reading notes

This is a mere sample of what I must do 3-5 times per day in order to pass exam to verify that I'm qualified to ... keep doing what I've been doing for the past 4 years:

Notes on Sauer (2003), "The Rhetoric of Risk: Technical Documentation in Hazardous Environments".

What was going on in the field when the author wrote it?

Tech comm shifted from arguing that it should research non-traditional settings to actually researching nontraditional settings. Note: This never happens in "high theory", in which no actual research is done.

Note: Contemporaneous examples include -- hey! Why is Sauer the only book-length study of a nontraditional setting that I can think of?

What aspects of knowledge does the author focus on, and why does the author focus on these aspects of knowledge?

Sauer analyzes the "embodied" technical communication -- specifically gestures -- of miners working in hazardous environments. In addition to responding to the call for research on "marginalized forms of representation", Sauer is taking up a social issue: Government regulations focus on abstract, paper-based forms of documentation -- these kinds of regulations don't even make it into the mine.

Sauer focuses on the endpoints of the cycle of tech. documentation in hazardous environments: stage 1, when embodied experiences are put in writing via an accident report, and stage 6, when procedures are represented to workers through training. At these points, there's a crucial interface between agencies and the material sites they seek to regulate.

What group of scholars is the author addressing?

Tech comm researchers and risk specialists.

What is the epistemological background?

Sauer blends the Aristelian perspecive that rhet. is an inventional art with the postmodern / feminist awareness that industrial communication practices are shaped by politics and economics, and therefore might not register some necessary info. about assessing and managing risk.

Here's Sauer's twist on invention: make visible the full range of responses to the problem of risk, then focus on the non-conventionalzed stuff that pre-existing / conventional modes of analysis have made invisible.

Sources: Richard Young . He focuses on invention, and I know about him.
2. Some Guy Named J.V. Cunningham.

What is the argument?

Broadly, Sauer claims centrality and value for miners' gestures and other marginalized forms of representations (i.e., leaving them out has real consequences): "Ultimately, the rhetoric of risk arguest that rhetoricians must develop, study and adopt documentation practices that will have the same authority and force that we now assicate with the written word. The hretoirc I imagine will note see gesture as additive, but it will help us understand how speakers and writers integrate many different forms of knowledge -- analytic and experiential, scientific and embodied -- in many different modalitites at many different sites of rhetorical production".

Sauer offers 4 provocative questions:
What if individuals don't have enough rhetorical knowledge to document experience in writing?
What if an individual can't interpret a toner or gesture?
How do health and judgements get skewed in consequence?
How can other attain and evaluate knowledge that is not documented in written form.

Sauer's research is descriptive (qualitative: empirical and documentary), so the focus is on "mapping new territory for investigation" and methods for answering questions, not on making claims.

What is Sauer's perspective?

Sauer is especially interested in "how gender and power is inscribed in the official communication practices that have affected miners' lives". Her focus is on rhetorical practices, not mine safety.

What perspective is missed?

The steps in the middle, which are intra-organizational.

What is the genre?

Descriptive with a smidge of critical.

What kind of research is the author doing?
I think it's ethnographic -- you might say it's lots of case studies -- with contextual documentary research. Sauer thinks that quantitative researchers would be uncomfortable with building theory from "isolated cases", a scruple that can be avoided if we look at the individuals as creating new, momentary solutions to communication problems that extend our understanding of the avail. means of persuasion in hazardous worksites.