The borders between r hetoric / composition

1. The borders between rhetoric / composition A corpus analysis of a decade of article abstracts in RSQ and CCC

2. Methods • Distant Reading • Franco Moretti: “This system of differences at the microscopic scale adds up to something that is much larger than any individual text . . .” (Graphs, Maps, Trees 76). • Derek Mueller: “A deliberate adjustment in the level of detail at which we ordinarily experience texts . . .” (“Grasping” 197). • Algorithmic Criticism • Stephen Ramsay: “The algorithimic critic imagines the artifacts of human culture as radically transformed, reordered, disassembled, and reassembled” (Reading Machines 85).

3. A Distant Reading of Abstracts from RSQ and CCC • Article abstracts between 2000 and 2011 • RSQ: 220 abstracts • CCC: 261 abstracts mined with . . . • The Natural Language Toolkit • Suite of libraries used with Python programming language • Compiles all sorts of information from the corpus of abstracts

4. Data • Longest words • Most frequent words • Most frequent bigrams by MI score • Common contexts of “rhetoric” and “writing” • Citation graphs • . . . What does it all tell us about the field of rhetoric and composition?

5. Longest words in each corpus RSQ CCC 5 shared words: self-presentation, eighteenth-century, nineteenth-century, interdisciplinary, responsibilities.

6. Most frequent words shared between each corpus Words appear at disparate frequencies in each journal Words appear equally often in each journal

7. Bigrams by mutual information score Probability that the terms occur together “Information” of two terms • Probability that the terms • occur apart CCC: 4,455bigrams by MI score. RSQ: 4,768bigrams by MI score. 1,153 bigrams shared between the two lists. However, 32 of the 1,153 bigrams remain after controlling for stopwords.

8. Common contexts of ‘rhetoric’ and ‘writing’ N x N x N N x the rhetoric of the composition of the writing of the literacy of the language of student writing student literacy student language student power

9. Common contexts of ‘rhetoric’ and ‘writing’

10. Citation graphs CCC RSQ

11. Citation graphs 79 unique citations in CCC abstracts. 159 unique citations in RSQ abstracts. • Top citations in CCC: • Burke (5).Smitherman(2). Villanueva (2). Bakhtin(2). • Top citations in RSQ: • Burke (17). Plato (14). Aristotle (11). Quintilian (6). • 6 shared citations: • Mina Shuaghnessy, Kenneth Burke, John Dewey, • Donald Davidson, Peter Elbow, and Mikhail Bakhtin.

12. So what does this analysis tell us? • Nothing too surprising: • CCC is a journal of writing theory and pedagogy • RSQ is a journal of rhetorical theory • The analysis uncovers the details of disciplinary divergence and specialization • Different words, meanings, and citations cluster in each journal • These clusters overlap at the margins but otherwise represent separate networks of academic labor Cicero Geneva Smitherman epideictic rhetoric expressivist-constructivist Platonic dialogues student writing master tropes contact grading historiographical service-learning

13. Specialization: the field as a patchwork of niches or clusters a. Understanding Problems in Critical Classrooms b. Memory, Myth, and Rhetoric in Plato's Phaedrus c. Infrastructure and Composing: The When of New-Media Writing d. Occult Retraction: Cornelius Agrippa and the Paradox of Magical Language e. Gadamer's Rhetorical Imaginary f. Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments g. Why Hermagoras Still Matters: The Fourth Stasis and Interdisciplinarity h.“And Now That I Know Them”: Composing Mutuality in a Service Learning Course Strabo, Plutarch, Porphyry and the Transmission and Composition of Aristotle's Rhetoric—A Hunch j. "Rugged Grandeur": A Study of the Influences on the Writing Style of Abraham Lincoln and a Brief Study of His Writing Habits k. Speak for Yourself? Power and Hybridity in the Cross-Cultural Classroom

14. Specialization: the field as a patchwork of nitches or clusters Critical Pedagogy a. Understanding Problems in Critical Classrooms b. Speak for Yourself? Power and Hybridity in the Cross-Cultural Classroom c. “And Now That I Know Them”: Composing Mutuality in a Service Learning Course New Media d. Infrastructure and Composing: The When of New-Media Writing e. Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments History of Rhetoric f. Occult Retraction: Cornelius Agrippa and the Paradox of Magical Language g. Strabo, Plutarch, Porphyry and the Transmission and Composition of Aristotle's Rhetoric—A Hunch h. Why Hermagoras Still Matters: The Fourth Stasis and Interdisciplinarity

15. The discipline as network, the discipline as clade • Synchronic: Individuals cluster together and form new networks of intellectual labor and discourse, within and across journals.

16. The discipline as network, the discipline as clade • Diachronic: Disciplinary “evolution” is not a process of singular, wholesale transformation from within. It is a clade-like process of emergence and divergence of specializations.

17. The lexis is created by and recreates the cluster • The corpus analysis studies the lexicalformof communication (i.e., microscopic scale of words and phrases across many texts) and discovers the divergent terminologies of specializations. • The borders between these specializations are reiterated and strengthened, in part, through the use of divergent terminologies and “stylistic auras” (Bakhtin).