Text at Scale: Corpus Analysis in Technical Communication
By Stephen Carradini and Jason Swarts
Copy edited by Don Donahue. Designed by Mike Palmquist.
Text at Scale presents corpus analysis as a methodological framework for exploring questions about genre development, technological mediation, writing practice, and teaching, among many other areas of inquiry central to technical and professional communication. Arguing that corpus analytics provides a powerful approach for the field, Carradini and Swarts provide an overview of corpus analysis as a coherent set of methodological practices and frames of analysis, show how it can be used to pose and address questions about large corpora of language data, and offer practical and replicable demonstrations of corpus analysis techniques. Through their clear discussions and extensive examples, the authors offer a theoretically informed and strongly grounded approach to using corpus analysis to develop and test hypotheses against large bodies of textual data.
Stephen Carradini is Assistant Professor of Technical Communication at Arizona State University. He studies and teaches emerging technologies in the workplace, social media, inter/disciplinarity, and methods. His work has been published at the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Technical Communication, Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, and New Media and Society, among others. He is the 2021 recipient of the Rising Star Award from the Association for Business Communication.
Jason Swarts is Professor and Head of English at North Carolina State University, where he specializes in the field of technical communication. He is a core faculty member in NC State’s M.S. program in Technical and Scientific Communication as well as in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media Ph.D. program. He focuses his research on technological mediation of writing practices, the rhetoric of technology, workplace communication, and emerging genres of technical communication. Previous work has appeared in Technical Communication Quarterly, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Technical Communication, and Written Communication. Over the years, his research has received a number of awards including NCTE Best Article on Theory or Philosophy of Technical or Scientific Communication (2005, 2009, 2011), the Nell Ann Pickett Award for Best Article in Technical Communication Quarterly (2007), and the Frank R. Smith Distinguished Article Award in Technical Communication (2013). His first book, Together With Technology (Baywood/Sage) received the NCTE Award for Best Book in Technical or Scientific Communication (2009). He has also written Wicked, Incomplete, and Uncertain (2018) and with Cheryl Geisler completed Coding Streams of Language (The WAC Clearinghouse, 2019).
Publication Information:
Carradini, Stephen, & Jason Swarts. (2023). Text at Scale: Corpus Analysis in Technical Communication. The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado. https://doi.org/10.37514/TPC-B.2023.2104
Foundations and Innovations in Technical and Professional Communication
Series Editor: Lisa Melonçon, University of South Florida
This book is available in whole and in part in Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF). It is also available in a low-cost print edition from our publishing partner, the University Press of Colorado .
