On April 1st, I sent out an e-mail to the newly-developed Women in Professional and Technical Communication listserv asking for participation in a collaborative bibliography project. The e-mail provided a link to a Google Doc spreadsheet inviting listserv participants to share any sources on gender in technical, science, and professional communication. The spreadsheet was also forwarded to the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication the next day.
The project hopes to create a bibliography to give footing to this “subfield,” provide instructors crucial readings for courses, and also exhibit what has been published about gender and avenues for future inquiry and research. This collaborative project will find an audience as a published annotated bibliography and/or mixed-methods research project concerning gender and technical communication.
In only in a matter of three weeks, the bibliography has grown to 75+ entries, ranging across topics and types of publications. With the difficulty of summarizing what the bibliography currently covers and readability issues of the spreadsheet, I have turned to data visualization to show what progress has been made and possibilities for future additions.
The Google Spreadsheet, although an excellent source for crowdsourcing, made it difficult to account for trends in the data. If this project is supposed to be comprehensive and acknowledging all scholarship, I needed a way to summarize what we have in a “progress report” so to inspire future additions to the list. The bibliography is set up in a timeline format so to highlight dates, which are important in current citation practices. This timeline format also shows a huge gap in data from ’75 to the 90s.
This project challenges notions of our current bibliography practices, showing that visuals can help in making bibliographies collaborative and visual (showing trends, gaps, etc.)
Gender in Professional, Technical, and Scientific Communication Progress Report
Please use the report above to add materials to keep this project going.
Ashley M. Watson | watsonam@purdue.edu