The Technical Communicator as Evangelist: Toward Critical and Rhetorical Literacies of Software Documentation

Abstract

In spite of a critical turn in technical communication research, discussions of software documentation continue to forward a singularly instrumental understanding of how these types of texts are composed and consumed. Using work on multiliteracies, I illustrate how analysis of the competing evangelisms of software that occur in programming culture unveils the ways in which documentation, like code, is ideologically encoded. Attention to the evangelisms of software facilitates critical literacy and, consequently, a richer rhetorical literacy. Such literacies are necessary for composing effective software documentation and identifying how the ideologies of software and its documentation intersect with the nationally-situated cultural values in which these technologies and texts are developed and used. To illustrate this complexity, I offer examples of the intersections between free and open source software evangelisms and the national-as-local contexts of the United States, Brazil, and China.

Rhetorical Genres in Code

“…What open source software (OSS) programming offers us, then, is a continued opportunity to study the complex rhetorical environments in which development occurs; in this, we echo—among others—Johnson-Eilola (2002) and others since (such as Cripps, 2011; Maher, 2011; Qiu, 2016) who have argued for technical communicators and critics to contribute to the OSS movement by developing documentation informed by (among others) rhetoric, usability theory, and information design. Situating documentation such as README files, man pages, help files, and so forth, as well as the code itself for any given OSS project, are open—that is, publicly available—for researchers to access and analyze.…”

Rhetorical Code Studies

“…Warnock and Kahn (2007) considered the ways that informal and self-directed exploratory writing practices might impact programming practices as a means of more clearly tying together programmers' approaches to writing and thinking. Maher (2011) highlighted the relationship between software documentation-related literacies and the "evangelism" through which particular software ideologies (e.g., open source) develop and are expressed.…”

A narrative approach to interactive information visualization in the digital humanities classroom

“…As Ballentine (2015) discusses, technical and professional communication shares several points of similarity with digital humanities, including concern for perpetuating humanistic values while employing technological tools and an emphasis on project-based scholarship. Specific points of concern include maintaining a humanistic ethic when developing graphics about injury or death (Dragga and Voss, 2001), adopting a rhetoric of user participation when developing interactive data displays (Kostelnick, 2008), and maintaining a critical perspective on the power relations embedded in computing technologies (Selber, 2004) and code (Maher, 2011). Wolfe (2015) describes two specific classroom activities focused on critically developing data categorization schemes and articulating storylines in data visualizations.…”