Mark A. Hannah

Legal Literacy: Coproducing the Law in Technical Communication

This article discusses the need for technical communicators to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between law and their work. The author reviews the disciplines literature regarding the relationship between law and technical communication and argues that technical communicators must learn to see themselves as coproducers of the law. To that end, the author offers pedagogical strategies for helping technical communication students develop skills for recognizing the legal implications of their work.

Innovation in the Knowledge Age: implications for collaborative science

Current trends validate the notion that multifaceted, multimodal interdisciplinary collaborations lead to increased research productivity in publications and citations, compared to those achieved by individual researchers. Moreover, it may be that scientific breakthroughs are increasingly achieved by interdisciplinary research teams. Nonetheless, despite the perceived importance of collaboration and its bibliometric benefits, today’s scientists are still trained to be autonomous, work individually, and encourage their graduate students to do the same—perpetuating values which impede the creation of collaborative space between disciplines. As a consequence, scientists working in teams typically report serious obstacles to collaboration. This paper builds off of recent recommendations from a 2015 National Academies report on the state of team science which emphasizes greater definition of roles, responsibility, accountability, goals, and milestones. However, these recommendations do not address the subjective, relational components of collaboration which can drive innovation and creativity. The relational side of collaboration is key to understanding the capacity and capabilities of the knowledge workers, such as scientists and engineers, who comprise interdisciplinary research teams. The authors’ recommendations, grounded in organizational communication and knowledge worker literature, include a renewed focus on the process of organizing through communication rather than focusing on organization as an outcome or consequence of teamwork, leading and cultivating team members rather than managing them, and the need to address self-driven, rather than external, motivations to engage in knowledge work.

Flipping the Audience Script: An Activity That Integrates Research and Audience Analysis

This article describes a flipped classroom activity that requires students to integrate research and audience analysis. The activity uses Twitter as a data source. In the activity, students identify a sample, collect customer tweets, and analyze the language of the tweets in an effort to construct knowledge about an audience’s values, needs, and attitudes. The article first presents an overview of audience analysis frameworks. It then presents a step-by-step tutorial for integrating the activity. The authors also provide business communication instructors with resources for implementing the activity including video lectures, handouts, and instructional guides.

Drawing From Available Means: Assessing the Rhetorical Dimensions of Facebook Practice

A company’s presence on Facebook plays an important role in engaging its customer base. However, little empirical work has fully examined the nature and impact of corporate Facebook posts on engagement. In this study, we analyzed 680 Facebook posts collected from a sample of six companies over a period of 12 months. We examined variables including post frequency, content type, illocutionary act, linking style, and media. We found that entertainment posts were more engaging than operational news and innovation posts. Educational posts were also more engaging than innovation posts. With regard to illocutionary acts, expressives, or posts that express the writer’s emotion, were more engaging than all other illocutionary acts. Additionally, representative posts were more engaging than directive posts. For linking style, we discovered that posts containing no link were actually more engaging than posts with an external link. We also found a significant interaction between content type and linking practice, which indicates that linking style influences the effectiveness of some content types in engaging audiences. Finally, we found that companies overwhelmingly relied on the use of text and images in their posts over video and image galleries. We speculate that content that removes a user from the Facebook “universe” (e.g., a link or a video) actually may demotivate a user to engage with the original content of the post. We discuss these results from a rhetorical perspective and provide insight for corporate Facebook practices.

Cultivating conditions for access: A case for ''case-making'' in graduate student preparation for interdisciplinary research

Gaining access to interdisciplinary research sites poses unique research challenges to technical and professional communication scholars and practitioners. Drawing on applied experiences in externally funded interdisciplinary research projects and scholarship about interdisciplinary research, this article describes a training protocol for preparing graduate students to understand the dynamic nature of access in interdisciplinary work as well as to develop a capacity for making a case about the value of their expertise in interdisciplinary research contexts. The authors situate the training protocol in the context of three distinct phases of case-making (individual, relational, and speculative) and note how the conditions for negotiating access vary within and across these phases. The authors conclude by describing implications to graduate students and faculty for theorizing access in this way and developing training to support graduate students’ negotiation of access in interdisciplinary work.

Mapping the Terrain: Examining the Conditions for Alignment Between the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine and the Medical Humanities

ABSTRACT This article offers an empirical study of literature in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) and the medical humanities (MH). Article traces the topics, funding mechanisms, research methods, theoretical frameworks, evidence types, audience, discourse arrangement patterns, and action orientation that constitute the scholarship in the sample to offer a landscape of the current state of RHM and the MH. Findings can be leveraged to assess the potential for alignment between these fields for future research.

The social help desk: examining how Twitter is used as a technical support tool

Technical support, a traditional practice of technical communication, is rapidly changing due to the ubiquitous use of digital technologies (Spinuzzi, 2007). In fact, many technology companies now have dedicated Twitter accounts specifically for providing technical support to end users. In response to this changing technical support landscape, we conducted an empirical study of Twitter-based interactions among six companies and their customers in order to examine the nature of the emerging technical support genre on Twitter. Among other findings, we discovered technical support was widely sought among the customers of the companies studied (Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Samsung, Hewlett Packard, and Dell) with nearly 200,000 tweets recorded in just a 38-day timespan. We also found a majority of individuals used Twitter to complain about a brand as opposed to seeking support for a specific technical problem. In our entry, we discuss the implications of these and other findings for technical communication practitioners and researchers who design for technical documentation in social media contexts.

Bridge the planetary divide

To explain why our planet is habitable, geoscientists studying Earths surface and interior must work with each other and with communications scholars, write Ariel D. Anbar, Christy B. Till and Mark A. Hannah.

Meeting Students Where They Are: Advancing a Theory and Practice of Archives in the Classroom.

This article uses theories of technical communication and archives to advance a pedagogy that includes archival production in the technical communication classroom. By developing and maintaining local classroom archives, students directly engage in valuable processes of appraisal, selection, collaboration, and retention. The anticipated outcomes of this work are the critical practice of making connections, the decentering of the self, the ability to work through noise, and the ability to imagine future users of the archive. The authors conclude that local classroom archives are one new means of meaningful instruction in the technical communication classroom and the local archive concept has great potential for further development.