Which brings me:

to a funny story about how I once had a crush on my eight grade math teacher. Actually, it's not so much funny as it is long.

congruent

Throughout the project, Nardi and O’Day present six ethnographic studies that describe how new information technologies either strike a delicate balance of "congruence” with their wider cultural ecologies or fail to thrive{cite Selfe and Hawisher}; this research method has been taken up by researchers in the fields of technical and communication, computers and writing, education and new media {cite nauseating amount of studies}.

the social life of information

Hilary> the preface>mythical silent scream.

Nardi and O’Day posit a new term—ecology—to provide new ways of thinking about the social life of information in “computerized technology contexts” (cite Johnson). Specifically, the ecological metaphor suggests that “tools, people and their practices” are inextricably intertwined and bound to local contexts: information ecologies are diverse, complex and continuously evolving “systems”(p. 51) of god HELP me,I just had a brief citational encounter with the letter F.

...

During that elapsing time, Latour, Woolgar and Collon blurred the boundaries between texts, technologies and human beings. Technical comm grew as a research discipline. Science and Action got published. Science communication became increasingly computer-mediated and I tried to vaccuum my cat, Shady. All of these events culminated in the publication of my next foundational text, Information Ecologies.

{Note: for handy reference, I've italicized the phrases that do not require drastic revision}.

m'kay?

Then, a considerable period of time elapsed. {Note: the committee will want me to revise this sentence}.

preface so far

Since Miller’s (1979) foundational essay “A humanistic rationale for technical writing”, scholars within the field of technical and professional communication have acknowledged that technical writing always happens in an institutional context, and therefore embodies “tacit commitments to bureaucratic hierarchies, corporate capitalism and high technology” (p. 616). This “humanistic” rationale for technical writing emphasizes that writing about technology is not an “objective” enterprise but a “communal” one: in Miller’s “reconceptualization” the field, scientific knowledge then becomes “the correspondence of ideas, not to the material world, but to other peoples’ ideas” (ibid).

my professional

My assigned counselor at Educational Accessibility Services is a
blind African-American woman with a PhD in a technical field.

There is a nerf elephant on her desk that you can throw and
hit. She says that mostly administrators, not students, "use" (i.e, assault) the elephant when they come in.

She strongly recommended that I get my own stuffed animal to oppress.

...

A careful exploration of the books around you will dispel the myth that the genre of the preface was invented five minutes before your QE exam.

Look:

Even Nardi and O'Day and {insert the author of your foundational text} wrote a preface for their books, Information Ecologies and {insert the title of your foundation text}. Watch the preface social and disciplinary centrality for the book, aligining the author's research with key issues and questions in the field.

A widely underexplored way to

write your QE preface is to read some prefaces. Not "prefaces", prefaces. You know: People put them at the beginning of books.

homegrown microfiche

There is nothing in our book, the Koran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery. That’s a good religion.
"Message to the Grass Roots," speech, Nov. 1963, Detroit (published in Malcolm X Speaks, ch. 1, 1965

Stuck in commuter traffic on I-94, Hilary had the disturbing realization that, no matter what cool things god wanted to do for her right now, he/she/it/they could accomplish nothing without the cooperation of the people to her immediate right and left.

Spawn of Blogger

All parents of Hilary de-lurk here.

Dad, I study this stuff for my dissertation.

love, Hilary

the vanishing horizon of invisible work

Thought experiment: "Invisible work" (Nardi, 1998) reaches the horizon and falls off the edge of the earth.

The monsters that eat it are my object of study.

Look:

what the Liquid Narrative Research Group has made.

warning: appended table

The table in Hoff and Groot et. al is scanned on a bizarre axis, forcing the reader to risk spinal injury to get to the findings.

Specifically, this is a project about:

organizational socialization "in light of recent developments in communication and information technologies" (Flanagan and Waldek, 2005, p. 137).

This is the project in the field of:

Technical communication.

special information systems

After 4 grueling hours of searching out and resolving missing bits of information, Hilary got out her research notebook and drew three columns:

K. W. L.

She hoped to god that nobody saw, such as Sarah or Matt.

coding the data

Look ouuuut: the dimensions are going to collapse.