Documentation (what a formal word!)

Documentation seems to have a nice ring to it. It is in the same formal category as “deliverable” and “benchmarks”, though it feels less exclusively corporate than the other two. You can document a lot of things. Document your life. Document your classes. Document a website, or a procedure, or a lab report.

Documenting your life– well, I think that’s what many blogs do. That was what sparked my original interest in blogging and websites, which was to somehow share the details of a life to others through the collaborative nature of the Internet. I ended up starting a Substack, and writing frequently (and now, more infrequently), all to document my views about the world at that point in time.

For this Vivero training project, we learned about Project Documentation, and was provided a few examples to reference from previous projects such as the “Mapping Islamaphobia Project”. I ought to take a look (I haven’t yet…). Regardless, it seems like documentation is a large part of digital scholarship (and in science as well!).

It’s not easy to write good documentation, though. I feel like it’s easy to complain about dry and lengthy documentation, but man, sitting down to write it was much harder. As part of the required Vivero Training, we were only meant to document a simple activity, something like logging into an app on your phone, but I felt like I wanted to do a little more.

I started with writing a quick guide to logging into your cPanel Dashboard. Then, when it came time to submit the proof of my training to the Vivero heads, I thought, why don’t I upload it to the Internet using File Manager in cPanel? Well, now I gotta document that process as well. Hence, I have two documents, both published online: “Accessing Your cPanel Dashboard” and “Publishing a File Using cPanel“.

This process has showed me the reverse side of documentation; normally, I’m the frustrated user trying to parse through the instructions. There’s definitely an art to writing documentation. I believe engaging and fun documentation is rare and under-appreciated.