Section I
Chapter 1:
Scientific and Technical Communication in Context
Part 1;
Part 2;
Part 3
Chapter 2:
Reading Scientific and Technical Texts
Chapter 3:
Writing Scientific and Technical Texts
Part 1;
Part 2;
Part 3
Chapter 4:
Conducting Research
Part 1;
Part 2
Chapter 5:
Understanding Audiences
Part 1;
Part 2
Chapter 6:
Persuasion and Critical Thinking
Part 1;
Part 2
Chapter 7:
Participation and Policy
Part 1;
Part 2
Section II
Chapter 8:
Definitions, Descriptions, and Instructions
Part 1;
Part 2
Chapter 9:
Correspondence
Chapter 10:
Job-Finding Materials
Chapter 11:
Proposals
Part 1;
Part 2
Chapter 12:
Technical Reports
Chapter 13:
Scientific Articles and Abstracts
Chapter 14:
Oral Presentations
Chapter 15:
Formatting, Designing, and Using Graphics
Part 1;
Part 2
Grammar Handbook
Section III
Chapter 16:
→ Opening
Geoff Cooper:
"Textual Technologies"
Discussion
Chapter 17:
Opening
Steve Fuller: "Putting People Back Into the Business of Science"
Part 1; Part 2
Discussion
Chapter 18:
Opening
William Keith: "Science and Communication"
Discussion
Chapter 19:
Opening
Sujatha Raman: "Challenging High-Tech War"
Discussion
Chapter 20:
Opening
Dale L. Sullivan: "Migrating Across Disciplinary Boundaries"
Discussion
Chapter 21:
Opening
Tobias, Chubin, Aylesworth: "Restructuring Demand for Scientific Expertise"
Part 1; Part 2
Discussion
Opening
One of the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher's (1898-1972) most popular works is a lithograph entitled "Hand with Reflecting Sphere" (1935). The work shows a reflecting globe resting in the artist's hand. The globe acts as a mirror reflecting, somewhat distortedly, nearly all of the artist's surroundings. The room contains a window at the far end as well as tables, chairs, lamps, paintings and books. Directly in the center of the globe sits the artist. He observes himself in the globe at the same time he observes and draws himself and his surroundings. As with many of Escher's works, the subject is self-reference. The self provides the basis from which one composes, and is composed by, their surroundings.
Self-reference is a unique concern in the social sciences. Social scientists immediately affect, and are affected by, the actions and settings of the subjects they observe. And while the subjects of natural scientific inquiry undoubtedly affect their investigators, their significance on an objective account of nature is disputed. Moreover, natural science methods rarely depend on subjects answering questions. Many social scientists concede that in any given instance what motivates human action is hard to pin down. Humans can act irrationally. They know only partially what motivates them. They lie. They use language in distinct ways. Consequently, the boundaries between analyst and analysand, stimulus and response, and cause and effect blur when humans interact with one another. Identifying how the interaction among subjects and objects affects social scientific explanations of, for example, why and how people vote, commit crime, and live in poverty seems thoroughly vexing — so vexing as to forever deny solutions to persistent social problems. In addition, social scientists have a undeniable stake in their own descriptions and recommendations. They too are affected by historical, political, social and economic change and how people conceive of that change. How then, in the swirl of social interchange, can one be a member of a society, come to describe and understand it, and objectively prescribe social policies? These questions lead social scientists to confront the problem of reflexivity.
In the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), reflexive textual practices are characterized by the use and mention of self-referring narrative forms, devices and literary styles. By self-consciously undermining the authority of assumptions held by writers and readers about the representational function of language, reflexive practitioners invite the active participation of readers in constructing the meaning of texts. The meaning of a scientific text, for example, would not rest primarily with the author's ability to match apparent linguistic referents with observable phenomena, but would be related to disciplinary dialects, previous literature on the subject and discussions among members of a given discourse community. Reflexive theorists hold a robust conception of language as constitutive of reality. Writing science is not just simply to record natural facts. Writing and reading science, rather, involves the creation of facts through social and rhetorical contexts. Consequently, traditional — often static — roles among reader, writer, text and real-world referents in scientific texts have been redefined. Reflexive theorists invite readers to employ the same interpretive devices to scientific texts as they would to literature.
In a rather playful and provocative article, Geoff Cooper explores possibilities for reaching outside (and inside) the traditional forms of scientific and technical communication. To varying degrees, all of our communication practices are instances of self-reference and self-discovery. We all participate in contexts from which we cannot, at an designated instance, separate ourselves. The act of reading a scientific text is a study in self-reference in which one composes, and is composed by, their aims and desires. But what happens we consciously and directly take self-reference into consideration when writing and reading scientific texts? Geoff Copper explores several possibilities.