I'm one of more than 70 contributors to Women in Technical Communication, an anthology edited by Sharon Burton that brings together first-person accounts from the women who built this field. The book spans fifty years of industry change, told by the people who lived it. My essay covers how I got into technical writing, what the workplace actually looked like for women in the early 1990s, and the path that led me to information architecture and DITA consulting.

DITA isn't a tool or an application — it's an architecture. Amber Swope explains what the Darwin Information Typing Architecture is, why it's built around topic types and reuse, and what it makes possible for organizations with complex content needs.

Every enterprise promises to share content across teams — and most fail. Amber Swope explains the four things you have to get right before cross-department content sharing with DITA will actually work: goals, architecture, authoring standards, and storage.