XML Project Overview

Though this course has traditionally offered students practical experience with some form of new technology, I don't want the technology to overshadow the theoretical and conceptual readings that are the heart of this seminar course. For that reason, our primary work with technology will occupy only the last three weeks of the course and will focus on a technology that has far-reaching consequences on professional communication—eXtensible Markup Language (XML). So here's what we're going to do:

• Read a few introductory articles about XML early in the semester to educate ourselves about key terms and concepts.
• Read more specific articles about XML technologies as the semester progresses, concentrating on those used most often in business publishing and technical communication.
• Gain hands-on experience with one of these technologies by converting the English Department's Graduate Student Handbook from Word to a form of XML known as DocBook so it can be repurposed to various media in the future. Work on this project will take place during the last three weeks of the semester—after you have submitted your research papers—and will be ungraded, allowing us to experiment without fear of failure.

In essence, the semester will begin by concentrating on the theoretical and conceptual and then shifting to more practical matters where we put a primary technology into practice. Iconically, the trajectory of the course might look something like this:

We start the semester deep in the theoretical, and as the semester progresses, this emphasis gradually fades while we slowly move into more practical exploration of a technology that promises to be incredibly important to the information age. For further information on our exploration of XML, consult other links in this category of the class site's primary navigation.