This article presents a pilot study in agentive modeling, a mixed-methods approach for visualizing networked models of agency. The study assesses technical and public seismic risk visuals from the websites of key organizations concerned with seismic activity. Preliminary findings indicate the need for visuals that stage more complex networks in order to create greater opportunities for engagement and danger-reducing action.

I propose Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) as an approach for understanding the discursive and material implications of technical documents in distant sites. I provide a historical vignette of MCDA and exemplify how technical and professional communication (TPC) researchers can critically engage with distant sites through MCDA by analyzing materials about GhanaPostGPS, a geolocation technology. I conclude by discussing limitations of MCDA – access to archives – and propose the creation of crowdsourced technical documentation archives.

This study investigates how instructional design manifests in TPC pedagogies and where educators draw resources from. As TPC expands into areas in which instructional design traditionally governs, scholars need to discern how TPC distinguishes its specialty while providing training to support instructional design practices. Through textbook and syllabus analysis, coupled with instructor interviews, this study reports findings about instructional design pedagogy within TPC based on the themes gathered from the instructors’ experiences and existing resources.

ABSTRACTThis article argues that game design can be used to teach design thinking within a pedagogy of making. It analyzes qualitative survey responses from 12 writing teachers who asked students to design social justice games and argues that games not only give students practice in design thinking but that, as multimodal, embodied systems, games can enact social theories and, as such, be a way for students to empathize with and design for wicked social problems.KEYWORDS: Computer-based learningcritical theorypedagogical theoryrhetoric of technologysocial theoryusability studies Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsRebekah Shultz ColbyRebekah Shultz Colby is a Teaching Professor at the University of Denver. She has co-edited The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom and Rhetoric/Composition/Play through Video Games. She has published articles on using games to theorize and teach rhetoric and technical writing in Computers and Composition and Communication Design Quarterly.

In this paper, we investigate two approaches to building artificial neural network models to compare their effectiveness for accurately classifying rhetorical structures across multiple (non-binary) classes in small textual datasets. We find that the most accurate type of model can be designed by using a custom rhetorical feature list coupled with general-language word vector representations, which outperforms models with more computing-intensive architectures.

ABSTRACTThis article builds four composite characters from the international Zika response to demonstrate each role’s position relative to inclusive health communication. I argue that a lack of jurisdictional stasis is at play in decision-making practices about transnational risk communication approaches. During emergency health responses, this lack of jurisdictional stasis functions to maintain the status quo in order for stakeholders to leverage their power in prioritizing local deliberations in transnational public health discourse and decision making.KEYWORDS: Transnationalstasishealth communicationcommunity engagement Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. In keeping with norms of global health discourse and of the context of this study, I preserve the gendered language used by the organizations throughout this manuscript that refers to women and girls. Terms such as “women of reproductive age” are consistent with the WHO and were used nearly exclusively to refer to people with uteruses who could be affected by Zika in utero or by giving birth to a child with congenital Zika syndrome. This term also reflects the history of gender-based violence that has predominantly affected people assigned female at birth. That said, the author acknowledges that this language can be harmful and reductive, particularly because transgender and non-binary people with uteruses are reproductive agents and that people who identify as women of reproductive age may not be able or choose to reproduce.2. More recently, the global health discourse community has dropped “communication” from the disciplinary title to account for the various way that behavior change interventions can be broader than what’s traditionally considered “communication.”3. Often, in my experience, these issues were tabled for pandemic preparedness discussions or for “lessons learned” documents meant to support future outbreak responses.4. All names of individuals and organizations in the narrative composites are fictional.5. Here, I reference Galison’s (Citation1997) trading zone, referred to by Wilson and Herndl (Citation2007) in their argument that a knowledge map created a boundary object to facilitate understanding of how knowledge from different areas within the interdisciplinary group that they were working with created a zone through which knowledge important to disparate parties about a shared area of concern could pass.6. For more on empowerment, refer to chapter 4 of Dingo’s (Citation2012) Networking ArgumentsAdditional informationNotes on contributorsJulie GerdesJulie Gerdes is an assistant professor of technical and professional writing and rhetoric at Virginia Tech. She works at the intersection of technical communication and global public health. Her interdisciplinary research examines methodologies for understanding and implementing inclusive risk communication, particularly during public health emergencies.

This article examines how nonprofessionals in early modern England used tactical technical communication and rhetorical strategies to build medical knowledge and healthcare expertise. Using a feminist ethos and tactical technical communication lens, this article details a content analysis study of 4,045 handwritten medical recipes from England dated between 1540 and 1860. Findings from the study extend tactical technical communication by examining non-digital/non-internet spaces and how extra-institutional nonprofessionals build ethos and expertise.

This article asserts that auditory cues can be categorized by rhetorical function into the categories of visual rhetoric, defined by Amare and Manning under Peirce’s Ten Classes of Sign, understanding visual rhetoric to include both images and text. This article expands this definition to aural-visual rhetoric, including auditory elements as visual rhetoric to analyze multimodal Technical and Professional Communication (TPC), demonstrating this method using the opening tutorial scene from Portal 2.

This article offers an approach to providing identity-specific routes for engagement in pro-Black futures in distributed ways. We outline a model designed for Black practitioners and non-Black practitioners in professional environments to navigate their complex relationships given the historical, cultural, and social nature of coalitional work. We demonstrate this model as a possible pathway for situated and distributed everyday coalitional work through reflective and introspective storytelling based on individual and shared positionality.

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.

This article analyzes user work during open game development and presents an alternative model for participatory design. During open development, developers publicly distribute incomplete games, discuss their design goals, and facilitate user feedback. This article examines user work on an open development forum using conventional content and discourse uptake analyses. It finds that users customize their participation, engage with multiple objects of design, and affect design through collective action.

This article proposes resistance as a form of participation in user experience settings. It details a study to include people living with HIV in codesigning a health education technology, and it found that participants resisted online education initiatives, citing HIV stigma on social media and privacy concerns. Taken with queer theory, these findings underscore the offline inequities mediating interaction on social media for those living with HIV and open alternative design arrangements reflecting participants’ embodied experiences.

This study explores the viability of making in technical and professional communication (TPC) pedagogy. This article reports a pedagogical case study of making as a way to enact design thinking in the TPC classroom. By aligning the values in making and design thinking with TPC learning goals, this study discusses the opportunities in maker-based learning and proposes a set of heuristics for integrating making with TPC pedagogy.

Constructing mental health interventions comes with specific methodological challenges, especially when working with vulnerable communities. Developing means of assessment for such projects compounds these challenges because the need to protect participant information may conflict with the need to produce persuasive results about the intervention to obtain funding for additional care. This article seeks to redress these methodological challenges by proposing new protocols for approving and assessing mental health interventions centered within multiply marginalized communities.

The multiple conceptualizations of design thinking make it difficult to implement and teach in TPC, especially given classroom constraints. We propose a framework (mind-set and process) that balances knowing with the thinking/doing of design thinking. This framework is effectively implemented through game design. We demonstrate that game design increases students’ ability to iterate and solve macro- and micro-level problems along with their ability to approach unfamiliar or ill-structured tasks while facing such wicked problems.

Providing contextualized, effective writing instruction for engineering students is an important and challenging objective. This article presents a needs analysis conducted in a large engineering college and introduces the faculty development program that was created based on that analysis. The authors advocate for sustained interdisciplinary collaboration to promote contextualized adoption and adaptation of best practices and testing of scalable strategies.

This article builds upon the exigence highlighted in recent scholarship on preparing technical and professional communication (TPC) graduate students for collaborative research and professionalization. Using collaborative autoethnography as a self-study methodology, the authors offer authentic graduate research and mentorship experiences in a collaborative research incubator, the Wearables Research Collaboratory, at a midwestern research university.

Sequential rhetoric can serve as a framework to instruct UX practice (through user story maps) to new learners because it is both approachable and affordable. Sequential rhetoric consists of five main facets that incorporate planning elements (core visual writing and envisaging) and composing elements (interanimation, juxtaquencing, and gestalt closure), which this essay both defines and relates to convergent scholarship. We argue that sequential rhetoric transfers beyond the technical classroom and into the profession itself.

Part of learning a discipline’s genres is learning how one’s work must be presented. Students confronting this economy of genre sometimes chafe at its restrictions, and their apprehension reveals unsuspected stakes for technical communication. In interviews, students discuss how their final presentations fail to capture the sophistication and the nuances of their designs, suggesting that learning genres is not just about participation but also about letting go of competing ways of conceiving practice.

This article advocates for a contrasting Value Sensitive Design (VSD) framework based on principles of environmental justice, which encourages environmental-sensing wearable developers to make their values apparent to users in their designs in order to transform users into researchers rather than passive data collectors; make technological systems more transparent rather than opaque; and connect users to larger networks of individuals, who share common justice-oriented goals.

According to Lisa Meloncon (2014), “…TPC [technical professional communication] practitioners and academics have few resources to understand issues related to disability studies and accessibility, ...

Technical communication scholarship is in the midst of a social justice movement with scholars interrogating considerations of race in technical professional communication (TCP) (Haas, 2012), revea...

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.

This case examines how functionalist approaches manifest culturally based on users’ contexts. The authors conduct a critical visual semiotic analysis of the race and Hispanic origin questions on the 2010 U.S. Census form, demonstrating how incongruities in design potentially harm people. This demonstrates a need for adding critical analyses to design and research and it refocuses the Society for Technical Communication’s value of promoting the public good on to design and documentation in order to fight injustice.

This content analysis examined how the authors of 114 peer-reviewed journal articles explained their empirical approaches to visual rhetoric scholarship. The authors content analysis sought to answer the question: how do scholars engage with the material dimensions of visual culture, specifically in terms of artifact selection and reporting data collection procedures? The answers to this question, the authors argue, are needed urgently as visual rhetoric research continues to expand because inconsistent reporting will hinder replicability and the reader’s access to the author’s argument. The authors use the findings of their content analysis to surface the implicit norms of empirical visual rhetoric research and to develop recommendations for reporting visual data collection procedures.

This content analysis examined how the authors of 114 peer-reviewed journal articles explained their empirical approaches to visual rhetoric scholarship. Our content analysis sought to answer the question: how do scholars engage with the material dimensions of visual culture, specifically in terms of artifact selection and reporting data collection procedures? The answers to this question, we argue, are needed urgently as visual rhetoric research continues to expand because inconsistent reporting will hinder replicability and the reader’s access to the author’s argument. We use the findings of our content analysis to surface the implicit norms of empirical visual rhetoric research and to develop recommendations for reporting visual data collection procedures.

Graduate programs in the sciences offer minimal support for writing, yet there is an increasing need for scientists to engage with the public and policy makers. To address this need, the authors describe an innovative, cross-disciplinary, National Science Foundation (NSF)–funded training program in rhetoric and writing for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduate students and faculty at the University of Rhode Island. The program offers a theory-driven, flexible, scalable model that could be adopted in a variety of institutional contexts.

The dispute for authority between the seemingly disparate disciplinary camps of theory and practice is a longstanding and well-documented tension within the field of technical communication (Miller...

This article presents a case study using ethnographic and visual methods to investigate the framing activity of engineering students. Findings suggest students use the rhetorical figure of hypotyposis to produce the vivid images needed to frame engineering constraints. Data reveal students multimodally inducing collaboration between group members to construct images as ways to configure engineering constraints. The author argues for the usefulness of hypotyposis for understanding the framing of engineers, technical communicators, and other designers.

"Assembling Arguments: Multimodal Rhetoric & Scientific Discourse, by Jonathan Buehl." Technical Communication Quarterly, 26(1), pp. 95–96

This article examines the framing of the designer’s role in game development in textbooks published and circulated over the past decade. The authors investigate the discursive ways coding is downplayed within game design texts as a means of promoting design as a form of creative expression. This speaks to ongoing tension in the games industry of coding and technology versus art. The authors argue that, in their presentation of game design, leading textbooks attempt to frame the field as one of artistry and technical practice, presenting game design as a type of technical communication. The authors ultimately consider the potential and pitfalls of considering game design as a technical communication field and suggest that this framing presents lens for considering the recently professionalized field.

The authors provide a robust framework for using rhetorical foundations to teach multimodality in technical communication, describing a pedagogical approach wherein students consider the rhetorical canons—invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory—when developing texts beyond print. Students learn to assess their own work, reflecting on how each canon contributed to the rhetorical effectiveness of their multimodal projects. The authors argue for using the canons as a rhetorical foundation for helping students understand technical communication in the digital age.

Previous research in technical communication indicates service-learning pedagogies can help prepare students for the workplace. The field, however, has only recently and tentatively extended these pedagogies into online environments and has not yet demonstrated how and whether such service-eLearning could as effectively bridge the gap between the classroom and workplace. In this article, the author discusses one such extension and offers a framework and model.

Over the past two decades, scientific editors have attempted to correct “mistaken” assumptions about scientific images and to curb unethical image-manipulation practices. Reactions to the advent and abuse of image-adjustment software (such as Adobe Photoshop) reveal the complex relations among visual representations, scientific credibility, and epistemic rhetoric. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's model of argumentation provides a flexible system for understanding these relations and for teaching students to use scientific images ethically and effectively.

Although Graham Pullin, an instructor of design, probably doesn't refer to himself as a technical communicator, he takes on the role of one in his book, Design Meets Disability. In this book, Pulli...

This article examines the role that reflective assessment plays in contributing to the quality of students' visual designs. Students who are required to account for their rhetorical decisions in the design of a document benefit from the practice of verbalizing those decisions. However, this study shows that students who engage in reflective assessment actually produce stronger visual designs as well. This effect should help determine the extent to which such assessments should be included in the classroom.

One of the great challenges and opportunities of the modern technological economy is the creation and delivery of satisfactory user experiences. In Cross-Cultural Technology Design: Creating Cultur...