atw: The decreasingly meaningful authoring experience
- From: "Steve Hudson" <adslyy5g@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 22:13:24 +1000
I posted quite some time ago on the way in which the future timeline will
affect our job. Since then I have been monitoring the situation quite
closely. This post is from said POV.
Re integration.
Bad old days: The finance dept ran long reports, analysed them, tweaked the
numbers in a calculator and wrote a report in a set format. If they were
lucky, they had a template, if not, they just used a copy of an old report.
This went to management, who condensed the report with others, and produced
the general report.
Today: I write a script which is scheduled to run monthly. It asks the
finance package to produce a report, which pops out in XML. This is then
cross-correlated against a report from the asset management system.
Discrepancy reports get produced and someone changes the data in the
database and reruns the script. It cross-correlates, finds a good match,
produces the general report which is given final approval. No-one has
produced this report.
Bad old day: Customer required a regularly updated service manual. Technical
writers would carefully collect the changes, section and paginate to send
out changed pages as addendums.
Today: The inventory management system feeds items into a service database
via XML. Fixes are logged and broken down by components, driven by XML. Both
of these feed into a system that then can automatically generate a service
manual for a new component, updated by the engineer's reporting. No-one has
actually authored this manual. Engineers authored some fix documents, some
previously authored installation instructions were identified as compatible
and re-used. No-one authored the new manual. The information was passed
between systems using XML.
I am _observing_ a real-world decrease in authoring activities. In its most
trivial sense, even a well designed template achieves this end. All the
boilerplate is provided so that the 'producer' does not have to 'author' the
document.
Yes, someone has to produce a system that 'authors' the material. If I was
to take the flipside of your argument to its ridiculous extreme, are the
developers of Microsoft Word authors because they have produced a system
capable of authoring documents? Of course not - just like I work as a
software developer to produce a system that generates document on demand. I
am not authoring those documents, my system does. This does not make me an
author and does not give the documents a human authorship.
Most real-world authoring is the transformation of existing information. We
do not produce new information, we merely change the form in which the
information is expressed. The program always had an OK button, but now we
have documented it. Previously it was people who provided this
transformation of new concepts. This is slowly changing.
Initially, much of my work as a software developer was aimed at enabling
people to do much more. Now, the trend is the opposite: it is to take work
away from them altogether. Rather than write tools to help a technical
writer do their job quicker or more effectively, I am asked to produce tools
to REPLACE the need for a technical writer.
As computers become more powerful at parsing natural language, the authoring
experience is decreasing. This will continue for the next 10 years, at which
point we will start to see XML starting to become obsolete as machines
become able to 'tag up' documents based on content context. Once this
occurs, XML becomes 'meaningless'. Practically speaking, it will be the
equivalent of human and computer readable shorthand. Regardless of which,
when this point arrives, we will see a drastic decline in authoring
positions. Yes, we will see a small number of jobs for "document systems
trainer" and the like, but they will be fractional compared to what we have
lost.
Sorry for the delay, not online as much as I would like at the moment.
Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: Silcock, Howard DR
> As the years roll by, the actual authoring experience is decreasingly
> meaningful. We are seeing the integration of products by way of XML
> data, so that some documents are never actually authored - they are
> produced on demand as a sophisticated report.
Steve, could I get you to clarify this statement? When a product is to be
integrated into a new environment, I can see that the new environment needs
information about it, and that that information could be supplied in XML
format. Is this what you mean by "integration of products by way of XML
data"? If so, I'm still unclear where the "documents that are never actually
authored" come in. Amd how do the "sophisticated reports" come in, if they
aren't designed and implemented in code by someone who has made the
decisions as to what to include and how to set it out? Doesn't that, in
effect, mean that the 'coder' has taken on the role of author? Isn't it
dependent on him whether the reports are "sophisticated" or not?
I've heard that the literary theorist Roland Barthes argued for the 'Death
of the Author' (though I never attempted to understand what he was saying).
Are you trying to argue that technology is murdering authors (maybe even
technical writers)?
**************************************************
To post a message to austechwriter, send the message to
austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To subscribe to austechwriter, send a message to
austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "subscribe" in the Subject field.
To unsubscribe, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with
"unsubscribe" in the Subject field.
To search the austechwriter archives, go to
www.freelists.org/archives/austechwriter
To contact the list administrator, send a message to
austechwriter-admins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
**************************************************
Other related posts:
- » atw: The decreasingly meaningful authoring experience
