Yes, it's getting down to the final few days to finish up your proposals for the 2012 Technical Communication Summit, taking place 20-23 May in Chicago-Rosemont, IL. The deadline to submit your proposals is 10:00 AM EDT (GMT-4) on Wednesday, 28 September; all proposals must be submitted through our online submission system. See the Call for Proposals website for full information.
To help get you in the mood, Your Friendly Neighborhood Blogger spent some time in the dark, dusty back rooms of Stately STC Manor browsing through Proceedings from previous Summits. Below is a list of 10 sessions from previous years, with the five years they came from. Two sessions were randomly selected from each year; can you guess which year saw which sessions? Answers are below the jump!
| Proposal Title | Year |
| 1. From CD to Web: A Real Usability Improvement Project | 1968 |
| 2. Laserprint vs. Typset Documents: A Study of Reader Performance | 1979 |
| 3. The Island of the Computer in the Sea of Instruction | 1990 |
| 4. Toward Women's Advancement: Politics, Tactics, and Camaraderie | 2001 |
| 5. How I Survived XML Single Sourcing | 2006 |
| 6. Nontraditional Communication About Health Risks: Hired Farm Laborers | |
| 7. How to Use Chinese FAX Control and Other Headlined News to Teach Technical Communication |
|
| 8. Semantics in Modern Technology | |
| 9. Moby Dick as Technical Writing | |
| 10. Speaking and Listening to Computers |
Answers
1968: The Island of the Computer in the Sea of Instruction; Semantics in Modern Technology
1979: Toward Women's Advancement: Politics, Tactics, and Camaraderie; Moby Dick as Technical Writing
1990: Laserprint vs. Typset Documents: A Study of Reader Performance; How to Use Chinese FAX Control and Other Headlined News to Teach Technical Communication
2001: How I Survived XML Single Sourcing; Nontraditional Communication About Health Risks: Hired Farm Laborers
2006: From CD to Web: A Real Usability Improvement Project; Speaking and Listening to Computers
How'd you do?
I guessed correctly about the Women’s Advancement session being offered in 1979, but I got all the others wrong. Really, I didn’t have a clue about the others. I just knew the Women’s Advancement had to be in the ’70s.