Dr. Jordan Frith Earns a CCCC Technical and Scientific Communication Award | Technical Communication
February 13, 2019

Dr. Jordan Frith Earns a CCCC Technical and Scientific Communication Award

The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) recently awarded Dr. Jordan Frith (associate professor in the Department of Technical Communication at UNT) the CCCC Technical and Scientific Communication Award for his 2017 article "Big Data, Technical Communication," which was published in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication.

"I feel very honored to receive the award," said Frith. "My reviewers helped a lot over both rounds."

CCCCs is a professional organization of more than 4,500 members dedicated to "promoting the teaching and study of composition, rhetoric, and communication skills at the college level," and is a division of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Frith's article describes the role of technical communicators in interpreting "big data" (data sets too large or complex for traditional data-processing application software to process).

In "Big Data, Technical Communication," readers are cautioned against inherently trusting big data because of its apparent objectivity or transparency. The article instead proposes that the real value of big data lies in the interpretations and conclusions drawn from data by people operating in the role of technical communicator.

"The way people discuss big data tends to ignore those roles," said Frith.

Frith's most recent contribution to academic tech comm literature is his third book, A Billion Little Pieces: RFID and Infrastructures of Identification, which will be released in March 2019 through MIT Press. In this book, he examines "how RFID (radio frequency identification), a ubiquitous but often invisible mobile technology, identifies tens of billions of objects as they move through the world."

In his future research, Frith wants to continue to observe writing and rhetoric as a form of infrastructure.

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