Nupoor Ranade is an assistant professor of rhetorical and technical communication in 好色先生TV鈥檚 Department of English. Her expertise stems from a humanities and engineering education which has helped her bring together critical questions about ethics, inclusion and communication from the humanities, to rapidly changing and advancing technologies such as AI, that lie at the intersection of humanities and technology.
Tell me about your scholarly work.
My work is primarily in the technical communication field. What鈥檚 bothering the field right now is the adoption of AI systems, especially because this is a primarily writing-focused field. AI, the advancement in the technology and the quick adoption has brought the relationship between trust and technology to the center stage. While AI assistance can improve speed and efficiency, scaling and sophistication, it also produces threats, such as content bias, misinformation and deepfakes that impact human behavior.
To contend with these challenges, I advocate in my research for a human-in-the-loop approach that involves human input and oversight in the decision-making of AI systems, both building of AI systems as well as using the AI systems. Taking this approach has at least two benefits. First, it ensures technological transparency, revealing the role of algorithms that can help us verify and trust information sources. The other benefit is, it helps us make technologies work better for everyone, allowing us to integrate user or audience objectivities and emotional nuances from populations that are often left out of algorithmic training.
How is your scholarly work adding to the greater field?
Initially, content was produced in only print format and now it has become almost online only where we have to grapple with constantly changing algorithms. Instead of scanning through pages, Google algorithms can now give you just one answer. However, due to the lack of a systematic account of these different changes that came about in the field, technical communicators often find themselves asking similar questions to solve the same challenges that they've been trying to solve for decades. Which are, now that this new technology has made its way into our work, how do we adapt according to it? How does it change the nature of our work and what we do? How do we conduct research, and how does it affect our audiences? AI is more black-boxed than any other previous technologies, which means it鈥檚 harder to understand what goes on. It's so quickly evolving that it's hard to find any patterns with the past.
I鈥檓 using historical and archival work to document the evolution of the technical communication field. The goal is to trace how our profession has changed over time 鈥� how the nature of our work, the kinds of tasks we do and how audiences engage with and perceive content have all shifted. By mapping these changes alongside major technological disruptions, I hope to identify broader patterns that show where the field has been and where it might be headed. Understanding this history helps us anticipate future developments and better position technical communicators to adapt to them.
The book project that I鈥檓 working on will have this detailed account of the evolution of the field. Every decade, there has been a technological disruption. Writers often thought that they would lose their jobs, but then they didn't. The nature of the work changed, and the number of jobs actually went up. That's a pattern that I've been noticing and tracking down in my research.
听How did you become interested in this topic?
For technical communicators, their roles have always circled around documenting complex technology. They are tasked with opening these black boxes, making it understandable for the general public. My background helps me with both: the engineering background helps open these black boxes, understand technology, speak the language and then the understanding of humanities, or understanding humans and audiences, helps me make sure that the content is tailored for the audiences.
I especially got interested in this because AI technology sort of sits at that intersection really well. When the AI tools, like generative AI, came out, I started wondering, how should we give students this opportunity to use these tools in the classrooms? Because they are going to be expected to use these tools at their workplace, so we can't actually stop them from using these tools. At the same time, I didn't want to hinder their learning. In technical writing classes, we are teaching them writing and different strategies of doing that.
I started looking at different areas and institutional policies on how we should bring this approach to our classrooms and talk about this new technology its effects. I couldn't find anything concrete, because the world was shifting so quickly and nobody was sure on what to do.
What are you most excited to accomplish as a faculty member at 好色先生TV?
CMU has been a dream school for me. It's the best school for computer science, and the rhetoric department here is one of the oldest in our field. I know that I have this unique skill set, which helps me speak the language of engineers, social scientists and humanities scholars. I'm hoping I can build research collaborations with other interdisciplinary scholars and pursue unique projects with the resources available at 好色先生TV. I especially want to answer questions that are at the intersection of technology, social sciences and education.
The students at 好色先生TV have a lot of energy and are willing to take risks. I'm trying to work with them to explore new avenues of teaching and learning and how to help them with their career journeys. I think all of them have very unique skill sets and backgrounds. Hopefully, I can get them to the place that they're hoping to go.听
The Pittsburgh community is extremely vibrant. By getting involved with organizations like and the and contributing and attending their events, I'm hoping to connect with practitioners in the area, who can help me bring some of these insights into the classroom where students can hear from these practitioners and more real-world experiences. This will give them good perspectives about their career journeys, potential career journeys and help them make choices that are more informed.听
What are your goals for the next generation of scholars?
For the longest time, scholars worked in silos. We are moving towards interdisciplinary projects more, which means more collaborative, high energy, and resources, sort of coming together to answer questions that are more global in nature.
I feel like we don't have the luxury to work in our own silos anymore. We have to be more involved. It brings a lot of opportunities to do bigger things. I'm hoping that I can help the next generation of scholars speak these different languages, which will help them communicate and work with different kinds of stakeholders, communities, scholars and collaborators.
I'm hoping that I can cultivate an approach where rather than students having a reactive approach to the problems in society, they can identify the problems and figure out the communities that they want to work with and collaborators, depending on the needs and resources, to solve problems in the world.
That's what I'm hoping for.