Editor\u27s Introduction

Researchers and practitioners of technical and professional communication deal with culture on a daily basis. We are members of an increasingly complex communication infrastructure that is global in scope and that is fueled by the proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) within all aspects of our lives. We are citizens of nations around the world that contain their own laws, rules, and customs. We are members of professional fields and academic disciplines that carry with them particular conceptions of knowledge-making, power, and competency. We are also members of organizations, institutions, and communities that we must navigate on a daily basis in order to develop and sustain our individual identities

Designing for Engagement: Intercultural Communication and/as Participatory Design

Within rhetoric and professional communication, intercultural research has most often focused on such elements of communication situations as languages, issues regarding translation, and adaptation to culturally situated value systems of interlocutors (Maylath, 1997; St.Amant, 1999; Thatcher, 2010; Wang, 2010). Technological infrastructure for intercultural situations, however, is largely conceived of as a material base upon which communication runs. If we consider an infrastructure as a dynamic meeting of communicators, modes of communication, and technologies, however, it is unclear how we might apply existing intercultural research methods and findings to the design of such communication systems. As a heuristic for moving toward thinking about both infrastructure and intercultural inquiry in this more complex manner, I provide below a literature review geared toward wedding best practices in user experience design (UX) with best practices in intercultural inquiry

Vanishing Point

pages 34-3

Designing for Everyday Life in Global Contexts

This special issue is a situated response in this discourse context, to investigate research issues surrounding the mundaneness and messiness of “Designing for Everyday Life in Global Contexts.” For the past two decades, a steadily growing body of work on the intersections of intercultural communication and information design has been developing within the field of Technical and Professional Communication (e.g., Kostelnick,1995; Chu, 1999; Fukuoka, 1999; Honold, 1999; Thatcher, 1999; Zahed, Van Pelt, & Song, 2001; St. Amant, 2002, 2005; Sun, 2006, 2012; Agboka, 2013; Breuch, 2015; Gustav, 2015; St. Amant & Rice, 2015; Maher & Getto, 2016; Sun & Getto, 2017; Zhou & Getto, 2017). This work variously seeks to articulate culturally situated and rhetorically sound practices for designing in intercultural, cross-cultural, and global contexts, contexts in which a variety of cultures, identities, and technologies are required

INCLUSIVE ASSESSMENT: TOWARD A SOCIALLY-JUST METHODOLOGY FOR MEASURING INSTITUTION-WIDE ENGAGEMENT

Institutions are increasingly being called upon to collect large amounts of data to demonstrate community impact. At institutions with strong and wide-reaching public engagement/service missions, this expectation is even greater – both for quality improvement and for demonstrating regional transformation. Despite these expectations, the decentralized culture of many campuses and lack of external incentives for individual faculty and departments can present significant barriers to telling a complete, representative, institutional story of engagement. This article explores the efforts of one campus to develop an inclusive assessment methodology in order to meet multifaceted institutional needs and navigate challenges. We take into account the particular dynamics of a specific campus culture to develop a process that is unique to the needs and particularities of our institution. At the same time, we hope that this methodology will demonstrate transferability to other institutions

Digitally Mapping the Buddhist Holy Land: Intercultural Communication, Religious History, and Networked Rhetoric

Intercultural communication presents an array of well-known and much-discussed challenges, including the difficulties of engaging in productive dialogues regarding cultural assumptions, the problems of translation, tensions between macro-level value systems and the uniqueness of individual cultures, and challenges to developing communication technologies that are culturally appropriate (Kostelnick, 1995; Maylath, 1997; Thatcher, 2006; Sun, 2012). When addressing the diverse dimensions of religious culture, there is the added obstacle that understanding another’s religion can sometimes become entwined with how people feel about their own deeply held religious values and assumptions (Jackson, 2004). Special obstacles to understanding can arise in relation to religion because an individual’s own religious truth claims may prevent them from coming to terms with how another religion orders the world. For this reason, faculty members teaching American university students about less familiar religions frequently find they need to attend to sophisticated methodological and epistemological considerations in the instructional context, even from an introductory level. Special efforts are needed to help students learn to engage diverse perspectives, especially when they are quite different from their own

Doing multimodal research the easy way: A workflow for making sense of technologically complex communication situations

In this paper, we describe the methodology known as Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA), as well as how it can be easily paired with a variety of technologies and research methods to successfully analyze and make sense of any combination of communicative modes, while leaving plenty of room for tailoring data visualizations for a variety of audiences, both scholarly and professional. Our ultimate goal is to provide researchers and practitioners with a simplified workflow of this methodology for employment in a variety of contexts. Copyright 2012 ACM\u27

“Hey, Such-and-Such on the Internet Has Suggested …”: How to Create Content Models That Invite User Participation

Problem: Few frameworks exist for building content strategies around user-generated content. We present a framework for building content strategies that enable user participation in the development and delivery of content. Key concepts: For this framework to be successfully implemented, this implementation team needs a working knowledge of user-generated content strategy, or the development of strategies for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content that encourage user participation. The framework also requires an understanding of the relationship between content models and technologies. Finally, practitioners utilizing the framework must also understand the role of content moderation in facilitating development of user-generated content. Key lessons: Our framework for user-generated content strategy specifies three main practices: 1. Developing a content strategy that enables interactions among administrators, moderators, users, types of content, and technologies within a given network; 2. building content models within technologies so that all interactions flow seamlessly; and 3. using content moderation to ensure that users are empowered to contribute content while respecting quality guidelines. Implications: Though there are challenges to facilitating user-generated content that unites organizational goals and user goals, the use of a framework like ours can benefit organizations that want to make user-generated content a core part of what they do

Building Communication Capacities Within Nonprofits Through Service-Learning

Previous research suggests that non-profit professionals struggle to effectively utilize digital media and that service-learning is an effective pedagogy for teaching communication-related classes (i.e. communication, technical communication, English, etc.). However, we do not know what impact these strategies have on community partner organizations. Our chapter reports preliminary findings of a study of a service-learning class in which graduate technical communication students were asked to help improve the communication capacity of local non-profits. An important finding of this research is that organizations who were able to clearly identify a gap between organizational and communication goals at the beginning of the class were more receptive to student feedback and found the class more useful than those who didn’t. Ultimately, we argue that through a collaborative study using participatory action research methodology, this work generated research outcomes and, at the same time, helped to build the organizational capacities of selected regional non-profits