Martine Courant Rife

Coming to Content Management: Inventing Infrastructure for Organizational Knowledge Work

Two project profiles depict content management as inquiry-driven practice. The first profile reflects on a project for a national professional organization that began with a deceptively simple request to improve the organizations website, but ended with recommendations that ran to the very core mission of the organization. The second profile focuses on an organizations current authoring practices and tools in order to prepare for a significant change: allowing users to develop and organize content.

Ethos, Pathos, Logos, Kairos: Using a Rhetorical Heuristic to Mediate Digital-Survey Recruitment Strategies

How might the rhetorical strategies of ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos play a mediational, intervening role in the successful administration of online surveys? What are the general costs and benefits of conducting survey research? Based on the activity of administering an online survey ( N= 334) testing knowledge and understanding of US copyright law among digital writers (both students and teachers) in US technical and professional writing (TPW) programs, I blend Rhetorical Theory with Activity Theory by conducting a rhetorical analysis within an Activity Theory paradigm. I posit that a rhetorically informed heuristic mediates between the researcher and potential participants when the researcher attempts to recruit individuals to respond to an online survey.

Cross-Cultural Collisions in Cyberspace: Case Studies of International Legal Issues for Educators Working in Globally Networked Learning Environments

This article explores some of the legal and law-related challenges educators face in designing, implementing, and sustaining globally networked learning environments (GNLEs) in the context of conflicting international laws on intellectual property and censorship/free speech. By discussing cases and areas involving such legal issues, the article makes visible some of the issues educators may want to consider as they design courses and curricula. First, using the Pakistani–US case of Axact v. Student Network Resources, the author examines issues of authorship and the related issues of copyright law and plagiarism. The author then addresses questions, moral rights, and authorship using the French case of Turner v. Huston. Next, the author explores issues of free speech/censorship and defamation as they have arisen globally in the blogosphere. The author describes several specific instances where such issues have resulted in legal consequences for the digital writer involved. The author then develops a possible solution to some of these legal issues arising in GNLEs by way of the idea of ‘the commons’. In this area of the discussion, the author also examines Creative Commons licensing as well as problems with protecting the appropriation and exploitation of traditional knowledge, and the politics of defining ‘the commons’. The author draws on discussions around the global repatriation debate to inform her exploration in this section. Finally, the article concludes with some recommendations, taking into account the legal and law-related issues of copyright, plagiarism, censorship, defamation, and defining ‘the commons’ as these issues arise in GNLEs.

The “shock and awe“ of digital research design: Rhetorical strategies as mediational means in digital survey research

What are the challenges, affordances, and the role of rhetoric when conducting online survey research? As part of a two-year study on rhetorical invention in copyright imbued environments, the author used an online survey to examine knowledge and understanding of US copyright law among digital writers (both students and teachers) in randomly selected US technical/professional writing programs. In this paper focus is on the implications for digital survey research under an activity theory lens, where the rhetorical strategies of ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos were used to accomplish data collection (N=334). After briefly reviewing existing best practices of survey research and describing the digital survey, it is discussed how administering an online survey to the educational field of technical and professional writing presents certain challenges. The effectiveness of differing rhetorical strategies when conducting online survey research is discussed. A heuristic is offered to facilitate success in these types of studies.

Book Review: Technical Communication International: Today and the Future (Vol. 9) Schriften zur Techische Kommunikation, Band 8

Technical Communication International: Today and the Future is a useful book on a practical level but also a book that carries a powerful message for the field of technical communication. For academics and practitioners that travel regularly, the book is useful in preparing for international meetings or conference presentations because the chapters are arranged by country. Each chapter in the collection contains a survey of technical communication, or in some cases, technical “documentation,” in the relevant country. I have referenced and shared the chapters written on technical documentation in Canada and Denmark, and they have proved handy, quick reads. The book is a welcome addition to the small amount of literature currently available and the brief profiles provided on the Society for Technical Communication’s (2006) International Technical Communication Special Interest Group Web site. Although readers can use the chapters individually with reference to a particular location, they can obtain a global view of technical communication from a variety of perspectives by reading the entire collection. The book contains an introduction and 18 chapters written by a collection of authors from Germany, Switzerland, France, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, the United Kingdom, Romania, Spain, Russia, Israel, India, China, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and TCeurope, “the European umbrella organization for technical communication” (TCeurope, n.d.). Backgrounds of the authors vary. For example, the author of Australia’s chapter is a PhD student at the University of Canberra whereas the author of the New Zealand chapter works as a technical writer at a manufacturing company. The U.S. chapter is written by the late Kenneth Rainey, who was a professor at Southern Polytechnic State University, and the Canadian chapter is written by Geoffrey J. S. Hart, who works as a freelance scientific and technical editor and technical writer. Variety in the authors’ backgrounds adds to the appeal Journal of Business and Technical Communication Volume 21 Number 2 April 2007 227-235