Browsing by Subject "Technical communication"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    “Democratizing” clinical research? efficiency and inclusiveness in an electronic primary care research network
    (2010-06) Hudson, Brenda L.
    This dissertation is a critical ethnography and rhetorical study of the development of an electronic network designed to advance medical research and improve health. Specifically, this study focuses on the network's social and technological affordances of efficiency and inclusiveness to connect communities of primary care providers and clinical researchers to both expand participation in and expedite the research process. By examining the network's technical elements aligned with its social context, the assumptions that influence the choice of technologies, and the network's subsequent design, Brenda L. Hudson explores the network's hierarchical structure and potential democratizing capabilities in clinical research. Through field notes, interviews, and textual analysis, Hudson provides a micro-level examination of the electronic network's development and technical affordances during the program's three-year funded contract. An ethnographic narrative describes how the group functions as a "community of practice" to create a network linking primary care practices with clinical research. Further, Hudson provides a macro-level examination that draws on critical theories of technology and explores to what extent the network might serve as a "democratic" technology through its involvement of previously unprivileged populations in clinical research--primary care providers and patients. Results indicate that assumptions of efficiency and inclusiveness in clinical research--and specifically in the network's technical affordances--provide potential benefits to patients' health by widening the pool of researchers and participants and streamlining the recruitment process. However, manifest in this electronic network, these assumptions also pose potential risks and ethical challenges surrounding private health information and "therapeutic misconception," whereby a research participant believes that enrolling in a research study will provide direct therapeutic benefit. Further results indicate that although the development team has done much to assure a "democratic" development of use of technology by operating as a "community of practice," there exist unintentional asymmetrical hierarchies of who controls and uses the network, favoring primary care providers and practices that already exist in clinical research.
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    Dictionaries of science as participants in the scientific knowledge economy.
    (2012-08) Menagarishvili, Olga
    The purpose of this dissertation is to examine how the first dictionary of science that appeared in English (Lexicon Technicum: or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences by John Harris) and one of the most recent dictionaries of science published in English (McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms) participate in the scientific knowledge economy. In order to answer that question, the study analyses the dictionaries from two perspectives: (1) as participants in knowledge making and (2) as products of capitalism. The model of production-consumption cycles is used, which is the extended version of Latour's model of knowledge accumulation, to consider dictionaries of science from both perspectives. The methodology combines lexicography (the science of dictionary-making and dictionary criticism) and cultural studies (the approach that focuses on the questions of power and culture and, therefore, allows one to discuss "knowledge legitimation within cultural contexts" (Longo, Approach 112). I am using lexicographic archaeology, which is one of the standard lexicographical methods for the comparison of different versions of the same dictionary. At the same time, I am extending the traditional lexicographic analysis by applying a cultural studies approach and using the cultural analysis of the front matter of each edition of a dictionary and employing production-consumption model, which is the discussion of how each dictionary functions in the model of production-consumption cycles.
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    Imaging Environmental Belonging in a Wounded World: Toward a Visual Rhetoric for the Anthropocene
    (2019-05) Eichberger, Ryan
    Recent scholarship has introduced the idea of the Anthropocene, a geologic epoch characterized by human intervention on a planetary scale. The Anthropocene draws our attention to three issues that have historically led societies to made environmentally poor choices: (1) an inability to foresee how human actions affect other life, (2) ideas of nature that create artificial binaries, partitioning the world into “wilderness” and “civilization,” and (3) excessive distance in time, space, or scale, which obscures violence and causality. This project argues that surviving the Anthropocene will not simply be about techno-scientific fixes or public policy. Instead, it will require that we address all three issues by fundamentally shifting how we see ourselves and our world. Drawing on three cases of contemporary discourse—online mapping of the Dakota Access Pipeline conflict, digital photography of the retreating Mýrdalsjökull and Vatnajökull glaciers in Iceland, and interactive mapping along the Great Lakes shoreline—I outline a set of strategies for visualizing environment that promotes more realistic ways of understanding human-nonhuman relationality. Ultimately, I argue that the key to resiliency in the Anthropocene will be our ability to develop new technical and scientific communication rooted in our belonging and emplacement in the world.