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I’m presenting the paper below at SIGDOC ’16 in Silver Spring, Maryland today. The paper is the outgrowth of an RSA workshop that Bill Hart-Davidson and Ryan Omizo led in Madison, WI, in 2015. Here’s the abstract: This paper reports on the results of an intensive application development workshop held in the summer of 2015 during which a group of thirteen researchers came together to explore the use of machine-learning algorithms in technical communication. To do this we analyzed Amazon.com consumer electronic product customer reviews to reevaluate a central concept in North American Genre Theory: stable genre structures arise from Read More …

This post will ultimately include the presentation slides, handout, and annotated bibliography for my presentation/workshop at the Legal Writing Institute in Portland OR on July 13, 2016. (Until the session is over, only the bibliography will appear here.) Presentation slides (with notes) This PDF includes my slides and my (sometimes extensive) notes on them. Try to ignore the little cues on them reminding me how to do the slide animations and when to move to the [NEXT] slide. Presentation handouts This PDF includes all the handouts from the session. Draft annotated bibliography I meant this bibliography to be more complete and Read More …

In Europe this month, there are numerous commemorations of the 1916 Battle of the Somme. Meanwhile, I’m distressed that so little attention has been paid in the U.S. to the centennial of World War I. The importance of that war in setting the stage for the 20th Century is hard to overestimate–the rise of Hitler’s Germany, the reluctance of the other powers to check him, etc. (Of course, events like the Congress of Vienna 100 years earlier can be seen as setting the stage for WW I. Such is history.) But for Americans, reflecting on WWI seems to be of Read More …

My spouse and I took a tour along part of the Western Front of WW I in Belgium and France this month. I did not, as I had hoped, post reflections along the way, as it turned out to be more work bicycling 40-70 km per day than I thought it would, especially on chilly, rainy days. I posted the following materials, making up Part 1 of my reflections, on Facebook during the journey. I’m gathering them here for friends and colleagues who are not Facebook “friends.” Part 2 and maybe subsequent parts will come later. (All photos are ours, Read More …

I’m teaching a “new prep” in the fall–that is, I’m teaching a class for the first time. This post is about my efforts to develop the course and shows some preliminary work, on which I’d be very interested to read your comments. The course is LMC 3408 Rhetoric of Technical Narratives (Fall 2016, Section D, listed for graduate credit as LMC 6215 Issues in Media Studies, section BL). The theme for the course is “Technical and Professional Presentations and Posters.” After teaching LMC 3408 this way a couple of times, I’m hoping to get a presentations course on the books at Georgia Tech Read More …

Below are the slides and handout from my talk at RSA 2016. The abstract appears on a previous post. And the program for the session appears in another post, too.