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Documentation, interaction, and conversation

Documentation, interaction, and conversation i i Article Documentation from the perspective of an AI-oriented interface designer. Documentation, Interaction, and Conversation Terry Winograd Dept. of Computer Science Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305 winograd@cs.stanford.edu hen I learned that I had been awarded the Joseph T. Rigo prize for achievement in system documentation, I felt greatly honored, and also a bit puzzled. In my research and writing, I have never seriously addressed the problems of documentation as a professional ac. tivity. My image of what a professional organization on documentation must do was dominated by the common stereotype of documentation as a rather static and formalized effort. The very word "documentation" carries with it an aura of rigidity. An "undocumented" person needs to go through bureaucratic rigors before getting "documented" and thereby become a real person in the eyes of the state. A system or product can be criticized as not "completely documented" if some detail is missing in the instructions. And certainly within the culture of the software industry, documentation is that burdensome chore that managers are always trying to force onto recalcitrant and otherwise productive programmers. But when I learned more about the award and the organization and its journal, I realized that http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer Documentation Association for Computing Machinery

Documentation, interaction, and conversation

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Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
The ACM Portal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc.
Subject
Training, help, and documentation
ISSN
0731-1001
DOI
10.1145/339119.339123
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

i i Article Documentation from the perspective of an AI-oriented interface designer. Documentation, Interaction, and Conversation Terry Winograd Dept. of Computer Science Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305 winograd@cs.stanford.edu hen I learned that I had been awarded the Joseph T. Rigo prize for achievement in system documentation, I felt greatly honored, and also a bit puzzled. In my research and writing, I have never seriously addressed the problems of documentation as a professional ac. tivity. My image of what a professional organization on documentation must do was dominated by the common stereotype of documentation as a rather static and formalized effort. The very word "documentation" carries with it an aura of rigidity. An "undocumented" person needs to go through bureaucratic rigors before getting "documented" and thereby become a real person in the eyes of the state. A system or product can be criticized as not "completely documented" if some detail is missing in the instructions. And certainly within the culture of the software industry, documentation is that burdensome chore that managers are always trying to force onto recalcitrant and otherwise productive programmers. But when I learned more about the award and the organization and its journal, I realized that

Journal

ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer DocumentationAssociation for Computing Machinery

Published: Nov 1, 1999

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