By Derek N. Mueller
Copy edited by Lydia Welker, Sarah Truax, and Kasey Osborne. Designed by Mike Palmquist.
This book is the winner of the 2019 Research Impact Award by the Conference on College Composition and Communication. The award is presented annually to "the empirical research publication in the previous two years that most advances the mission of the organization or the needs of the profession." It is also the winner of the 2018 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award, which was awarded at the 2019 Computers and Writing Conference.
In this book, the first published in the #writing series, Derek N. Mueller offers a methodological response to recent efforts by scholars in rhetoric and composition/writing studies to account for patterns indicative of the discipline’s maturation. Influenced by work on distant reading (Moretti, 2005) and thin description (Love, 2010 & 2013), this monograph attends to forms of knowledge newly available via computationally mined, aggregated data from large collections of texts, which is then used to build experimental models for discerning non-obvious relationships. By shedding light on large-scale patterns, the models promote what Mueller refers to as a network sense of the field, which regards these as crucial structures of participation for orienting newcomers to the shifting terrain of disciplinary knowledge and for sustaining a generalist’s wherewithal in the midst of a growing archive of increasingly specialized scholarship.
