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Quite some time ago I made a request for sources on interactions between
programmers and technical communicators. Below is a summary of the response
(hopefully, I have them all!). My thanks and sincere apologies for the
long delay--We were, for quite a while, having numerous problems with our
network capabilities.
Nancy S. Burns wrote:
I recommend "The Mythical Man-month, Essays on Software Engineering," by
Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., Addison-Wesley. Chapter 6, Passing the Word, is
especially applicable, but the whole book is worth reading. Mr. Brooks is
an excellent writer as well as systems designer.
___________________
Steve Fouts wrote:
You may wish to contact Dr. Judith Ramey, Associate Professor in the
Department of Technical Communication, College of Engineering, University
of Washington. She does a lot of research on the topic, and teaches an
excellent workshop on it as well.
She wrote a paper on this topic for the IEEE Transactions on Professional
Communication in 1990 sometime. She may be willing to share some of her
knowledge with you.
_____________________
Justin Wells wrote:
Try asking in comp.human-factors since that seems to be the newsgroup
haunted by all the crossover and HCI people. The major organization to get
in touch with is ACM-SIGCHI, which holds conferences, publishes stuff, etc.
-- thats the "Association for Computing Machinery -- special interest group
in computer-human interaction."
--A text edited by Brenda Laurel called "The Art of Human-Computer
Interface Design" which is a source book. Laurel also has a book called
"Computers as Theatre" which explores the computer-human interface in terms
of drama.
Finally, thanks to Justin Wells for taking the time to send an extremely
helpful (and long) HCI bibliography and to Bonni Graham for the suggestion
to write a survey and distribute it to the list.
*******************************************
Lee Brasseur
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Illinois State University
Normal, Illinois 61790-4240
