Thesis (M.A.)--University of Central Florida, 2009. / Adviser: Madelyn Flammia. Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-104).

Thesis (M.T.S.C.)--Miami University, Dept. of English, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 31).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Central Florida, 2008. / Adviser: Madelyn Flammia. Includes bibliographical references (p. 178-187).

Technical writing teachers have always struggled with understanding how to best deal with pedagogical issues including rapidly changing technology, audience construction, and transposing an academic ethos into a professional one. The expanding online world complicates these issues by increasing the pace of digital change, making the potential audience both more diffuse and more remote, and creating a more complex online rhetorical situation. E-portfolios provide a vivid way to examine this complex technological situation, and in this study, the author examines four cases of students creating online portfolios in a technical communication classroom. The author looks at both their e-portfolio process as well as their product, interviewing them to get a sense of how they used rhetoric, identity, and technology in an attempt to form a coherent professional presentation through a technological medium. In addition, the author looks at some issues inherent in e-portfolios themselves that may be applicable to a technical communication classroom, as this medium becomes ever more popular as a way of assessing both programs and the students themselves.

Technological advances have made endless amounts of information on nearly every subject easily accessible, while at the same time fostering an economic climate conducive to international trade and partnerships. The challenge for companies then becomes one of figuring out how best to manage and use this mass of information, a task complicated by the increasingly global nature of business that requires products to be tailored to more specialized user groups in a wider array of formats and in different languages. Hence the emergence of information design, a field that technical communicators would do well to associate themselves with. Information design is centered around solving many of today's communication problems, and technical communicators are well suited to participate in those discussions. This thesis seeks to understand what information design is and the role that technical communicators can play in this important and emerging field. A comprehensive literature review, this thesis seeks to represent and summarize the overall body of work within the field of technical communication concerning information design and its related issues, as well as to suggest ways in which technical communicators can better participate in the design and implementation of information design systems.

Thesis. 1976. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Alfred P. Sloan School of Management. / Microfiche copy available in Archives and Dewey. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 230-242. / Ph.D.

The purpose of this case study was to examine what would happen when poetry writing was incorporated into a technical writing course for engineering students. To make poetry relevant to engineering students and topics of technical writing, a low-stakes assignment of poetry writing as prewriting about a technical object, called Technical Poetry, was designed and paired with a high-stakes assignment of technical description. The study explored with a group of engineering students their experiences of writing technical poetry, how they perceived it, and how it changed their technical writings and perceptions of engineering. The study did not intend to teach the engineering students to become professional poets, but to keep the focus of the study on enhancing technical writing instruction and developing students’ technical writing through a creative, poetic, and expressive pedagogy. The problem that engineering students have, of writing for and communicating through technical documents with a broad range of audiences who vary from high-technical to low-technical and lay readers, demands a broad range of exercises in different writing forms and genres. The Expressive Theory of composition emphasizes the benefits of creative and poetic writing exercises that foster writing from alternative perspectives, such as the poet’s perspective, and eventually improve the students’ writing and communication skills. Furthermore, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory informed the study of the roles metaphors play in language and mind and how they can be applied to writing technical documents and clarifying complex technical and scientific matters for readers. Poetry was used as a creative and expressive pedagogical tool that introduced poetic devices such as metaphors, similes, and analogies to equip engineering students with language techniques for effective technical communication with a broad range of audiences. The practice of writing poetry and creating metaphors also served to familiarize the engineering students with the creative thinking experience used in industrial designing, inventing, and technical problem solving, referred to as biomimicry or biomimetic. A qualitative case study was designed for in-depth case-by-case research. Data were collected from multiple sources including the students’ technical poems, technical descriptions in prose, pre- and post-poetry reflections or questionnaires, and interviews. The study adopted coding and discourse analysis methods to examine the students’ metaphors in communicating complex technical concepts with lay readers, their experiences of technical poetry writing, and their perceptions of engineering through the creative poetic pedagogy. As a result, the vast majority of the students reported positive changes in their perceptions of poetry and engineering and showed more effectiveness in their technical writings. In addition to writing technical poems that embodied metaphors, the students wrote technical descriptions that included numerous metaphors which, in turn, made their technical writings more understandable and relatable to lay readers. Recommendations are offered for ways that technical writing instructors can design and apply poetic, expressive, and creative pedagogies. Poetry was one way to make a change in the way English instructors teach technical writing to engineering students. Further studies can look at the impact of other literary and creative pedagogies.

In this thesis, we make automatic video categorization and summarization by using subtitles of videos. We propose two methods for video categorization. The first method makes unsupervised categorization by applying natural language processing techniques on video subtitles and uses the WordNet lexical database and WordNet domains. The method starts with text preprocessing. Then a keyword extraction algorithm and a word sense disambiguation method are applied. The WordNet domains that correspond to the correct senses of keywords are extracted. Video is assigned a category label based on the extracted domains. The second method has the same steps for extracting WordNet domains of video but makes categorization by using a learning module. Experiments with documentary videos give promising results in discovering the correct categories of videos. Video summarization algorithms present condensed versions of a full length video by identifying the most significant parts of the video. We propose a video summarization method using the subtitles of videos and text summarization techniques. We identify significant sentences in the subtitles of a video by using text summarization techniques and then we compose a video summary by finding the video parts corresponding to these summary sentences.

A framework for monitoring the dependencies between users, applications, and other system components, combined with the actual access times and frequencies, was proposed. Operating system commands were used to extract event information from the end-user workstations about the dependencies between system, application and infrastructure components. Access times of system components were recorded, and data mining tools were leveraged to detect usage patterns. This information was integrated and used to predict whether or not the failure of a component would cause an operational impact during certain time periods. The framework was designed to minimize installation and management overhead, to consume minimal system resources (e.g. network bandwidth), and to be deployable on a variety of enterprise systems, including those with low-bandwidth and partial-connectivity characteristics. The framework was implemented in a test environment to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. The system was tested on small-scale (6 computers in the GT CERCS Laboratory over 35 days) and large-scale (76 CPR nodes across the entire GT campus over 4 months) data sets. The average size of the impact topology was shown to be approximately 4% of the complete topology, and this size reduction was related to providing system administrators the capability to better identify those users and resources most likely to be affected by a designated set of component failures during a designated time period.

Thesis (M.S.)--New Jersey Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 42-43). Also available via the World Wide Web.