{"title":"Facts Upon Delivery: What Is Rhetorical About Visualized Models?","authors":"Chris Lindgren","doi":"10.1177/1050651920958499","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651920958499","url":null,"abstract":"What expectations should professionals and the public place on visuals to communicate the uncertainties of complex phenomena? This article demonstrates how charts during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic articulated visual arguments yet also required extended communicative support upon their delivery. The author examines one well-circulated chart comparing COVID-19 case trends per country and highlights its rhetoric by contrasting its design decisions with those of other charts and reports created as the pandemic initially unfolded. To help nonexpert audiences, the author suggests that professional communicators and designers incorporate more contextual information about the data and notable design choices.","PeriodicalId":46414,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Business and Technical Communication","volume":"35 1","pages":"65 - 72"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1050651920958499","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41313145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rural Health and Contextualizing Data","authors":"Erin Brock Carlson, Catherine C. Gouge","doi":"10.1177/1050651920958502","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651920958502","url":null,"abstract":"With significantly higher rates of comorbidities and limited access to health care, some Appalachian rural communities face magnified health challenges due to COVID-19. This article looks at one example of how data visualizations might draw attention to health care realities in rural communities and yet render invisible the realities of the most vulnerable community members. The authors urge technical and professional communicators to contextualize data-driven accounts of public health crises in order to call attention to the needs of rural communities and support community members who are multiply marginalized and thus especially vulnerable.","PeriodicalId":46414,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Business and Technical Communication","volume":"35 1","pages":"41 - 49"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1050651920958502","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45304014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction to Business and Technical Communication and COVID-19: Communicating in Times of Crisis","authors":"J. Frith","doi":"10.1177/1050651920959208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651920959208","url":null,"abstract":"Typically, the introduction to special issues of journals starts by explaining the topic being covered. One issue I contributed to included a 400-word description of Pokémon Go; another introduction had an extended definition of content strategy in technical communication. I sat down to write this introduction the same way, but doing so felt wrong. COVID-19 does not need a two-paragraph introduction. We are all aware of what it is and what it has done. As I write this in early June, the pandemic has killed over 400,000 people worldwide and rendered millions of people out of work. All of our lives have been affected in one way or another. The importance of COVID-19 needs no justification. Academic work, like most other work, was quickly altered by the pandemic. Classes moved online; campuses closed. Research slowed in some cases as labs became inaccessible, and researchers—and many people (disproportionately women)—were left with additional responsibilities at home. Research also shifted in some cases as people across disciplines","PeriodicalId":46414,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Business and Technical Communication","volume":"35 1","pages":"1 - 6"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1050651920959208","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46805285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Culturally Situated Do-It-Yourself Instructions for Making Protective Masks: Teaching the Genre of Instructional Design in the Age of COVID-19","authors":"Sushil K. Oswal, Zsuzsanna B. Palmer","doi":"10.1177/1050651920959190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651920959190","url":null,"abstract":"This article employs cross-cultural communication approaches to teaching instructional design in the times of COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on instructions from France, India, Spain, and the United States for making protective masks, the authors highlight how the writers and designers of these four documents from each culture approach their audiences, organize their DIY instructions, make language choices, employ images and other illustration devices, and culturally persuade users. While acknowledging cultural differences, the authors urge students to identify and adopt design strengths from diverse cultures in their own ideas about composing instructions.","PeriodicalId":46414,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Business and Technical Communication","volume":"35 1","pages":"160 - 166"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1050651920959190","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48729221","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Missing/Unspecified”: Demographic Data Visualization During the COVID-19 Pandemic","authors":"Rachel Atherton","doi":"10.1177/1050651920957982","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651920957982","url":null,"abstract":"While data 1 has shown that COVID-19 disproportionately affects Black people, the CDC’s early data listed race as “missing/unspecified” at high rates. Incomplete demographic data obscures the virus’s full impact on marginalized communities. Without more information about who the virus is affecting and how, we cannot protect our most vulnerable. This article demonstrates disconnects between reported datasets and data visualizations in public-facing COVID health and science communication and suggests steps that technical and professional communicators can take in creating or using data visualizations accurately and ethically to describe COVID conditions and impacts.","PeriodicalId":46414,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Business and Technical Communication","volume":"35 1","pages":"80 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1050651920957982","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46683623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Zoombombing Your Toddler: User Experience and the Communication of Zoom’s Privacy Crisis","authors":"S. Young","doi":"10.1177/1050651920959201","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651920959201","url":null,"abstract":"In spring 2020, not only did the teleconferencing platform Zoom experience an onslaught of new users who were now social distancing due to the COVID-19 crisis, but it also faced its own crisis due to the privacy of its product. For those working in technical and professional communication, the Zoom example illustrates not only a way to communicate in an emergency but also a way that privacy can cause a crisis in the first place. Drawing from literature on crisis communication and the experiences users described in the Zoom CEO’s blog post, the author concludes that while Zoom did indeed have technical issues that contributed to its privacy crisis, users also experienced its technology in unexpected ways, and the company underestimated the privacy expectations of its new users. Zoom’s privacy crisis ultimately provides a useful discussion of why it is increasingly important for companies to incorporate privacy by design and to be frank about their privacy practices with a public who has a growing interest in, and dissatisfaction with, corporate privacy practices.","PeriodicalId":46414,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Business and Technical Communication","volume":"35 1","pages":"147 - 153"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1050651920959201","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42381870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Is It Fake News or Is It Open Science? Science Communication in the COVID-19 Pandemic","authors":"A. Koerber","doi":"10.1177/1050651920958506","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651920958506","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores science communication in the context of COVID-19 through a case study of a January 31, 2020, bioRxiv preprint publication that led to conspiracy theories by suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 originated in the laboratory through genetic engineering. Analysis will consider the initial preprint, the scientific critique that led it to be withdrawn, the conspiracy theories that continue to circulate, and the larger debate that this example has sparked among advocates and critics of open science.","PeriodicalId":46414,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Business and Technical Communication","volume":"35 1","pages":"22 - 27"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1050651920958506","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45036604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Making-Do on the Margins: Organizing Resource Seeking and Rhetorical Agency in Communities During Grassroots Entrepreneurship","authors":"P. Rajan","doi":"10.1177/1050651920979999","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651920979999","url":null,"abstract":"Innovation and entrepreneurship are important yet understudied pathways in the technical and professional communication (TPC) literature for studying how underresourced people enact agency given weak or absent access to institutions. Despite TPC’s social justice turn and continued internationalization of research and practice, little is known about how economically underresourced entrepreneurs work in the majority world. Drawing on multisited, ethnographic research in communities of such grassroots entrepreneurs in India, the author inquires into the processes by which innovation and entrepreneurship are practiced in extrainstitutional settings of the majority world. Popular and scholarly reports paint a simplistic picture when they claim that grassroots entrepreneurs are resourceful, resilient bricoleurs who possess deep, contextual knowledge of complex problems for which they improvise affordable solutions. Challenging this homogenizing view, the author shares rich accounts of how such individuals navigate the complex sociocultural contexts that constrain and enable bricolage on institutional margins.","PeriodicalId":46414,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Business and Technical Communication","volume":"35 1","pages":"254 - 292"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2020-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1050651920979999","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44796587","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction to Special Issue on Innovation and Entrepreneurship Communication in the Context of Globalization","authors":"S. Fraiberg","doi":"10.1177/1050651920979947","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651920979947","url":null,"abstract":"The context of 21st-century globalization has witnessed a shift toward an entrepreneurial and innovation economy (Schumpeter, 1942/1987). Intersecting with these changes is the increasingly distributed and fluid nature of workplace activities as information, signs, symbols, actors, discourses, narratives, policies, and objects flow across borders, or “scapes” (Appadurai, 1996). This deeply contested process entails unequal encounters across difference that are linked to new arrangements of culture and power (Tsing, 2005). This special issue on innovation, entrepreneurship, and globalization is a call to look more fully at this process and the complex manner in which it is tied to shifting identities, literacies, mobilities, geographies, and the growth of start-up ecosystems worldwide. In making this call, this special issue builds on an emergent body of technical and professional communication (TPC) scholarship in entrepreneurship (Doheny-Farina, 1992; Gerding & Vealey, 2017; Jones, 2017; Lauren & Pigg, 2016a, 2016b; Lucas","PeriodicalId":46414,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Business and Technical Communication","volume":"35 1","pages":"175 - 184"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2020-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1050651920979947","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65236853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Evolution of University Business Incubators: Transnational Hubs for Entrepreneurship","authors":"M. Pellegrini, Richard. Johnson-Sheehan","doi":"10.1177/1050651920979983","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651920979983","url":null,"abstract":"University business incubators (UBIs) are uniquely positioned to foster transnational entrepreneurship and the evolution of business and technical communication practices on a worldwide basis. UBIs facilitate the launch of start-ups by professors, students, researchers, and local entrepreneurs. This study uses assemblage theory to profile four UBIs. Its findings concern their process of exporting incubation models and training transnational entrepreneurs, the roles of alumni and students, and the genres and conventions of entrepreneurship.","PeriodicalId":46414,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Business and Technical Communication","volume":"35 1","pages":"185 - 218"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2020-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1050651920979983","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46330054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}