CCR 760: Textual Coordination and Curation

Discussion Questions for Investing Textual Curation

We are interested in focusing on three topics of discussion that were gathered from our readings. Based on the kinds of technical communication described in our readings:

• How do conceptualizations and practices of invention transform?
• How are these authors alluding to what counts as “good writing”?
• Who has authority in the kind of writing described by our authors?

A theme that seemed to resonate for us throughout each of the texts was authors’ tendency to view textual coordination as a type of “remixing” of already existing texts:

• Slattery explains ways in which TCers borrow, move around, and re-use information. One strategy he describes is “Modifying,” a strategy where “writers were more often responsible for changing text and images than for creating them” (356, emphasis added).
• Jones found in his study of corporate writers collaborating that “the writers focused less on producing text and more on developing, coordinating, and structuring the newly adopted corporate intranet” (456, emphasis added).
• Describing the curation in Chambers’ Preface to Cyclopædia, Kennedy explains that “the Encyclopedic Author is…a compiler, assessor, and re-composer of texts” (123, emphasis added). She illustrates that “rather than aligning himself primarily with the first canon, invention, he sees his work as more closely integrated with the second canon, arrangement” (125).

If most folks in our field understand invention as prewriting and brainstorming towards creating original ideas, culminating as the fruit of reading, research, and writing labors, then how might these authors’ claims challenge such traditional notions? What may be problematic in privileging one definition of invention over the other?

In Jason Alexander’s plenary presentation last Thursday, he posed some interesting questions about the Cs position statement online that explains goals for how students might create “well-composed” essays. Alexander then asked his audience, “What does ‘well-composed’ mean?” and “Who gets to determine what well-composed means?” With his provocative questions in mind, we were struck by the following excerpts from this week’s authors:

• Slattery’s title, for example, reads, “Technical Communication as Textual Coordination: An Argument for the Value of Writers’ Skill with Information Technology.”
• Also in Slattery’s text, Carliner is quoted for describing qualifications of information designers: “They must be broad thinkers…The must be comfortable designing interfaces and interaction…have a good ‘eye’ for the visual look of a communication product and a good ‘ear’ for its verbal tone” (Qtd. in Slattery, 353, emphasis added).
• Kennedy argues that “we can best understand this [encyclopedic] author as a textual curator in much the same sense as a museum curator: working to bring together the best textual samples available, assessing their quality, arranging entries in the most effective order, and writing a variety of additional texts to transform the gathered elements into a cohesive whole” (123).

With Alexander’s charge in mind, we ask: What is this “writers’ skill” that Slattery speaks of? How can we define for both instructors and students of TC what it means to be “broad thinkers” with “a good ‘eye’” and “a good ‘ear’”? Is it clear from our readings what “skills” are “best” and “most effective”? Can we imagine how these skills might be understood and described?

Last, we noticed these quotes as speaking to issues of agency and authorship of TC textual “products”:

• “[TCers] seldom get to call the shots in terms of what tools they will use for this inherently collaborative effort. Client preferences almost always dictate the medium in which documentation will be published and the technologies that will be used for storing, retrieving, producing, and providing feedback on texts” (Slattery 357).
• According to Jones, writers in his study worked on “a collection of documents rather than a document in and of itself” through “an ongoing project with no end” (Jones 462).
• Referencing Wikipedia, Kennedy illuminates that “Originality” in Widipedia “is explicitly banned, to the point of specifying which possible peripheral forms of originality are not allowed” (120). Referencing Cyclopædia, she explains that “The basic goals of the textual situation at hand determine the form of authorship that can be successfully employed….The author’s agency, then, is indeed effected by both the demands of the rhetorical situation and form” (121).

Based on these examples (and any others you can think of), who—and (perhaps more interesting) what—has agency in technical writing in scenarios like those above? How do these constructs challenge romantic notions of the single author acting as “solitary genius” and “legal owner” over some supposedly “finalized,” “creative,” and “original” product?

Post-Activity Reflective Framework

1. Based on the Collaboration Continuum framed by Jones, what kinds of collaboration did you participate in with your groups? What challenges/benefits were apparent?
2. Imagining you took a different approach than you did, what other strategies/practices might have you undertaken? In other words, how might the co-authoring and collaboration have been enacted differently while obtaining the same ends?

From Slattery:

Techniques of Mediation

• The author presents some of the patters that emerged from his study:
• Textual re-use: “the re-use of information (such as phrasing or formatting) from existing texts to produce new documents” (355).
• Whole-cloth (open doc, rename it, edit it for new purpose)
• Pastiche (copy/paste from selected sources)
• Direct and indirect incorporation (copy or change depends on the “fit”)
• Feedback sometimes solicited
• Remediation of information (“the need to move information from one medium to another” 355)
• Retrieving (retrieving necessary information from/about client and/or document systems)
• Staging (“ability to manipulate electronic and print documents”)
• Producing (adding new information, words, formatting, etc.)
• Modifying (more likely to change/edit rather than invent)
• Sharing (collaborative work; social awareness needed)
• Dissemination (media and audience awareness