Reading #1: Selfe & Selfe

One of the things that has bothered me greatly throughout all of the technical/professional leaning classes that I have participated in was the lack of a unifying definition of the discipline. This essay, while not overtly answering the question of an all encompassing definition, certainly address the issue, and is mainly focused on the different approaches that individuals and organizations have taken to try to provide an answer. All of the traditional methods of surveying the modern/current state of tech/pro writing, including historical accounts, research base, and general skills/understandings, made sense in the context which they were discussed, mainly within professional and academic settings, but I could also see their shortcomings. The method supplied by the authors is that of the text cloud, which through taking a sample of pages and the text contained therein, the surveyor then creates a "map" of all the most frequently used words which can then be further grouped or divided based on different attributes. The size of the more frequently used words is larger than those found less often. Selfe & Self claim that the text cloud provides a convenient and effective snapshot of any given field. The article, in typical academic article fashion, provided no convenient answers to the problem it suggested early on, and instead provided a survey and a possible alternative. I found it very interesting to read through the different approaches that have been attempted over the years, but found myself wondering if the problem is not quite a bit bigger than what is being discussed, and that maybe what this article concerns itself with isn't just a part of the larger beast. I'm also not sure that the text cloud would be that potentially effective beyond the initial wow factor and the fact that it looks cool and is easy to read.