Teaching Content Management in Technical and Professional Communication

Tracy Bridgeford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367181253
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429601989
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This collection offers a comprehensive overview of approaches to teaching the complex subject of content management.

The 12 chapters define and explain content management and its accompanying competencies, providing teaching examples in areas including content strategy, topic-based writing, usability studies, and social media. The book covers tasks associated with content management such as analyzing audiences and using information architecture languages including XML and DITA. It highlights the communal aspects of content management, focusing on the work of writing stewardship and project management, and the characteristics of content management in global contexts. It concludes with a look to the future and the forces that shape content management today. The editor situates the collection within a pedagogical exigency, providing sound instructional approaches to teaching content management from a rhetorical perspective.

The book is an essential resource for both instructors new to teaching technical and professional communication, and experienced instructors who are interested in upgrading their pedagogies to include content management.

PART I

Definitions

1

Reconceptualizing Technical Communication Pedagogy in the Context of Content Management

George Pullman and Baotong Gu

GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY

Chapter Takeaways

• Content management (CM) is not about software.
• CM is what writing has become.
• Separation of form and content is essential to writing now.
• Single sourcing is key to consistency of message.
• Content managers need to craft messages that can exist in different formats.

Content management has been a buzzword in the field of technical communication for about a decade, but more so in the last few years. If you have been in this field for even a couple of years, you probably could not have helped noticing the term popping up around you: during your online search for technical communication information, your library research for an article you are working on, your browsing session on the latest publications in our field, the annual Association of Teachers of Technical Writing or Society for Technical Communication conferences, or sometimes even class discussions on the latest developments in technical communication. The truth is students have already heard the term, and some have even designed or customized their own CM software; your colleague next door is adopting a CM-driven pedagogy. Granted, there is still a wide spectrum of knowledge and skills when it comes to CM: from a cursory recognition of the term to full ability to customize or even design one’s own system, it is becoming more relevant to what we do as technical communication instructors. You ask yourself: What exactly is CM? What does that have to do with me? Can I afford not knowing what it is? What are some of the key terms? What are the fundamentals I need to know about CM? What does a CM-driven pedagogy look like? In this chapter, we attempt to answer some of these questions and explicate on why a CM approach is essential to today’s technical communication, in what way it is challenging our traditional conceptualizations of rhetorical design and revolutionizing our field, and how it can inform our pedagogical practice both theoretically and operationally.

Over the last decade or so, the field of technical communication has witnessed nothing short of a paradigm shift: from the conceptualization of writing as a rhetorical act of composing words on paper to that of content creation and asset management. Content creation and management is about composing with words, images, video, data, metadata, and the containers that deliver the content. While documents are inert and autonomous, digital content is dynamic and context responsive. For us, CM is a systematic way of thinking about (and executing) how to create, share, archive, and track the efficacy of information; who wrote which version(s); which version is current; how old it is; its siblings and descendants; its planned lifecycle; and so on. We are talking about designing and creating content for an information ecosystem and the complex act of asset management. Thus, in the digital era, technical writers do not write so much as they create, curate, and manage content. They still have to compose efficient prose, of course, but they need to have a much broader skill set as well as a deeper understanding of information and workflow; not just technical knowledge of the field they write to the world about, but knowledge of such things as content strategy, communication medium, software applications, CM systems (CMSs), and so on.

Jonah Winters’s description of his work with the Bahá’í Library Online is a perfect illustration of the contrast between the traditional method of managing content in the pre-CMS era and the new method of CM.

• The old way (a partial summary):
  1. Documents are emailed to him in a variety of formats.
  2. He manually converts all the formatting to HTML.
  3. He uses a number of professional, often complex programs to create content: Photoshop to edit images, RTFtoHTML to convert Word documents to HTML, Dreamweaver to edit HTML, and numerous helper apps.
  4. He compiles all document information he can find and creates a blurb for index pages.
  5. He adds links to the new site to the index pages and possibly two to five other cross-reference links.
  6. He adds the document to his Word-based list catalog.
  7. Making corrections: he manually makes any corrections in the HTML document, tests, and uploads the new document.
  8. If anything more than cursory changes are made, he re-converts the entire document.
  9. He searches for all links that need to be updated and changes them one by one.
     His time commitment: two hours per day every day, every month, every year.
     Pros: full control over formatting and cataloguing.
     Cons: only works well with sites of a few hundred files (the Bahá’í Library now has 18,000 files); site ends up being full of errors, dead links, outdated content, and limited cross-referencing, and becomes wholly unmanageable for an individual or even a small team of individuals.
• The new way (a complete summary):
  1. He programs an interface in PHP and sets up a back-end database.
  2. All further content is added by public users, not by himself.
  3. Users log in, then are taken to an upload/editing screen, where they contribute new content or update preexisting content.
  4. When users click “Update,” the system (1) formats basic HTML automatically, (2) prepares the blurb and as many index entries as are cross-referenced, (3) catalogs the document, and (4) displays the document to the public.
  5. Making corrections: users log in and make any updates they wish; the system then stores and catalogs the corrections across the entire site.

His time commitment: 1,000 hours up front (300 initial programming, 200 upgrades and module additions, and 500 hours for manual data migration, copying all information for each file into the database in each appropriate field), less than 30 minutes per day from then on.

Pros: anyone can register, upload content, correct errors, and add cross-references; site is easy to navigate and search; content is always up to date; site can and soon will house millions of files; site can handle documents in any language.

Cons: limited flexibility; significant up-front time requirements.

(Adapted from Winters, 2017)

The old-way scenario is representative of how most companies used to manage their content, especially during the static web days. This transition to systematic CM is thus redefining the role of technical communicator from that of a writer to that of a content manager. It is also placing new demands on today’s technical communicators as it requires a new skill set, a new approach to technical communication, and a new big-picture mindset about managing content. As a result, it is also placing new demands on us technical communication instructors as it dictates new pedagogical approaches that can accommodate the changing needs of today’s technical communicators.

A Brief History of Content Management Systems

CMSs, software applications for systematic management of content/information, began to emerge in the early 1990s. According to Jonah Winters, a rough timeline runs like the following:

First CMSs (1992–1995)

The first CMSs emerged in the early 1990s. Most of these early CMSs were cumbersome and expensive, including, for example, RAINMAN (Remote Automated Information Network Manager), developed by AOL in 1992 (Levitt, 2011).

Emergent Period for Open-source CMSs (1995–1999)

The first open-source CMS, named Wiki Wiki, was designed and used for Portland Pattern Repository in 1995, which was also the year PHP was created. In 1997, PHP was retooled for much better versatility, stability, and ease of use. Although a number of PHP-based CMSs were born in this period, most CMSs in use were those proprietary ones used commercially. This is also the period when three important open-source tools came into being: the database program MySQL, the operating system Linux, and the web server software Apache (Winters, 2017).

Booming Period of Open-source CMS (2000–2005)

The creation of the four critical tools of open-source software—Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP—paved the way for an “internet revolution” that saw the exponential increase of open-source websites from thousands to millions as well as of open-source CMSs. This period is when some well-known open-source CMSs came into being, such as Mambo and Drupal (Winters, 2017). WordPress arrived in 2003. It is also the period when a large number of CMSs went through “a massive wave of mergers and acquisitions,” leaving many users high and dry without support (Kanga Internet, n.d.).

Period of User Orientation and Customization (2006–present)

Many of the CMSs created in the previous periods afforded little flexibility for customization to accommodate users’ needs. The CMS industry was lagging seriously behind the evolving needs of users. It was not until “somewhere around 2009 [that designers] caught up with [users] on the management side” (Tolvanen, 2013). “It wasn’t long before the usability, affordability, and ideology driving the popularity of open source began to pose a major threat to the commercial software industry” (Whitehead, 2014). As of October 26, 2017, WordPress, one of the most popular open-source CMSs, holds a 28.9% market share of web CMSs (W3Techs, 2017).

Defining Key Content Management Related Terms

Various terms related to CM have surfaced. To someone new to this field, understanding the meanings of these terms and the distinctions among them is essential. For the sake of our discussion, we briefly define the following terms:

• Content.
• Content management.
• Content management systems.
• Enterprise content management.
• Component content management.
• Content strategy.

There are more than nuanced distinctions among these terms, and we define them and outline the main differences.

Content

Content is seldom defined in books and articles on CM. We tend to assume that we all understand and agree on what content means when in fact we do not. The fact that Bob Boiko (2005) devotes the first five chapters of his seminal work Content Management Bible to defining the term “content” indicates that we indeed have very different conceptualizations of the term. Various alternatives to content have also been suggested, adding to the potential confusion: content, data, information, knowledge, asset … For our purpose here, we limit our discussion to the differences between content and data (or raw data to be exact). Data, in our conceptualization, means raw information not processed for any specific purposes. According to Deane Barker (2016), there are two key differences between content and raw data: (1) content is created differently, and (2) content is used differently. He therefore defines content as “information produced through [the] editorial process and ultimately intended for human consumption via publication.” Although this definition captures the essence of CM, the word “publication” is somewhat ambiguous and could mean the act of publishing content in some form or delivering it to the end user. To simplify the matter, we define content as data that has been edited to accommodate specific user needs.

Content Management

CM “is a set of processes and technologies that supports the collection, managing, and publishing of information in any form or medium” (Wikipedia, n.d.). As a result of its more popular sister term “content management system,” “we tend to look at content management as a digital concept, but it’s been around for as long as content. For as long as humans have been creating content, we’ve been searching for solutions to manage it” (Barker, 2016). As “the process for collection, delivery, retrieval, governance and overall management of information in any format” (Kiwak, n.d.), CM may not necessarily involve digital technologies, although in today’s environment it is hard to imagine it not doing so. Another term that has often been used in its place is “asset management,” although this is more context dependent because it could denote other types of assets, such as financial assets. Whichever the term, content management describes the process of content lifecycle from its creation to its presentation, delivery, storage, reuse, etc.

Content Management System

A CMS is “a software application or set of related programs used to create and manage digital content” (Churchville). Put in a different way, “A content management system (CMS) is a software package that provides some level of automation for the tasks required to effectively manage content” (Barker, 2016). These definitions imply two key aspects to CMSs: (1) the content is digital; (2) it involves some form of digital technology. This then begs the question: did CMSs exist in pre-digital era? Many will argue they did not, and there are good reasons for such an argument: if CMSs involve digital technology, how could they have ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editor Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Content Management: A Pedagogical Exigency
• PART I: Definitions
• PART II: Teaching
• PART III: Tasks
• PART IV: Community
• Index