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.

The first generation of content developed by the committee is now live on our web site https://acm-sigdoc-structured.org.

Web Masthead

  • Curriculum Resources: All articles posted to this library focus on the concepts and skills that are attractive to hiring managers, specifically structured authoring (XML, DITA) and docs-as-code (Markdown, ASCIIdoc, Jekyll). You are free to download these resources in any format, modify them for your instructional needs, and distribute them to your students. If you do not see an article on a topic that you would like to cover in your courses, let us know.
  • Industry Speaker Bureau: Industry professionals are generous with their time. They can ZOOM into your classroom to talk about technical issues, industry roles/organizations, and first-job strategies. How can we help?
  • Sample Content: Structured authoring and docs-as-code have been around for some time. To complement curriculum resources, we collect and make available to instructors open-source and public domain documentation sets developed by industry teams and individuals. Instructors can distribute this sample content to students, build assignments around it, and assess how well students can interact with the sort of real-world content that they will encounter on the job.
  • Content Development: We do not have all the answers. We suspect that providing instructors with industry-relevant tools, content, and sample content will lower the threshold for instructors considering structured content, increase the number of courses that address structured content, and increase first-job prospects for program graduates. Our Content Development page makes transparent what we are developing how we are developing it. We share our work in progress, our style guide, our review workflow, and topics for which we have no writers – yet. Consider joining the conversation and shaping the work that we do.

Call for participation

We need additional industry experts and educators to complete our ambitious plans for 2025. Please contact Committee Chair or anyone on the Committee Steering Committee to learn more.

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 Committee Chair if you are interested.

2025 Steering Committee members:

Rebekka Andersen, Ph.D.
– Associate Professor – University of California, Davis (USA)
Stan Doherty, Ph.D.
– Senior Documentation Manager, Google LLC. (USA)
– Chair, ACM SIGDOC Committee on Structured Authoring
– Founding Member, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Carlos Evia, Ph.D.
– Professor of Communication, Virginia Tech (USA)
– Director of the Academy of Transdisciplinary Studies
Oliver Fischer
– Recent graduate – North Carolina State University
– Technical Writer, Red Hat (Germany)
Joe Golner
– Managing Director, Gnostyx Research Inc. (Canada)
Emily Gresbrink, Ph.D.
– Assistant Professor, Minnesota State University Mankato (USA)
Ashley Hardin
– Content Strategist, Red Hat (USA)
Stefan Jung
– Director, Technical Documentation at Dometic (Germany)
– Author, DITA Getting Started
Keith Schengili-Roberts
– Author, DITAWriter.com Industry Blog (Canada)
– Content Strategist and Information Architect
Frank Wegmann
– Content Strategist, Software AG (Germany)
– Member, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
– Chair, OASIS Lightweight DITA Subcommittee
Chenxing Xie, Ph.D.
– Assistant Professor, University of Cincinnati (USA)

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.