Welcome to the ACM SIGDOC Committee on Structured Authoring and Content Management

This SIGDOC committee promotes collaboration between academic programs in technical communication (professors, students, researchers) and industry professionals (writers, architects, trainers, managers). Technical communication is a big field, so we’ve narrowed the scope of the committee to structured authoring and to management of that structured content. See Definition of structured content.

Call for participation

We’d like to give people interested in participating some feel for activities and deliverables. The following roadmap is a work in progress and will evolve as people join the committee and shape its mission. That said, we’ve got to start somewhere.

Semester Committee activity Contact
Spring 2024
  1. Offer technical workshops to ACM SIGDOC members.
  2. Implement infrastructure resources (web site, new Google drives, email accounts, and a Github repo).
  3. Develop editorial and maintenance policies.
  4. Scale out the number of engagements with university programs – especially pilots.
  5. Scale out the directory of guest lecturers.
  6. Scale out the library of curriculum resources.
  7. Set up career development programs.
Fall 2024
  1. Recruit additional industry professionals willing to serve as guest speakers and content developers.
  2. Recruit additional professors willing to test and adapt these curriculum resources in their coursework.

Committee activities and deliverables

Industry professionals who have an interest or background in teaching technical communication are a relatively untapped resource toward the development of resources for academia.

  1. Curriculum resources: The primary deliverables for our committee consist of resources that communications professors can easily add and/or adapt to their semester syllabi.
    • Modular slide decks: We are developing slide decks on a variety of technical and professional topics. Professors can customize them and add them to existing curriculum materials. To view our current collections, see Curriculum Resources.
    • Instructional videos: To complement the slide decks, we are developing videos that provide a visual walk-throughs of the slide deck content.
  2. Directory of guest speakers: Within their individual departments or companies, industry professionals speak routinely about their subjects of expertise. Opportunities to share that expertise outside their companies or outside the context of annual professional conferences are rare. This directory consists of a table of industry professionals who would be willing to ZOOM into a classroom and share what they know about particular subjects. It’s a talent bank that professors can consult as they develop week-to-week class plans. See Industry Speaker Bureau
  3. Sample technical content: One of the biggest challenges for new technical communicators is gaining experience with the large documentation sets and product interfaces prevalent at the large companies hiring entry-level writers. To expose students to larges-scale doc sets before they interview or graduate, industry professionals can genericize outdated or open-source documentation sets and make them available to curriculum planners. The OASIS DITA Adoption Technical Committee, for example, assembled an extensive library of ready-to-test DITA documentation sets. There are many other samples out there. See Sample Content.

Committee steering committee

The committee is recruiting ACM SIGDOC members who would be willing to serve on the steering committee. A mix of academic and industry people would be ideal. The minimum commitments for a steering committee member would involve:

  • Attendance at a monthly steering committee ZOOM meeting.
  • Participation in email-based discussions (especially when we are getting this off the ground).

Please contact Stan Doherty if you are interested.

Current steering committee members:

Rebekka Andersen, Ph.D.
– Associate Professor – University of California, Davis
Stan Doherty, Ph.D.
– Senior Documentation Manager, Google LLC
– Chair, ACM SIGDOC Committee on Structured Authoring
– Founding Member, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Aine Doyle
– Recent graduate – North Carolina State University
– Technical Writer, IBM
Carlos Evia, Ph.D.
– Professor of Communication, Virginia Tech
– Director of the Academy of Transdisciplinary Studies
Oliver Fischer
– Recent graduate – North Carolina State University
– Technical Writer, Red Hat (Germany)
Ashley Hardin
– Content Strategist, Red Hat
Frank Wegmann
– Content Strategist, Software AG (Germany)
– Member, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
– Chair, OASIS Lightweight DITA Subcommittee
Chenxing Xie
– Doctoral Student, North Carolina State University

Consulting Members

  • Huiling Ding, Professor, English, North Carolina State University
    Kris Eberlein, Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
  • Dan Richards, Associate Professor of English, Old Dominion University
  • Keith Schengili-Roberts, Senior Manager, Technical Documentation, AMD Data Center GPU and Accelerated Processing
  • Jason Swartz, Professor, Director of Undergraduate Programs, University of North Carolina

What is Structured Authoring?

Structured authoring consists of a collection of standards, technologies, and best practices prevalent in the field of technical communication. “Structure” in this context implies that individual documents comply with a specific set of software-enforced rules governing allowable elements, attributes, and relationships. There can be many different sets of rules available to writers, but they declare only one rule set for each document. Software applications such as parsers then validate the individual document against its declared rule set. The enforced level of consistency allows teams to use more granular building blocks (topics, library blocks), to assemble them predictably via maps, and to automate workflows for authoring, content management, and publication.Frequently implemented with structured authoring projects are the following best practices for content development:

  • Semantic markup: The names of elements and attributes describe their content, but not their styling or presentation.
  • Information typing: Content of the same type — task, concept, reference — is implemented in specific topic types.
  • Minimalism: Information that is not directly relevant to the focus of the topic is removed or relocated.
  • Topic-based authoring: Content is developed in small-ish modules. Each module (topic) reflects a specific information type, validates against a particular rule set (DTD), and is referenced by maps to construction publications.
  • Metadata-based navigation and assembly: Processors read structured metadata in sources to generate navigation links and/or content assemblies dynamically.
  • Content reuse by reference: Content in maps, topics, blocks, or phrases can be reused by reference in multiple contexts.
  • Source-side analytics: Teams can query structured sources to generate reports on content freshness, reuse, and relationships.