Towards content lakes

One of the trends in both data and content management is the move away from silos. In data management circles, there is a trend towards the collection and aggregation of customer data into “data lakes”. According to Margaret Rouse, a data lake is: A storage repository that holds a vast amount of raw data in its… Read more »

New online MSc in Technical Writing

The Department of Computing at Cork Institute of Technology (CIT) has announced new online Masters degree in Information Design & Development for 2016-17, together with a certificate and a postgraduate diploma. There aren’t any undergraduate or postgraduate university courses in the UK for technical communication, so online courses in other countries can be an alternative solution. In comparison to the technical… Read more »

SankeyTextualVariant: Visualisation software for comparing texts

Professor Martin Paul Eve of Birkbeck College, University of London, has released, for free, the visualisation software that helped him compare the texts of the novel Cloud Atlas. It displays the differences as a Sankey diagram. It’s intended to be used for comparing contemporary fiction, but it may have uses for analysing other long documents. See: SankeyTextualVariant… Read more »

Documentation as Code

Tom Johnson has written two interesting posts on his blog on the “Documentation as Code” concept: Will the docs-as-code approach scale? Review of Andrew Etter’s ebook on Modern Technical Writing Documentation as Code can be interpreted in a few ways. Tom describes it as being able to store the documentation with the code: From a… Read more »

General Data Protection Regulation – will this affect online Help?

Yesterday, I saw a presentation by Hazel Southwell on the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will be implemented on the 25th May 2018. The impact in its data privacy and protection rules seem likely to affect pretty much every website, with the threat of hefty fines for those that do not comply. Organisations providing… Read more »