This article examines a system of organizational keypunch identification technology between 1966 and 1972 via diachronous actor-network theory (ANT 2.0) visualized with ForceAtlas2, a network spatialization algorithm. This article’s greatest impacts lay in its analytic focus on programs and antiprograms and its evolution of existing visualization methodology, most notably by incorporating community detection and partitioning, which helps scholars and readers more easily identify macrotrends in the evolution of networks.

In this article, I examine and contextualize a selection of award-winning data visualizations created by W. E. B. Du Bois and his team for the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, France. I show that Du Bois’s success with these data visualizations is partially attributable to the ways in which he merged artistic creativity with statistical empiricism to overcome the practical and ideological constraints of his rhetorical situation, namely a need to be seen amongst the fair’s larger spectacle and a refutation of the “scientific” racism that pervaded academia at the time. The research presented confirms Du Bois as an important but previously unrecognized progenitor of data visualization and therefore deserving of much more recognition in the fields of technical and professional communication (TPC) and data visualization than he currently receives. Ultimately, I argue that his achievement recommends useful lessons for contemporary scholars, practitioners, and pedagogues of TPC and data design.

By utilizing rhetorical analysis with a focus on agency and feminist rhetoric, this article focuses on China’s most popular pregnancy and mothering app – Babytree – to examine how users assume the mantle of technical writers, writing their pregnant and mothering experiences into online narratives and selling them to generate income. This article shows how Chinese women take advantage of the technical affordances of Babytree to share their embodied experiences and, in so doing, respond to and push back against the traditional norms of motherhood and healthcare provision. The women whose experiences are examined here participate in social media as a way to reenter job markets by using their embodied experiences, thus asserting their rhetorical agency politically and economically while implicitly critiquing the traditional situation of contemporary pregnant women and the state of motherhood in China.

Technical communication research has relied heavily on participatory, user-focused strategies as well as “participative”, posthuman frameworks. Both research methodologies have various strengths, yet also have been critiqued for underplaying the role of human and non-human agency (respectively) in rhetorical situations. Through an analysis of an urban planning comic book, I suggest that turning to the Greek concept of methexis – or “participation” – may help technical communication researchers bridge posthuman and user-centered investigative approaches.

This article offers a revision to an existing social science methodology, Q methodology, through “Q-Rhetoric.” After detailing Q methodology’s theoretical underpinnings and practical method, and persistent critiques of the methodology, the article employs perspectives from rhetorical theory and Amerindian anthropology to suggest a methodological correction. It concludes by detailing the use of Q-Rhetoric to intervene in a Wisconsin stream management controversy, proposing Q-Rhetoric as a pragmatic and theoretically sound methodology for working across disciplinary divides.

This case study is based on a research through design project (RTD) that focuses on a technical communication video of the live-action format. It investigates the usability and design-implications of a live-action how-to video, by means of analyzing user-centered data such as YouTube analytics data, usability, and comprehension assessments. In the study, four key live-action video affordances are identified: verifiability, comparability, recordability, and visibility. The identification of these affordances when related to the users’ assessments resulted in several design implementations that would warrant sought-for communication efficacies. Findings show that some assumed efficacies appear to be mitigated by the complexity and the density of the video information. One implication of this is that the implementation of conventional video editing techniques and the addition of on-screen text that serve to make content briefer and more concise into instructional live-action videos requires the technical communicator’s careful consideration.

This article extends new materialist theorizing on the constructive role played by the physical stuff of the world. Specifically, it draws on Kenneth Burke’s writings on recalcitrance to theorize the materialities of rhetorical invention. It takes X-rays as a case study in recalcitrance-driven invention, focusing on two particular applications, traditional medical X-rays, a pervasive category of contemporary technical communication, and backscatter X-ray airport security scans, a controversial and short-lived one. Its analysis shows how recalcitrance (1) is harnessed as means of technical invention and (2) is key to invention’s bidirectionality, by which our material interventions, in turn, work upon us.

Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Jihadist organizations such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) have focused increasingly on motivating unaffiliated individuals in the United States and Western countries to carry out lone-wolf attacks in their home countries. To this end, many Jihadist organizations produce what is known as tactical technical communication. Jihadist tactical technical communication persuades individuals to act by creating identification between individuals and audiences, and by associating terrorist tactics with everyday practices such as cooking.

The book Rhetorical Touch by Shannon Walters opens with a reference to 18th-century philosopher Etienne Bonnot, abbe de Condillac’s Treatise of the Sensations in which he argues that all other sens...

This article examines the inter-relational role of genre and narrative in a social justice organization. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this test presents a process-centered approach using genre ecology modeling and narrative maps. This approach can help scholars understand how genre and narrative dialectically promote collaboration and coordination while simultaneously promoting the process of consubstantiality and rhetorical identification in networked organizations.

Reading historical intelligence community documents primarily through the lens of Kenneth Burke's essay "Semantic and Poetic Meaning," this article explores the history and stakes of the intelligence community's ongoing commitment to a problematic model of language use. The essay argues that the intelligence community's pursuit of a "mathematical" ideology of language is an attempt to render language "neutral" and to divorce rhetoric from ethics in ways that Burke anticipated, and with negative consequences for the generation of written intelligence reports and national policy decisions.

Much has been written about how to evaluate static graphics from the perspective of clarity, ethics, efficiency, and power relations. However, when considering interactive graphics, agency must enter the conversation. This article develops a typology to understand the balance of agency between the designers and users of interactive graphics. The authors use this typology to interrogate 2 contemporary theories of rhetorical agency advanced by Miller and by Herndl and Licona.

This article examines 3 papers presented before the Cincinnati Academy of Medicine by 19th-century physician Julia W. Carpenter. The article identifies 3 strategies Carpenter used to negotiate the incompatible rhetorical expectations for women and for physicians. The published records of academy discussions provide evidence for Carpenter's colleagues' reactions to each strategy, revealing the complexity of her rhetorical situation and demonstrating the complex links among rhetorical practice, professional identity, and a communicator's social position.

This article builds on scholarship in technical communication, medical rhetoric, and visual communication and represents a portion of a grounded study of one medical workplace setting's visualization practices. Specifically, the author explores how medical images—as technologically and rhetorically rendered artifacts—make “present” (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969 Perelman , C. , & Olbrechts-Tyteca , L. ( 1969 ). The new rhetoric . Notre Dame , IN : University of Notre Dame Press . [Google Scholar]) the material characteristics of disease and thereby perceptually and argumentatively afford the construction of knowledge about future cancer-care action.

Abstract Drawing on interviews from a qualitative study, this article extends theorizing about rhetorical agency and resistance by analyzing how breastfeeding advocates and their clients resist medical regulatory rhetoric. The resistant acts that interviewees describe begin with a negotiation of discursive alternatives and subject positions framed by the grid of disciplinary rhetoric about breastfeeding. But in some acts of resistance, breastfeeding women use both discursive and bodily actions to disrupt the intelligibility of this grid and what it deems possible. When such disruption occurs, the results are unpredictable and so must be understood as more than the occupation of preexisting subject positions.

Abstract Preparing students for civic engagement requires new knowledge about the uses of documents for advocacy and social change. Substantial social change results from repeated rather than from single rhetorical acts. Reconsideration of the rhetorical canon of delivery suggests expanding the concept beyond its present connection to publication (visual design, medium) to a rhetorical situation comprehensively defined. Delivery may take place over time and embrace a web of activities including field work, updates, and interconnections with other publications.

Abstract This article explores the writing of archaeologists to argue that the metaphor of context-as-rhetorical-situation may understate the power that context has to shape scientific discourse. The author offers instead the metaphor of context-as-active-agent in the rhetorical situation—one that sometimes reifies values that are dangerous to the archaeologists' belief systems. As scholars of technical writing, we must develop a greater understanding of the subtle but powerful influences that context wields on the writing we read and help to produce.

This article argues that fact sheets produced by environmental activists in response to proposed nuclear waste repositories constitute a new genre of scientific rhetoric. By analyzing the rhetorical features of these texts, including the simultaneous reliance on and distrust of scientific evidence, this article demonstrates how effective environmental activists' texts can be, in spite of the constraints and pressures of their rhetorical situation.

Abstract This article answers Carl Hemdl's call for furthering critical approaches to research in professional communication by forwarding Kenneth Burke's concepts of symbolic action, dramatism, and the pentad. This article illustrates, through an analysis of data gathered in a case study of technical writers, how Burke provides us with tools that can produce more varied terministic screens for how critical researchers conceptualize, interpret, and analyze workplace communication.

The Presentation of Technical Information. 3rd ed. Reginald Kapp. Letchworth, Hertfordshire, UK: The Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators, 1998. 136 pages. User‐Centered Technology: A Rhetorical Theory for Computers and Other Mundane Artifacts. Robert R. Johnson. Albany: SUNY P, 1998. 195 pages. Ethics in Technical Communication: Shades of Gray. Lori Allen and Dan Voss. New York: Wiley, 1997. 410 pages. The Dynamics of Writing Review: Opportunities for Growth and Change in the Workplace. Susan M. Katz. Vol. 5 in the ATTW Contemporary Studies in Technical Communication. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1998. 134 pages. Essays in the Study of Scientific Discourse: Methods, Practice, and Pedagogy. Ed. John T. Battalio. Vol. 6 in the ATTW Contemporary Studies in Technical Communication. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1998. 264 pages. Outlining Goes Electronic. Jonathan Price. Vol. 9 in the ATTW Contemporary Studies in Technical Communication. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1999. 177 pages (including bibliography and indexes). Wiring the Writing Center. Ed. Eric H. Hobson. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 1998. 254 pages. Inventing the Internet. Janet Abbate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. 264 pages.

Medical rhetoric has long been characterized by a focus on disease and on the physician as healer. Now, in the era of managed health care, patients are increasingly being viewed as agents in the management of their own chronic diseases. This article examines the concept of patient agency from a rhetorical perspective in lay and professional medical discourse relating to diabetes care. Kenneth Burke's dramatistic pentad is used as a tool to help uncover and analyze sites where values appear ambiguous. This study shows that patient agency is closely related to patient compliance in the language of biomedicine. The terms "compliance" and "adherence" operate as terrninistic screens in professional discourse and serve to limit discussion of patient agency. In managed health care, tension is evident between the trend toward greater patient agency and the constraints of biomedical text conventions concerning doctor and patient roles.

This article employs aspects of Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative action and his concept of a lifeworld, alongside composition theory's use of community, to examine the effectiveness of guilt as a rhetorical strategy in two national environmental publications. It finds that, ultimately, for long-term cdmmunicative action to occur, environmental groups should not rely on guilt as a rhetorical strategy because outside their "discourse communities," it will not lead to "dialogue, deliberation, and consensus-building."

Technical communication scholars have argued that communication skills can be used to promote and enhance ethical uses of technology. This essay articulates a related view: technical communicators should remain cognizant of the ways that technologies can inhibit ethical communication practices. The author proposes a framework for evaluating the degree to which communication technologies promote ethical communication. This framework's applicability is then demonstrated in an explication of the ethical problems associated with “Caller Identification.”;

The instructor and students in a technical writing class constitute a complex organizational unit with an array of interests, needs, values, and agendas. The need to negotiate and define both shared and conflicting goals and assumptions presents a richly problematical rhetorical situation. In this context, we can use the old standard organizational genre, the memo, in ways that are both rhetorically and pedagogically rich, helping students to write themselves—and their instructors—into a more vital, satisfying, and effective learning environment.

Although “community”; is an important concept for writing, writers have been unclear about how a sense of community relates to the writing process or to the documents produced. This study reports a comparison of several technical reports showing the influences of a writer's identification with a community on features of the resulting document. Features most affected were personal and community references within the document, writer's stance toward the reader, and definition of the rhetorical problem.

Classical rhetoric's ability to inform and empower the teaching of technical writing has been for the most part ignored in technical writing textbooks. This absence is curious, given the enormous body of scholarly material affirming classical rhetoric's usefulness for that purpose. While teachers wait for textbooks with explicitly classical roots, three key concepts can provide the basic framework for incorporating classical rhetorical theory into contemporary technical writing studies.

Developing alliances with industry may be one of the primary factors in creating a technical communication program that blends sound rhetorical theory and pedagogy with the discourse knowledge of technical communication practitioners. Creating an Advisory Board is one way to forge this alliance. This article describes how such a board was created, the influence it had upon program development, and the insights both industry and academia gained from this alliance. Although industry and academia are not the same, both had overlapping goals: to develop a symbiotic relationship that would provide students and faculty with the technological expertise practicing technical communicators could offer, but, at the same time, to provide a construct true to the missions of a liberal education.