This article argues for the long-term value of client-based group projects in an introductory technical communication course. Survey results are presented from 73 former technical communication students with two to seven years of workplace experience. Lasting five to six weeks, these projects are a compromise between a briefer conventional case method and a more lengthy individualized internship or cooperative education experience. The projects reinforce research, analysis, and reporting skills, such as interviewing specialists and conducting survey research, that graduates continue to value highly even after years of workplace writing. When framed as such, client-based projects also encourage students to define and debate public policy issues.
Although many excellent histories of photography and its invention exist, few focus on the rhetoric employed in debates over scientific priority and the romantic construct of nature as the active agent in photographic processes. This article surveys the range and complexity of rhetorical claims made for the first practical photographic process, daguerreotypy. It presents a rereading of the standard and romanticized history of the invention, defines the daguerreotype as a made object and cultural artifact with its own supratextual rhetoric, and presents examples from the discourse of 1839-1860 that show how daguerreotypes were argued to be simultaneously equal to, superior to, and inferior to natural human perceptions and representations.
This article reviews the history of photography to 1845 in France, England, and the United States, emphasizing roles of collaboration, legal protection, and training in the development and transfer of the technologies of the heliograph, physautotype, daguerreotype, and calotype. It argues that early innovative work in photography was motivated by plural desires: to photo-illustrate printed publications, to capture scenes from nature, to render human portraiture, and to investigate scientific theories of radiation.Amid narratives of the invention of photography, historians recognize at once the 1839 claims to invention of Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre in France, and the rival claims of William Henry Fox Talbot in England. But other of the earliest work toward successful photography remains less well recognized and understood. In photography, many of the earliest technological innovations were fostered by collaboration, by legal protection, and by training. Amid abundant national and even nationalistic histories of photography, the international development and dissemination of early photo technology remains somewhat obscure. Although the images of Daguerre appeared magical or miraculous to most in 1839, they in fact represented the culmination of more than 20 years of incremental work toward a satisfactory process of photography. Permanent silver-based photo images evolved from a search for a photolithographic process. With improvements that shortened exposure times from days to minutes, photo technology evolved by 1839 to the point where it could render recognizable miniature images directly from nature without conflating the movements of shadows cast by the sun. In the months immediately before and following the publication of Daguerre's (1839/1971) how-to manual Historique et Description des Procédés du Daguerréo Type et du Diorama in August 1839, technical innovation and legal restrictions became prominent, working both as incentives and barriers to international transfer of the technology. As exposure times were shortened further, successful human portraiture and a host TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY, 15(3),
Beginning in the 1850s, authors of American and British scientific and technical publications began to integrate photographs into their texts. These chemical and photo-mechanically reproduced images often functioned as the basis for carefully defined claims for truth. In the natural sciences, in microscopy, in medicine, in the emerging studies of psychology and the social sciences, and in the dissemination and promotion of technological accomplishments, the verity of early published photographs led authors to claim that an image could be equal to its referent in nature, or even exceed its referent when conveying scientific and technical information. This article presents a technological, cultural, and rhetorical history of published photographs based upon twenty-three images selected from a review of forty photographically illustrated texts published between 1854 and 1900.
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