Browsing by Subject "Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Agency, socio-cultural context, and the role of the technical communicator during IT adoption: a case study in innovation diffusion across cultures.
    (2010-07) Coggio, Grace Leinbach
    This dissertation examines the diffusion of an innovative information technology system across multiple cultures between 2000 and 2006. Developed and implemented by technical communicators in the technical communication department of a global medical device company, the Advanced Single-Source Authoring and Publication System (ASAPS) brought profound changes to documentation processes and was not wholly embraced by all of the writers in a position to use it. Employing the case study method, this project explores the influence of socio-cultural context and agency on the decision to adopt the new system, as well as the role of the technical communicator as change agent during the diffusion process. The inquiry is guided by an adapted hybrid theoretical framework incorporating Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations Theory, Engeström's Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, Hofstede's Culture Dimensions, and the Cultural Studies Perspective. Using online questionnaires, the study examines the adoption decisions of technical writers and translators in the following three locations: Minnesota in the U.S.A., Gelderland and Limberg in the Netherlands. In addition, three technical communicators identified as the change agents instrumental to developing and implementing ASAPS are interviewed face-to-face. The most notable finding concerning the role of technical communicators as change agents is that a pro-innovation bias coupled with multiple levels of culture differences can hinder the change agent's ability to engage more reluctant users in reciprocal, adoption-conducive meaning making during innovation diffusion. This case suggests that by engaging their rhetorical agency during IT adoption, technical communicators can empower users to participate more fully in the adoption-decision process. One of the more notable findings concerning agency is that users can be empowered both actively and passively during the adoption-decision process, particularly when elements in the socio-cultural context open a window of agency for more silent resistance. Finally, this study suggests that national culture differences can influence adoption decisions by demonstrating that Dutch management tends to reinforce collaborative decisions while U.S. management tends to reinforce individualized decisions.
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    Body burden in umbilical cord blood: a rhetorical analysis of how experts communicate risk to public audiences.
    (2011-01) VanNorman, Maggie Lynn
    The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the rhetorical strategies used by experts to communicate prenatal exposure to chemical pollution. This dissertation uses a case study approach to analyze how prenatal exposure to chemical pollutants is communicated to public audiences by non-traditional scientific experts through an examination of specific reports and briefings. The non-traditional experts that are the subject of this dissertation are the Environmental Working Group, an environmental activist group, and the American Chemistry Council, an industry lobby group. These non-traditional scientific experts use a variety of rhetorical strategies to communicate meaning about exposure data. Following Ulrich Beck, risk is understood to be both socially constructed through discursive practices as well as materially real through its physical impacts. By analyzing the discursive and material representations of risk found in the EWG and ACC's reports through a variety of rhetorical strategies, this dissertation represents an initial attempt by a rhetorician to understand biomonitoring data as persuasive elements in public policies related to environmental and regulatory issues.
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    Online pedagogy: designing writing courses for students with autism spectrum disorders.
    (2010-05) Wyatt, Christopher Scott
    As more universities offer academic composition and technical writing courses via virtual classrooms, our institutions are also being asked to accommodate an increasingly diverse student population. The success of disability accommodations in elementary and secondary schools is expanding the number of students with special needs academically qualified for postsecondary admissions. Among these students are individuals with autism spectrum disorders--a population with unique gifts and needs. This project sought to determine how writing courses in virtual spaces might be improved for university students with ASDs. The original research propositions included the possibility that Web-based course management software could be optimized by examining virtual spaces favored by individuals with ASDs. Ninety-eight Web sites were analyzed and 48 adults with clinical diagnoses of autism disorders were surveyed. The results directly challenged the research propositions and require a rethinking of the delivery of online course content. Overwhelmingly, the communities analyzed and the individuals surveyed point to a need to deliver course content via e-mail, Really Simple Syndication (RSS), and other purely textual methods. Every online community studied relays content to members via both e-mail and RSS feeds, allowing participation without accessing a Web-based interface. Seventy-five percent of the individuals surveyed indicated Web sites present challenges that cannot be addressed via traditional accessibility practices. The data suggest online courses should offer e-mail and RSS interactions, as an option to the Web-based interfaces of most courseware platforms. While instructors of academic composition and technical writing courses might be tempted to recreate the traditional classroom in virtual simulations, this approach not only hinders participation by students with autism disorders, but also might exclude them from courses that form an important foundation for university success. Additionally, gender differences were found within the survey population, relating specifically to writing and communication practices. This study concludes with a recommendation for studies exploring these differences and any implications they might have for writing instruction, especially within virtual classroom settings.
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    Pragmatic ecocriticism and equipments for living.
    (2010-02) Werner, Brett Alan
    Over the last two centuries, books by American nature writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and John Muir have shaped individual behavior, inspired the creation of environmental organizations, and influenced public policy. Ecocritical scholars have shown how such texts encourage non-anthropocentric values and awareness of nature. Yet these classics of environmental literature, and subsequent ecocritical scholarship, have unintentionally promoted absolutist views of nature that entrench environmental conflicts and shut down communication, a problem rhetorical scholars call "ecospeak." In this dissertation I examine how writers might overcome ecospeak. I not only argue for alternative environmental narratives, but also propose a new approach to reading all environmental texts. I call this approach "pragmatic ecocriticism" as it draws significantly on John Dewey's philosophical pragmatism, by weakening dualist understandings such as that of "humans and nature"; by examining value pluralism; and by focusing on narratives in which writers make decisions and take action in the face of complex and uncertain social-environmental situations. Such a rhetorical approach draws heavily on Kenneth Burke's notion that literary texts serve as equipment for living through dramatic rehearsal's role in moral imagination. I examine whether and how three recent texts avoid the problem of ecospeak by offering more pragmatic narratives: The Pine Island Paradox by Kathleen Dean Moore (2004); Hunting for Hope by Scott Russell Sanders (1998); and Having Faith by Sandra Steingraber (2001). Although all of these books are part of the larger genre of environmental writing and literature, they pragmatically engage the complexity of contemporary social and environmental issues facing readers today. Moore links human-centered and nature-centered ethics and values in the context of decisions Moore encounters daily. Sanders emphasizes social hope and bounded conflict rather than despair and divisiveness in the face of social-environmental crisis. Steingraber addresses the relationship between human health and environmental pollution in the context of pregnancy and childbirth. As a result, these texts constitute a sub-genre of environmental writing, representing more pragmatic texts able to move beyond ecospeak and encourage readers to engage each other in more productive ways.
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    Pressures on play: rhetoric, virtual environments, and the design of experience in virtual world computer games.
    (2012-05) Baron, Robert John
    My dissertation explores the ways in which player interactions are shaped, directed and constrained by the designed experience of modern virtual world computer games from a rhetorical perspective. To that end, I develop a theory of "virtual consubstantiality" based on shared experiences within virtual environments as integral to virtual community formation. I examine two case studies to explore this concept. First, I examine the massive multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft. I identify three key pressures exerted on players within World of Warcraft's virtual environment: a focus on gameplay, a focus on the player utility, and the pressure to engage in "purposeful social interactions" with other players. I go on to document structures in World of Warcraft's virtual environment that reinforce these pressures: the implementation of a "dungeon finder" system for the creation of random in-game groups, the implementation of the "Real ID" social network that links players across the whole catalog of games produced by Blizzard Entertainment, and the restructuring of the game's virtual environment as a part of the release of World of Warcraft's most recent expansion, Cataclysm. Second, I examine Farmville, as representative of a new class of social computer games. I explore three key pressures exerted on players within Farmville's virtual environment: The pressure to collect in-game items, the pressure to connect with other users for in-game rewards, and the pressure to consume both in-game and real world resources. In a similar fashion, I go on to document three in-game mechanics reinforce these pressures: the portability of the game space across several computers and several computing platforms, the intentionally simplicity design of the overall game interface and the large degree of automation of both in-game and out-of-game communication between players. The research finds that virtual environments do shape their user interactions. I further argue that the virtual consubstantiality formed by the shared experiences created by the design of these virtual environments is integral to the formation and maintenance of each virtual environment's virtual community.
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    The rhetorical potential of images in popular accounts of historical events.
    (2010-11) Scruton, William Christopher
    In The Rhetorical Potential of Images in Popular Accounts of Historical Events, I develop a methodological toolkit for analyzing persuasive visuals and use those lenses—technological, perceptual, semantic/semiotic, societal pragmatic, and inferential—to evaluate a multimodal narrative in Matthew Paris's thirteenthcentury Chronica Majora. Focusing on the sententious role of the chronicling narrative form and the moralizing purpose of the exemplars that most influenced Matthew's style, I argue that Matthew's practice of image-construction was an historiographic—not decorative—act and explore the ways in which the layout, organization, and illustration of Chronica Majora produced a mnemonic and epistemic machine—a purposeful, rhetorical encyclopedia of human experience and a guide to right behavior. Within this grounded framework, I address questions of broader import, including the cognitive functions of narrative form, the influence of socialization and enculturation in shaping the semiotic and rhetorical vernaculars of discourse communities, and the function of communicative artifacts as interfaces connecting the material domain with the intellectual lifeworlds of the producers and interpreters of communicative artifacts.
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    A textual analysis of the American journal of Chinese medicine: from spirituality to science.
    (2010-08) Wais-Hennen, Erin Marie
    This dissertation has taken as its principal object of study, the American Journal of Chinese Medicine. It has examined the textual features of that journal over a thirty-five year period as an indication of changes in the broader field of traditional Chinese medicine--how it is perceived and practiced by those in the field. The dissertation supplemented this textual analysis with interviews of practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine to see if these practitioners' reports of their own experiences in the field support the conclusion from the textual analysis. Specifically, this dissertation has been guided by three research questions. These research questions first look at what textual changes the AJCM has undergone over the last thirty-five years, and what do those changes explain about the culture of TCM as a whole. The rhetorical and linguistic features of the AJCM that were examined include: the use of headings, IMRD structure, biomedical noun-strings, a biomedical or traditional Chinese medical register, subject, audience, and article genre. Also, this study looks to answer the question, in what ways does the biomedicialization of TCM articles reflect change in traditional Chinese medicine? Finally, I sought to understand to what extent the ACJM has become more biomedicalized, and during this process, what has been lost or silenced. The results of this dissertation demonstrate and explain that over the last thirty-five years traditional Chinese medicine in America has become centered on biomedicine and the scientific method, which is a significant change from the early 1970s.
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    Textual curators and writing machines: authorial agency in encyclopedias, print to digital.
    (2009-07) Kennedy, Krista A.
    Wikipedia is often discussed as the first of its kind: the first massively collaborative, Web-based encyclopedia that belongs to the public domain. While it’s true that wiki technology enables large-scale, distributed collaborations in revolutionary ways, the concept of a collaborative encyclopedia is not new, and neither is the idea that private ownership might not apply to such documents. More than 275 years ago, in the preface to the 1728 edition of his Cyclopædia, Ephraim Chambers mused on the intensely collaborative nature of the volumes he was about to publish. His thoughts were remarkably similar to contemporary intellectual property arguments for Wikipedia, and while the composition processes involved in producing these texts are influenced by the available technologies, they are also unexpectedly similar. This dissertation examines issues of authorial agency in these two texts and shows that the “Author Construct” is not static across eras, genres, or textual technologies. In contrast to traditional considerations of the poetic author, the encyclopedic author demonstrates a different form of authorial agency that operates within strict genre conventions and does not place a premium on originality. This and related variations challenge contemporary ideas concerning the divide between print and digital authorship as well as the notion that new media intellectual property arguments are without historical precedent.