Author: Chris Scheidler

The broad rollout of automation technology is not simply a question of technological development, but also economic calculation, and thus it always exists in price competition with human labor. Moritz Altenried, The Digital Factory: The Human labor of automation Last January I began teaching an experimental “Automation & Writing” course in our Professional & Technical Writing Program. The aim of the course was to theorize and train alongside the many forms of automation facing technical writers today. Such automation spanned digital technologies that prompt design automation (e.g. Microsoft 365’s Designer), established PTW practices like Component Content Management (Batova &…

As a MA student at the University of Louisville I was invited to attend the Watson symposium in the spring of 2015. During the symposium, we (graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers) read, nuanced, and critiqued what became the Watson 2016 keynote addresses. The spring symposium and the fall conference were both moderated by Anis Bawarshi. In his role as moderator, Bawarshi worked to bridge the seemingly disparate fields/theories/concepts between the multiple keynote speakers, the audience-participants, and the disciplines. Perhaps fittingly, Bawarshi, in the closing session of the Watson 2016 Conference, asked that we attend to the work of mobility.…