Proceedings of the 27th ACM international conference on Design of communication
Venue: ACM Special Interest Group for Design of Communication (2009)

Welcome to SIGDOC 2009, the 27th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication! Hosted in Bloomington on the beautiful campus of Indiana University, this year's conference includes presentations of research and experience drawn from an unprecedented number of submissions. The call for papers attracted 84 submissions from Asia, Europe, and North and South America. The program committee accepted 43 papers and experience reports as well as workshops and posters representing the wide range of perspectives which inform our multi-disciplinary field. The program includes a panel on the role of technology in communication design and invited talks from Jim Shea, Director of Planning for IU's School of Informatics; Michael Priestley, lead DITA architect for IBM; and Jason Melton, Data Management Sales Specialist of IBM Software Group. Finally, Sandy Korzenny, Director of Product Documentation, will be accepting the Diana Award on behalf of this year's winner, Apple. Each SIGDOC conference is a true team effort. We would like to thank the many authors who submitted such excellent proposals and worked hard to develop the ideas and insights presented in these proceedings. We also thank the Program Committee for their hard work reviewing papers and providing suggestions for their improvements. Thank you to Indiana University for hosting this year's meeting and to our sponsors, The School of Informatics and Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, IBM, ACM, and the Department of English at Old Dominion University, whose contributions helped make our meeting possible. We would also like to thank this year's conference co-chairs Brad Mehlenbacher and Aristos Protopsaltis, program co-chairs Ashley Williams and Shaun Slattery, and local arrangements chairs Jim Shea and Rob Pierce, all of whom worked hard to make this year's meeting successful. Thanks also to Mike Albers who coordinated the student competition. Special thanks go to Ashley Williams who, in addition to serving as Program Co-Chair, set up and maintained the conference website, paper submissions system, and online registration. Finally, we thank Lisa Tolles of Sheridan Printing who was instrumental in producing the quality proceedings you hold in your hand. By meeting each year, we identify ourselves as a community, albeit a diverse one, committed to advancing our understanding of communication design from such perspectives as computer science, information science, information architecture, usability, communications, rhetoric, and technical communication. This year, these perspectives inform work on web communication and design, documentation and help, accessibility, usability and user-centered design, textual analysis, applications development, pedagogy, and social networking. By meeting together, we are able to share our own work, learn from the work of others, and engage in conversations which expand our collective understanding with the benefit of these multiple perspectives. We hope our meeting and these collected proceedings provide you a valuable opportunity to share ideas with other researchers and practitioners from institutions around the world.