User Localization Strategies in the Face of Technological Breakdown: Biometric in Ghana's Elections

ISBN-13: 9783030264017 / Angielski / Miękka / 2020 / 243 str.

Isidore Kafui Dorpenyo

Spis treści

Chapter 1: Recovering the Lost Voices of Users in Localization

Culture as a Problem and a Relevant Factor in Cross-Cultural Design Practices

The User in Localization and User-Centered Approaches

Moving Beyond the Narrow Representation of Users

Theorizing Localization: Linguistic, subversive and user heuristic localization

The wicked problem for technical communicators in the era of biometric elections: testing our theories in a global village

Chapter 2: Biometric Technology: the Savior of a Risky Electoral System

Context of study and the exigence for reseasrch

Biometric to the rescue

Chapter 3: Decolonial Methodology as a Framework for Localization and Social Justice Study in Resource-Mismanaged Context

Decolonial methodology defined

The research process and methods

Flexible design for data collection

Chapter 4: Stories of Users’ Experiences

Kofi Manu's story: desiring to be part of the biometric design process

Mr. Gadugah's story: learning from previous challenges

Mr. Kofi Ansah's story: desiring to know how technology was built

Francis Yankson's story: the nature of the heat was too much

Reflections on biometric use in elections

Chapter 5: Linguistic Localization: Constructing Local/Global Knowledge of Biometric Technology

Parliamentary Hansard: Deliberating on the Biometric Law

Suite of Posters: Educating the Populace on Biometric Registration

The user manual: Follow the instructions to operate biometric smoothly

Local documents maintain the logic of the biometric

Local documents sustain the biometric system

Chapter 6: User-heuristic experience localization

Active sense-making during technology use

Stepping back as user-heuristic strategy

learning from experience as user strategy

Users as critical thinkers

Chapter 7: Subversive localization

The manual as an articulation of instruction writing 'pieties'

The Technological Gap

Expert Designer to the Rescue of non-Expert User

Non-Expert Users Rescue themselves

Manual as an articulation of local logics in a context

Chapter 8: You are not who you say you are: Discriminations inherent in biomentric design

Chapter 9: Conclusion: participatory user localization

Implications for technical communication

O autorze

Isidore Kafui Dorpenyo is Assistant Professor of Professional Writing and Rhetoric at George Mason University, USA. His research focuses on election technology, international technical communication, social justice, and localization. He co-edited a special issue of Technical Communication focused on technical communication and election technologies. Dorpenyo has also published in Technical Communication Quarterly, the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, and Community Literacy journal.

Blurb

Dr. Dorpenyo is to be applauded for highlighting an often forgotten issue of how technology issues in the Global South can inhibit social justice for users who rely on technology to participate in the democratic process. This is a timely and important material that will shape conversations on technology use in the fields of technical communication and rhetoric for a long time.

—Godwin Agboka, Associate Professor of Technical Communication, University of Houston-Downtown, USA

User Localization Strategies in the Face of Technological Breakdown is a nuanced, insightful text that will be useful to technical communication researchers interested in theories and methodologies of localization, biometrics, and cross-cultural technical communication. A much-needed perspective from an important community that can completely transform the ways in which technical communicators think about technology design in both local and global contexts. This book makes powerful interventions in current conversations about decolonizing technical communication through social justice work.

—Laura Gonzales, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at The University of Texas at El Paso, USA, and  author of Sites of Translation: What Multilinguals Can Teach Us About Digital Writing and Rhetoric​

Dorpenyo’s work provides technical communicators with a deep and very privileged look into the fascinating world of technology transfer in Ghana. The story he tells of how biometrics were adapted by Ghana’s election officials and voters is a case study for how to conduct analyses of “user localization strategies” for our field.

—Tharon W. Howard, Professor of Professional Communication and Rhetoric and Director of the Usability Testing Facility, Clemson University, USA

Dr. Dorpenyo’s unique perspective and robust analysis of the adoption and use of biometric in Ghana’s elections illustrates how users adapted this technology for their social, cultural, physical, and political contexts using linguistic, subversive, and user-heuristic localizations. This work, situated at the intersections of technical communication, civic engagement, social justice, user experience, and localization earns its significance by pointing out the importance of election technologies in non-western cultures and providing us with rhetorical localization strategies to consider within cultural technical communication.

—Michelle F. Eble, Associate Professor of Technical and Professional Communication, East Carolina University, USA

This book examines Ghana’s use of the fingerprint biometric technology in order to further conversations about localization championed by technical communication scholars. Localization, in this case, refers to the extent to which users demonstrate their knowledge of use by subverting and reconfiguring the purpose of technology to solve local problems. Dorpenyo argues that the success of a technology depends on how it meets the users’ needs and the creative efforts users put into use situations. In User Localization Strategies in the Face of Technological Breakdown, Dorpenyo advocates studying how users of technological systems construct knowledge about the technology and develop local strategies to solve technological breakdowns. By analyzing technical documents and interview transcripts, the author identifies and advances three user localization strategies: linguistic localization, subversive localization, and user-heuristic experience localization, and considers how biometric systems can become a tool of marginalization.