Analyzing the Language of Citation across Discipline and Experience Levels: An Automated Dictionary Approach

Abstract

source use of new kn formal ch know from reports on and levels sixteen pa (Compute Social Sci participan one's own Keywords , A. (2016). Rhet f Writing Researc

Uses of Metadiscourse in Online Help

“…A different kind of analysis can be achieved when close analysis of discourse is preceded by computational corpus analysis. Computational corpus analysis can directly support close analysis either by imposing a rhetorical framework on common language patterns, as in the Carnegie Mellon studies using Docuscope (e.g., Kaufer & Ishizaki, 2011; Kaufer et al, 2016) or by relying on the computational analysis to reveal patterns of discourse that can then be sampled for close analysis (e.g., Boettger & Wulff, 2014; Carradini, 2016).…”

Text at Scale: Corpus Analysis in Technical Communication

“…The ability to cross-reference the content of texts with metadata (in this case, metadata being the outcome of voting on the approval of a drug as a result of the meeting) led to an insight on how the content of the meetings may have affected the outcome of voting. Researchers can conduct this type of cross-referencing outside medical documentation for proposed policy documents concerning issues of technical communication interest that may have a range of outcomes (passed, tabled, returned to committee, rejected), as well as emerging proposal genres such as crowdfunding campaigns (Ishizaki, 2016) that have largely binary outcomes.…”

“…An example of a question of kind comes from David Kaufer et al (2016), who took a corpus analytic approach to studying citation practices among academics. This work built on research by Andreas Karatsolis (2016) and demonstrated how corpus analytic techniques allow researchers to supplement and guide close textual analysis.…”

Open-Source Software in the Sciences: The Challenge of User Support

“…Technical communicators could help online communities work as communities by finding trends in questions and solutions and from that trend analysis find points at which to intervene with targeted documentation. To support this work, technical communicators should develop skills in analyzing and mining text (see Geisler, 2003; Kaufer, Ishizaki, & Cai, 2016) in order to develop awareness of the discourse patterns that signal different kinds of questions and purposes for asking. Individual questions can easily get lost in the rush of conversation in an online forum, but as the research here demonstrates, users often relied on similar kinds of language to signal types of questions.…”