1,720,994 research outputs found
Review: Theories and Methods of Writing Center Research: A Practical Guide edited by Jo Mackiewicz and Rebecca Day Babcock
Get PDFWith nine chapters on theories and 10 chapters on methods, all contributed by knowledgeable professionals, Theories and Methods of Writing Center Research: A Practical Guide, edited by Jo Mackiewicz & Rebecca Day Babcock, is the research guide I have been waiting for. I have previously conducted two IRB-approved studies on writing centers and am in the middle of my third; without this guide, I have had to pull from multiple sources and have tried to read between the lines of published articles to determine the theories, methods, and methodologies that might best suit a writing center-specific context as a site for inquiry. While I will still turn to multiple sources while designing any research study and still encourage others to do so as well, this collection offers a starting place to ground research projects within the field of writing center studies
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Contextual information, answerability, and the logical construction of social how-to questions
Get PDFFor technical-knowledge workers seeking information about how to complete software tasks, online social question and answer (SQA) sites represent a valuable resource as an emerging form of software documentation. However, because answerers on these sites respond to questions on a volunteer basis, not all questions receive answers. Current research shows that askers provide contextual information in varying amounts, yet researchers have not yet reliably described contextual information types, disagree on whether more or less information associates with answerability, and have not yet compared the coherence of answered and unanswered questions. To assist technical-knowledge workers posting questions on SQA sites, this study explores the relationship between contextual information and answerability and between logical coherence and answerability.
This study analyzes 3,529 contextual-information t-units and 690 comment t-units from social how-to questions about Microsoft Word that askers posted on the popular SQA site Super User. Content analysis enabled a close examination of not only the amounts of contextual information that askers provided, but also the types of information, relationships among types, and relationships between types and answerability. Establishing and using three reliable codebooks related to social how-to questions, to contextual information, and to answerers’ follow-up comments, the study presents descriptive statistics and examples of contextual-information types and comment types. Further analyzing contextual-information types, the study presents and explores statistical differences in the distinctness, magnitude, variation, efficiency, word count, and logical coherence of contextual information in answered and unanswered questions.</p
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Discourse Strategies in Technical-support Interactions
Get PDFThis study responds to the lack of research on the discourse of technical-support interactions. Researchers have explored successful practices for recruiting technical-support personnel, constructs for determining user satisfaction in survey instruments, and discourse moments of miscommunication and empathy. Even though organizations must maintain users by successfully training technical-support providers to interact with users, no empirical study exists that explores the discourse strategies these workers can employ in the process of defining and resolving technical problems during that interaction. In this study, I examine 20 helpdesk interactions between users and technical-support providers in an educational technology helpdesk at a four-year university in the Midwest United States. Using discourse analysis to explore speech acts at both macro- and microlevels, I provide a comprehensive overview of the discourse in these interactions, helping organizations to maintain users by providing concrete, data-driven discourse strategies that technical-support providers can use in their service to users as they define and resolve technical problems during this important service interaction.</p
The Newest Tool for Technical Communicators-Redux
Get PDFSUMMARY
This article discusses color properties and color systems, re-examines and supports Jan V. White’s advice to technical communicators to use color to
increase document usability, and discusses what technical communicators should know about color to work effectively with professional printers.PublishedYe
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
A comparison of prescriptive usage problems in formal and informal written English
Get PDFSince the inception of modern linguistic study in the early twentieth century, prescriptivism has largely been ignored as an area worthy of serious linguistic investigation. However, recent theoretical and empirical work has sought to better understand the relationship between prescriptivism and language variation and change. In this dissertation, I carry out a three-part study in which I compare the way that the features for eight well-known prescriptive usage rules can be observed in formal and informal writing. In Part I of the study, I identify the eight usage problems to include in the study and the 11 usage guides from which to collect relevant entries. I then present a prescriptivism index for each usage problem from each guide to represent the extent to which each guide suggests that each rule should be upheld or ignored. In Part 2, I carry out a comparative corpus analysis of the usage problems in two different registers (blogs and news) that differ in terms of formality. The purpose of this analysis is to compare the proportions of times the rules are followed or not followed between registers. In Part 3, I present the results of a survey conducted among bloggers and news writers to better understand their views on the different usage problems.
Findings revealed substantial differences in the ways that usage guides treated the usage problems and in the attitudes bloggers and journalists espoused toward the usage problems. Additionally, there was substantial variation in the degree to which individual usage rules were adhered to, but there was surprisingly little variation in the patterns of usage for each usage problem between the two registers. These findings suggest that the level of formality of the text did not considerably affect the usage patterns observed in the corpora.</p
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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