CFP: Technological Spaces

[loelkim at memphis.edu]

We hope that you will consider submitting a proposal for a special issue
of /Technical Communication Quarterly/, titled, "New technological
spaces: Mastering the literacies of thinking and doing across multiple
modalities." The cfp and submission details are below. 

PDF and DOC versions of the cfp are available at 
< http://www4.ncsu.edu/~jswarts/#research >. 

Email inquiries are welcome. Please distribute widely.

Best,

Jason Swarts (North Carolina State University) and Loel Kim (University
of Memphis)


*Call for Papers: Special Issue of /Technical Communication Quarterly/*

"New Technological Spaces: Mastering the Literacies of Thinking and
Doing Across Multiple Modalities"

We live in an age of unprecedented information abundance, where more
information is available to us in a greater variety of modal forms and
in a greater number of places than ever before. Richard Lanham views
this abundance as symptomatic of life in an information age, where
people are just as interested in information about things as they are in
the things themselves. 

In /The Economics of Attention/, Lanham writes
that “[w]e have always had information as a perspective on stuff, to be
sure, and toggled back and forth between the stuff and the information
that informs it [but] [t]he information economy leaves the toggle switch
in the information position.” Keeping the toggle in the information
position are vast ecologies of technological agents (e.g., texts,
computer interfaces, information kiosks, signs, etc.) that ceaselessly
generate information about the world around us. These technologies help
fashion an information space, comprised of many streams of multimodal
information, laying over a physical space.

We can describe both the physical and the overlying information spaces
as having architectures, structured arrangements of resources and
allocations of space designed to support particular kinds of activity.
To most of us, the division between information space and physical space
is functionally imperceptible. When those spaces are effectively
designed and implemented, our experiences of them are seamlessly
mediated by information residing there. 

Consider, for example, how automatically we interact with the signal
devices we encounter at crosswalks and intersections and whether it is
possible to separate our interactions with the space from our interactions
with information about traffic flow. Just as physical spaces support and
shape social interaction, hybrid physical/information, and virtual spaces
do so also. We draw on this information to create texts that mediate
locally-meaningful activities. Often, the texts are narrative-like in
their construction, threading fragments of information together to tell
a story about an object of work and to script the identities and
relationships of the human and non-human agents whose interactions are
coordinated around that object of work. However, the information for
constructing these narratives is available in different modal forms,
each imbued with different potentials to communicate and to persuade.
Thus, participants in those spaces must adapt existing and acquire new
literate skills to engage in the activities those spaces support. These
literacies and the settings where they are developed are the subjects of
this special issue.

The proliferation of information technologies—especially those providing
mobile and wireless access to remotely-located information--not only
increase the amount of available information, but also require that we
implement and juggle a variety of ways of interacting with it. Narrative
is one way of arranging information to mediate our interactions with
information in a given space. Recent research in linguistics, the
rhetoric of science, and technical communication suggest narrative as a
powerful means of thinking about and making sense of the world. In
addition, narrative can facilitate coordination among people. For
example, anesthesia technicians create narratives about their patients’
conditions, which mediate their work performances and their interactions
with other medical staff. The ways that the complex literacy issues
involved in new technological spaces will play out are yet unknown, but
it is clear that the implications will be far-reaching. We welcome
submissions on the following:

· architectural configurations of physical, virtual, and hybridic spaces
and the implications for information delivery/access, individual
experience, wayfinding/navigation, narrative, etc;

· emerging literate practices and the sites at which they take place:
e.g., blogging and podcasting;

· uses of multimodal technologies in the configuration and
reconfiguration of workplace activities;

· potential impact of multimodal technologies on literacy acquisition,
civic engagement, disciplinary/professional standing, and related issues;

· literacy skills required for working with multimodal technologies;

· theories concerning the shifting relationship between readers and
writers or producers and audiences;

· impact of multimodal technologies on pedagogy and technical
communication programs;

· new research methods to investigate the use of distributed networks of
interactive/multimodal technologies in technical communication;

· technical communication’s potential contribution to the development of
multimodal technologies.

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Please e-mail proposals (1-2 pages max.; 500-1000 words) as .RTF or .DOC
to Jason Swarts (Jason_Swarts at ncsu.edu <mailto:Jason_Swarts at ncsu.edu>)
and Loel Kim (loelkim at memphis.edu <mailto:loelkim at memphis.edu>) by
December 14th, 2007. We welcome e-mail inquiries from potential
contributors.

· Authors will be notified of acceptance by January 15th, 2008

· For proposals that are accepted, first drafts of papers will be due by
March 30th, 2008

· Finished manuscripts will be due October 17, 2008.

· Publication scheduled for Summer, 2009.

· Please contact us as soon as possible if you would like to serve as a
reviewer for this special issue.