Rhetorical Theory Building for “Context-less” Writing: Redefining Context for the Shift to XML-based Writing, Content Management Systems, and Information Reuse
Kate Agena, Purdue University
Industry’s rapid adoption of XML-based architectures, including DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture), for authoring, delivering, and reusing technical documentation--as well as the presence of over half the total 2005 STC conference attendees at a presentation about DITA--suggest the need for corresponding academic interest in the theoretical and pedagogical implications of modular writing with DITA topics and information architecture through ditamaps. Proponents of XML-based writing suggest that the very nature of writing is changing as reuse with CMSs (content management systems) becomes more possible. They argue that, in the future, technical writing must be “context-less” in order to make chunks of information reusable across an organization, across deliverables, and across interfaces. This presentation will use both scholarship and my own experience writing with DITA at IBM’s Silicon Valley Lab to begin to define where current rhetorical theories break down in this new writing environment and to start to suggest ways we might fill in the gaps. I will provide a brief introduction to DITA-based documentation, an outline of rhetorical elements of technical writing that do and do not change with DITA, and point toward the additional challenges DITA poses for the work of technical writers, researchers, theorists, and educators.

Identifying Research Agendas in Teaching XML
Thomas Barker, Texas Tech University
In teaching concepts that bring new technologies for writing to bear on traditional concepts of instructional writing, a productive approach is to see the teaching as an exploration for the instructor and the student. Thus, a research-based model of teaching allows for a course to have a focus that fosters research and inquiry as the dominant paradigm for practice. This paper will cover the basic strategies for a research-based model for teaching XML (Extensible Markup Language) and content management strategies to upper-division and graduate students in a course on software documentation.

Text Encoding Initiative Markup Language and Technical Communication Pedagogy
J.D. Applen, University of Central Florida
An examination of the unique and facile use of TEI P4 archiving technology by humanities scholars that aids in their collaborative efforts to identify, retrieve, update, reconfigure, resubmit, and retransmit data/text will illustrate how we can more thoughtfully employ XML-based pedagogies in undergraduate and graduate courses in technical communication. The reusable nature of this single-sourcing style of data that TEI allows suggests how tagged text, like the facts that structure arguments, can be reconfigured to structure new arguments. Additionally, digital archivers can tag text in a manner that is open for dispute as TEI P4 technology includes interpretive tags () which mark text that might include rhetorical figures used by an author or a rhetorical stance assumed by a character. This could suggest new points of criticism. An awareness of this spirit of interpretation and dynamic representation of text/data will allow students and teachers to 1) reexamine conventional XML markup practices and be critical of their ability to organize and represent data, 2) be more cognizant of the differences between branches of large organizations as the conventions of naming, value, and arrangement of data/text are differ across organizational units, and 3) and leverage the knowledge capital of an organization’s members.

Lightweight Literate Programming: A Case Study in the Rhetoric and History of Single-Sourcing
Walsh, Lynda Walsh, New Mexico Tech
In spite of a clear trend toward single-sourcing in industry and a call to academics to theorize the practice in a special issue of Technical Commmunication (August 2003), few scholars have attempted to establish the rhetoric and history of single-sourcing that are prerequisite to decisions about how to teach and implement it. In this paper we analyze a historical antecedent to single-sourcing—literate programming—and explore the implications that a recent innovation in the same vein, “lightweight” literate programming (LLP), has both for the practice of single-sourcing in software engineering and for a rhetoric of that practice. A programmer using LLP writes computer code and its internal documentation at the same time to a single (XML)source file. The programmer thus becomes a technical writer, and even more interesting from a rhetorical standpoint, the documentation process has an unprecedented potential to alter the code itself. We review the history and functionality of LLP, critique its extension of the philosophy of single-sourcing beyond content to the very genesis of product, and discuss how it affects the relationship between technical writers and programmers.