The Official Publication of the STC Technical Editing SIG
Paula Robertson, Senior Member
I think editors are uniquely suited to be judges for the STC International Summit Awards (ISA). In many ways, judging an entry is just like editing. The same analytical skills are required. The same diplomatic approach in offering advice applies.
Ann Marie Queeney and Kelly Schrank
Thank you to our survey participants!
Although the NATO conference was the higher-profile event, STC managed to generate its own excitement at the 59th STC Summit at the Hyatt O’Hare. The STC Summit, held May 20 – 23, offered a wide spectrum of interesting topics, time to reconnect with friends and colleagues, and opportunities to meet new people.
Continue reading “The Roving Technical Editors Report on the STC Summit”
Carol Lamarche
The atmosphere at the STC 2012 Summit, the annual STC conference, was electric, with terrific presenters inspiring conversation and new directions.
Vanessa Wilburn
A motif throughout the STC Summit 2010 was the idea of technical communicators as curators. Technical communicators pull together various content areas, select the ones of interest to their audiences, and provide that content to their users.
With that in mind, I thought that the #stc10 hashtag stream could be interesting to other technical editors. (For more about hashtags, see: http://help.twitter.com/entries/49309
.) The #stc10 hashtag acted as a collection point for tweets about the 2010 conference. For example, while I was at the conference, I tweeted for the Technical Editing SIG and included the #stc10 hashtag.
After the conference, I waded through the #stc10 hashtag stream by using tools like Twapper, TweetDeck, the Twitter API, and Ben Woelk’s resources to collate the stream before it disappeared (although you can use Google to pull older tweet streams). Following is the result of my curation of that list—I looked for tweets that hopefully are of interest to technical editors and might give a flavor of what people were “talking” and thinking about during the conference.
After removing the chit chat, tweetups, and other content not relevant to editors, I used Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/) to analyze the content. What’s interesting is that no frequent keywords popped out (beyond obvious ones like “STC,” “2010,” and “tweet”). Of the 3,003 words, only a few words occurred in the teens, and most were below five occurrences. For example, “Interviewing” appeared 10 times, “Gentle” 12 times, and “design” 10 times.
So what themes stood out among all those tweets and represented the “collective consciousness” of the conference?
To start, content strategy came up often and generated many retweets (definition: http://retweetist.com/howto). As editors, we are intimately enmeshed in content strategy through outline edits, templates, reuse decisions, and content modeling. The conference influenced this tweet discussion by including a track dedicated to content strategy and its advanced topics (http://www.softconference.com/stc/slist.asp?C=3145#TID11295). As Rachel Peters (twitter: @rachelhpeters) stated, “Content is the only corporate asset that companies still squander.” In other words, content is dramatically important, but still undervalued.
Another theme was usability and how it relates to technical communication. Although this theme might not seem to have a direct relationship to editing, it does demonstrate that all technical communicators, including editors, need to wear multiple hats to bring a quality information experience to our customers. As editors we help make content decisions, so usability can help.
Terminology drove the tweet stream as well, due in part to the keynote speaker, Erin McKean, lexicographer. Her passion about word usage created spikes in tweets during and after her talk on May 3. A couple of choice tweets summarized her points:
In their session later during the conference, Linden Lab reported that the most-viewed article in the Second Life Viewer online help was the glossary. Clearly, terminology is important as newer technologies, such as virtual environments, rise in usage.
Last, social media and community enablement can help an editor analyze what customers are thinking about products, including their opinions, their own documentation, and their sentiment about the documents and the products. Reuse of content, through either user-authored content or RSS aggregation, can make editing decisions trickier as multiple content streams are incorporated into traditional documentation. For example, Ben Woelk (twitter: @bwoelk) shared, “Lessons learned Community Roundtable report. User generated vs. professional content. Repurpose content. Accept imperfections. A. Gentle.”
So if you wonder what you might find in Twitter, consider following a conference hashtag for your industry, a professional organization such as the Technical Editing SIG, or experts in the field. These new streams of information are packed with the latest off-the-cuff thinking.
For curated tweets from the STC Conference 2010, see the attached file below.
Wow, I hope you had a chance to follow some tweets we sent during the conference. If so, you might have heard about the exciting times there. To wrap up:
At the Honors Banquet, we were extremely pleased (see the photo) to accept the Community of Distinction award on behalf of our volunteers, members, and past leadership board. We’d particularly like to call out the work of these past presidents: Pat Moell, Michelle Corbin, and Dianne Feldman for their contributions to make this award a reality.
Over 26 people joined us for the 7:15 am breakfast and networking during our annual business meeting. We shared our thoughts by posting “I love the TE SIG because…” on the walls of the room. See your peers’ thoughts in the photos below. We recapped our activities in the past year and talked about our upcoming plans, such as membership meetings, our use of social networking technologies, more additions to our web site, and the much-loved discussion list. Thanks to Jeff Japp for taking notes. In addition, the group shared its thoughts about how to help STC better promote its conference through better written session descriptions and templates.
Click to read the notes
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I love STC because I can talk about problems with people who understand. Good to know there are other editors out there!
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Thanks go to Shirley Burns and Gururaj B.S. for the SIG brochure that also included a list of sessions of interest to editors. We handed out 100 of these brochures to attendees. In addition to that, at the Community Reception on Monday evening, Kelly Shrank helped us meet and greet both potential members and current members, as well as hand out editor goodies: sticky pads in the shape of punctuation marks, fluorescent sticky flags, highlighters, and editing buttons.
We had 67 people attend the Editing Progression (the room was at capacity!). With six dynamic topics, each table had lively debate and conversation about Editing Challenges and Opportunities: Tracking Your Editing Metrics, What Practitioners Can Learn from Students, Keeping Your Editing Skills Sharp, The Editor’s Role in Building Community, The Editor’s Role in Screencast Development, and The Remote Editor. Several attendees commented that this was the best session at the conference!
Please enter thoughts about your experience at the conference in the Comments section below. Share what you learned, your summaries of your favorite sessions, or your opinions on the events you attended.