Please describe value of Information Mapping

[Ned Bedinger]

Thank you, Sue.

Bob's point must be that the movement was in response to technical 
documents not being read or used.

I keep hoping for a new interpretation of the problem and those 
experiments. Nurnburg Funnel indeed. We're supposed to be verging on 
Instant Karma by now.

Going back to sleep now,

Ned Bedinger
doc at edwordsmith.com


Susan W Gallagher wrote:
> Ned,
> The Minimalist Documentation movement began with John M. Carroll's _The 
> Nurnberg Funnel_ and is further discussed and explained in _Minimalism 
> Beyond the Nurnberg Funnel_ edited by Carroll and featuring chapters by 
> Joann Hackos and Ginny Redish. _Minimalism Beyond ..._ is the book to 
> read to learn about minimalism in practice.
>  
> Some of the practices that Carroll introduced are to document only a 
> single way to perform a task, encourage exploration, support recovery, 
> ...Many of Carroll's points have become conventional wisdom/common sense 
> over the years.
>  
> Much of Carroll's early work centered around tutorials for programmers 
> learning Smalltalk, and a lot of what he said in _The Nurnberg Funnel_ 
> makes more sense in the training arena than in a user guide. But the 
> work that's been done since then (by Carroll and others) has taken the 
> original Minimalist principles and adapted them to user guides and the like.
>  
> HTH
> -Sue Gallagher
> 
>  
> On 4/6/08, *Ned Bedinger* <doc at edwordsmith.com 
> <mailto:doc at edwordsmith.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Bob Doyle wrote:
> 
> 
>      > The whole MInimalism movement in the 1990's showed that the average
>      > technical document was just not being read or used.
> 
>     Hi Bob, I've enjoyed your perspective and comments about DITA. I'd like
>     to understand about Minimalism in the 1990s. I'm not clear whether it
>     refers to a consumer-initiated movement toward intuitive products where
>     the documentation didn't matter to them, or perhaps something that came
>     about with the innovation lust and the quest for new competitve
>     advantages in the speculative dotcoms business era.
> 
>     If you would share something of your perspective on it, I'll try and get
>     oriented.
> 
>     Thanks,
> 
>     Ned Bedinger
>     doc at edwordsmith.com <mailto:doc at edwordsmith.com>
> 
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