DITA Session 1 Review

Good morning!  I'm in the lab now after Session 1 of DITA.  We were instructed to create a blog or use a current blog if we have one, as a part of our coursework.  This is intended to be a recap of what we've learned during the week and will help us when it's time to turn in our culminating coursework at the end of the semester.

Today's session was an introduction to the module and an introduction to computing.  We discussed information and its impact.

• We are an information society
• defined by data
• changes in information affect individuals and organizations
• According to thye 2003 Lyman report, humans generate up to 5 exabytes of information per year
• So, as information professionals, we need to understand the techonology that handles this data in order to organize the information to manage and/or prevent information overload.

An analogy to describe Information Professionals:

We look at architectures, not just individual computers.

bricklayer vs. architect: the latter has a broader understanding of the buildings.

So... I don't need to be a programmer and understand the nitty gritty of the technology side.  I need to understand the information side and its organization.

We also talked about the levels of representation in computing:

• digital is discrete as opposed to continuous.  It's either on or off.
• bit - is represented by either 1 or 0.
• This can be used for numbers/counting, characters, letters/words, etc.
• byte - sequence of 8 bits
• kilobyte - 1024 bytes
• megabyte - 1024 kilobytes
• gigabyte - 1024 megabytes
• bytes are stored on disks or other storage devices.
• store magnetic charges = + ve/ - ve

Formats
Agreed upon structures - ANSI (American National Standards Institute)
ASCII - binary numbers to characters

• 7 bit strings
• 128 different characters
• Ex:
• A: 10000001
• J: 10001010
• N: 10001110
• JAN: 100000011000101010001110
• This only uses the US alphabet.
• higher level of encoding than binary numbers

Files - named collection of digital info

• uses the "office" metaphor
• text file = ASCII characters online
• file names have meanings: jpg, xls, docx, ppt

file centered approach

• files as single entities
• naming conventions
• mark-up for metadata: file type

files

• file structures
• files as related entities
• named collections in folders/directories
• hierarchal

Documents
Document centered approach

• building documents from file
• different media
• related to multiple files
• network/Internet

Later on we will discuss this aside:

What is a document?