I'm writing about two subjects because I haven't decided which one I'm going to focus my report on: the WVU undergraduate course catalog and the WVU Alumni magazine. Laura Spitznoggle is editor for both productions and has been gracious enough to give me information on both.
1) Why is the course catalog important? Is it easier to have the courses listed online or to have printed text you can hold in your hand? How are these decisions and process made?
What is the process of choosing articles for the alumni magazine? Who decides what the alumni want to read about? What makes the themes of the magazines so important?
2) I interviewed the editor of the course catalog about how it is made, what her specific duties are in that process, and how she prefers to go about her work ethics. I was invited to meetings and also received samples of writings.
I interviewed the editor of the magazine, asking her what the process of compiling a magazine contains, how much editing is involved and how she decides what articles are valuable and what aren't. I was invited to meetings on the production and also received two copies of the fall issue of the alumni magazine.
3) So far, from interviewing her on both products, I've learned that they are each lengthy works of production and take multiple revisions-the course catalog needing more. Also, it has a lot of interpersonal communications going on.
4) From what I've gathered, the editing process takes longer than the entire compilation of both products. With the course catalog, to revise every text that professors send in can take months, due to people turning in their information late, not liking how the course was exemplified in a revision, and not knowing how to write professionally. The magazine takes time to edit all of the articles people want to submit and fitting them into the appropriate places in the magazine so it flows well. The course catalog may not be available in handbook format for much longer because of how long the revision process takes. An online catalog is starting to make its way into process.
November 13th 2008 Class Stuff
15 years ago
1 comment:
Fantastic--I'm glad that you've made such great progress to this point. I particularly like your noting here how interpersonal communication helps to shape the work that gets done on these projects; that's the "activity systems" idea that Bazerman discussed in the genre essay we read last week. You certainly could focus your ethnographic project on these decision-making processes about what kinds of material to produce for the alumni magazine (are they collaborative, or does Ms. Spitznoggle make most of the decisions and then assign the projects?). I find interesting your question, "Who decides what the alumni want to read about?" I think you slightly reframe this question so that you're asking, "What kinds of values and interests do the magazine writers and editors assume (or understand) that the audience holds? How do they come to these conclusions? AND, how does this understanding of the audience influence the decisions that the editors make in generating story ideas and assigning these projects as well as the decisions that the writers make in research, drafting, and revising articles?"
Post a Comment