Archive - Mar 2008

thecontentwrangler

Three DITA Groups on New Social Network for Content Pros

I've started a new social network for content professionals, The Content Wrangler Community. It's a place where technical, science, medical and marketing writers, editors, information architects, translators, indexers, content managers, taxonomists, and information technology professionals of all flavors can find and share information.

The network already boasts nearly 600 members (in just 2 days) who have started groups including:

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DITA and Topic Maps: Bringing the Pieces Together

Location: 
Oslo, Norway
Date: 
3 Apr 2008 - 15:00 - 15:30
Event Type: 
Conference

Audience and Task Analysis for DITA OT

The DITA OT user guide (authored by Dick Johnson and Anna van Raaphorst) is an excellent reference and has tons of useful information. It's one of the best references on the DITA OT. Sometimes, however, I feel that it's sheer size is a challenge for users, especially first-timers. We as a community need to help improve the existing DITA OT documentation by making it more user-friendly. Both Anna and Dick are busy and I have volunteered to reorganize the user guide and possibly break it down into smaller ones targeted by specific audience groups.

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Self on Help

Parallel Documentation Universes

Until a few weeks ago, I was unaware that there was a company employing some 200 technical writers just two kilometres from where I teach technical communication in Melbourne, Australia.  Likewise, a manager at the company was unaware that my university provided post-graduate education in technical communication. We were operating in two parallel universes. The company involved operates in the "engineering technical publications" field, which seems to be quite separate (and isolated) from the "IT and corporate technical communication" field.

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DITA Topic Specialization

Many great resources are available to
explain the mechanics and syntax of specializing the standard DITA DTDs
for your content—for example, Michael Priestley's Specializing topic types in DITA and Eliot Kimber's DITA specialization.
However, I didn't see any that walk readers through the process of
reviewing their existing content, evaluating its fit with the various
DITA topic types, and then designing and building a DITA specialization
around the needs and structure of their content, so I wrote the IBM
developerWorks tutorial DITA topic specializatio

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