Re: SGML, new media, and other hot issues

[Elaine M Brennan <ELAINE -at- BROWNVM -dot- BITNET>]

On Wed, 3 Nov 1993 08:58:42 EST Marguerite Krupp said:

>Ed Costello hit on something that's been bothering me, too, and not just about
>academic programs.  I teach in the Graduate Certificate program at
>Northeastern University, which is more practical than theoretical.

>My feeling is that the issues you raise about SGML, "reusable" documentation,
>new media, etc., are mostly of concern right now to practicing tech writers.
>I'd love to see some solid research done by academics, but my immediate need
>is for practical stuff.  Frankly, I'm writing a book about it myself,
>primarily because I didn't find what I needed elsewhere.  There are many good
>journal articles about particular aspects of particular technologies, but I
>have yet to find anything that ties it all into one coherent picture.  Stay
>tuned, I'm still writing that book.

There has been a lot of solid work on analyzing texts and using SGML
to encode those texts in the literary and linguistic academic communities --
see the work of the Text Encoding Initiative, for example -- but I don't
have the sense that those theoretical perspectives have been particularly
valued.  On the other hand, decipering and encoding the structure of
a seventeenth-century literary text makes looking at aircraft repair
manuals seem quite simple ...

Elaine

Elaine_Brennan -at- brown -dot- edu
Assistant Director
Women Writers Project
Brown University
Providence, RI 02912
>Come on, folks!  How about your ideas on how the new technologies and
>techniques are affecting your thinking and your work life?  What about ISO
>9000 and TQM?  Are you ready to push the state of the art?  Or areyou going to
>wait "until you have time" to deal with these issues?  If you wait long enough
>you'll have plenty of time, because you'll be obsolete!

>OK, that should get some bits and bytes flowing in those electronic veins.
>Let's hear from you folks.

>Marguerite Krupp