ATTW Bulletin

We live in an age of unprecedented information abundance, where more information is available to us in a greater variety of modal forms and in a greater number of places than ever before. Richard Lanham views this abundance as symptomatic of life in an information age, where people are just as interested in information about things as they are in the things themselves. In The Economics of Attention, Lanham writes that “[w]e have always had information as a perspective on stuff, to be sure, and toggled back and forth between the stuff and the information that informs it [but] [t]he information economy leaves the toggle switch in the information position.” Keeping the toggle in the information position are vast ecologies of technological agents (e.g., texts, computer interfaces, information kiosks, signs, etc.) that ceaselessly generate information about the world around us. These technologies help fashion an information space, comprised of many streams of multimodal information, lying over a physical space.

We can describe both the physical and the overlying information spaces as having architectures, structured arrangements of resources and allocations of space designed to support particular kinds of activity. To most of us, the division between information space and physical space is functionally imperceptible. When those spaces are effectively designed and implemented, our experiences of them are seamlessly mediated by information residing there. Consider, for example, how automatically we interact with the signal devices we encounter at crosswalks and intersections and whether it is possible to separate our interactions with the space from our interactions with information about traffic flow. Just as physical spaces support and shape social interaction, hybrid physical/information, and virtual spaces do so also. We draw on this information to create texts that mediate locally-meaningful activities. Often, the texts are narrative-like in their construction, threading fragments of information together to tell a story about an object of work and to script the identities and relationships of the human and non-human agents whose interactions are coordinated around that object of work. However, the information for constructing these narratives is available in different modal forms, each imbued with different potentials to communicate and to persuade. Thus, participants in those spaces must adapt existing and acquire new literate skills to engage in the activities those spaces support. These literacies and the settings where they are developed are the subjects of this special issue.

The proliferation of information technologies—especially those providing mobile and wireless access to remotely-located information—not only increase the amount of available information, but also require that we implement and juggle a variety of ways of interacting with it. Narrative is one way of arranging information to mediate our interactions with information in a given space. Recent research in linguistics, the rhetoric of science, and technical communication suggests narrative as a powerful means of thinking about and making sense of the world. In addition, narrative can facilitate coordination among people. For example, anesthesia technicians create narratives about their patients' conditions, which mediate their work performances and their interactions with other medical staff. The ways that the complex literacy issues involved in new technological spaces will play out are yet unknown, but it is clear that the implications will be far-reaching.

We welcome submissions on the following topics:

architectural configurations of physical, virtual, and hybridic spaces and the implications for information delivery/access, individual experience, wayfinding/navigation, narrative, etc;
emerging literate practices and the sites at which they take place: e.g., blogging and podcasting;
uses of multimodal technologies in the configuration and reconfiguration of workplace activities;
potential impact of multimodal technologies on literacy acquisition, civic engagement, disciplinary/professional standing, and related issues;
literacy skills required for working with multimodal technologies;
theories concerning the shifting relationship between readers and writers or producers and audiences;
impact of multimodal technologies on pedagogy and technical communication programs;
new research methods to investigate the use of distributed networks of interactive/multimodal technologies in technical communication;
technical communication's potential contribution to the development of multimodal technologies.

Submission Information

December 14th, 2007: E-mail proposals due. (1-2 pages max.; 500-1000 words) as .RTF or .DOC to Jason Swarts Jason_Swarts@ncsu.edu and Loel Kim ( loelkim@memphis.edu by We welcome e-mail inquiries from potential contributors.

January 15th, 2008: Authors will be notified of acceptance
March 30th, 2008: First drafts of accepted papers due
October 17, 2008: Finished manuscripts due.
Summer, 2009: Publication scheduled.

Please contact Jason or Loel as soon as possible if you would like to serve as a reviewer for this special issue.