The event has passed.
| Date: | Saturday, July 11, 2009 |
| Networking: | 8:30 AM |
| Presentation: | 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM |
| Topic: | DITA Content Modeling Workshop |
| Speaker: | Leigh White
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| Speaker Bio: | Leigh White is a technical communicator with over 15 years of experience as a content creator, content manager, and production coordinator. One of her primary interests is exploring ways that small technical publications groups can leverage existing tools and improve processes to maximize the reuse of their content, improve their efficiency, increase their offerings and save their sanity. To accomplish these goals, Leigh advocates that effective technical communicators need to be more than writers; they need to be part programmer, part designer and part project manager. She is also a devotee of XML and structured documentation and she believes that DITA might just save the world. Her other professional interests include DTD and XSLT design, FrameMaker template design, and relational database design for small, proprietary content management systems. When she is not parked in front of a computer, Leigh enjoys reading, running, hiking, bouldering, photography, motorcycles and a variety of other rather dangerous activities. |
| Cost: | Members $50, Non-Members $85, Students $25 |
| Location: | BloodCenter of Wisconsin
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| Overview: | The STC Wisconsin, Four Lakes and Twin Cities communities cooperatively present everything you need to know about DITA in July. Leigh White returns to the Midwest share her DITA expertise. The workshops provide practical, hands-on experience to creating DITA modular, reusable, structured documentation, and ways to assemble topics for different audiences and outputs. Following an overview of the principles of structured authoring (with a focus on the DITA model), you’ll apply those principles to your own content. Working with the instructor, you’ll physically deconstruct a current publication (or part of one), breaking it down into individual, self-contained, reusable topics. Next, you apply some basic DITA markup to the topics to begin understanding the relationship between the elements and your actual content. After markup, you’ll consider how you could create multiple publications from various combinations of those topics and what kind of changes you might need to make to the topics’ verbiage and organization to maximize their reusability. As this workshop is an exercise in modeling your own content, you must bring a printed copy of your material to work with. Suggested is a chapter of a manual that is between 20-30 pages and contains material that is representative of your publications in general. Also, bring scissors, tape and pack of index cards and a highlighter. If you do not produce hardcopy/PDF documentation, then bring an electronic copy of your online output as well as a representative sample of printed individual topics (20-30). If you are bringing electronic material, please bring a laptop as well. Otherwise, you will not need a laptop, though feel free to bring one. Attendees are writers, editors, content managers—anyone who needs to create modular, reusable, structured documentation. Although this workshop focuses on DITA, the principles you learn can be applied to any structured, XML-based authoring model, such as DocBook or a proprietary model. |
