carefully and critically about the changes that online education affords us, the rich possibilities such courses and programs bring, and some potential problems they can introduce into our department and college ecologies. By highlighting both innovative pedagogies and hybrid methods, the authors in our collection demonstrate how we might engage these changes more productively. Divided into three interrelated conversations — practices, programs, and possibilities — the essays in this collection demonstrate some of the innovative pedagogical work going on in English departments around the United States in order to highlight how both hybrid and fully online programs in English Studies can help us to more meaningfully and purposefully enact the values of a liberal arts education. This collection serves as both a cautionary history of teaching practices and programs that have developed in English Studies and a space to support faculty and administrators in making the case for why and how humanities disciplines can be important contributors to digital teaching and learning. Contributors include Joanne Addison, William P. Banks, Lisa Beckelhimer, Dev K. Bose, Elizabeth Burrows, Amy Cicchino, Erin A. Frost, Heidi Skurat Harris, John Havard, Marcela Hebbard, Stephanie Hedge, Ashley J. Holmes, George Jensen, Karen Kuralt, Michele Griegel-McCord, Samantha McNeilly, Lilian Mina, Catrina Mitchum, Janine Morris, Michael Neal, Cynthia Nitz Ris, Rochelle Rodrigo, Cecilia Shelton, Susan Spangler, Katelyn Stark, Eric Sterling, and Richard C. Taylor.