History Bump

As the Conference on College Composition and Communication convenes each spring, the chair's keynote address reflects the currents of the field.  The conference commences after the brief address, which is performed by a prominent scholar identified by/with the field.  Through my project, I am seeking to revisit the addresses as arrangements of verbal/lexical data, which, sorted for word and (perhaps) phrase frequencies, provide us with a meta-perspective on the field.  Of course this is experimental through and through; other than a few keyword analyses of speeches from political figures and increasing attention in social network theory to folksonomies and tagging, very little work like this has been taken up.  I will begin with text versions of the six most recent CCC addresses, from Villanueva's talk in Atlanta in 1999 to Kathleen Yancey's address last year in San Antonio.  Provided that I can access copies of the text versions of these talks, I will process them through a word frequency indexer, as individual texts and as a collective.  I am currently working to access malleable copy; it is, I think, the only inhibitive factor in my plan.  From there, I intend to read the data for patterns and exceptions.  I would like to render the results into graphic form and develop an account of the process I applied as well as what it means to read the field in this way.  I will work toward my own understanding of what we might ascertain from data-sets stemming from large samplings of discourse, and, as well, infer connections between the annual ritual of the keynote address and the circulation of thema/topoi/noesis in the discipline.  

Provisional Bibliography

Barton, Ellen L. "Evocative Gestures in CCCC Chairs' Addresses." History, Reflection, and Narrative: The Professionalization of Composition 1963-1983. Eds. Mary Rosner, Beth Boehm, and Debra Journet. Greenwich, CT: Ablex, 1998. 235-252. (on request from Bird)

Bishop, Wendy. "Against the Odds in Composition and Rhetoric." CCC. 53.2 (2001): 322-335. 

Gilyard, Keith. "Literacy, Identity, Imagination, Flight." CCC. 52.2 (2000): 260-272. 

Hiatt, Mary P. "The Feminine Style: Theory and Fact." On Writing Research: The Braddock Essays, 1975-1998. Ed. Lisa Ede. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1999. 77-83.

Logan, Shirley. "Changing Missions, Shifting Positions, and Breaking Silences."  CCC. 55.2 (2003): 330-342. 

Lovas, John C. "All Good Writing Develops at the Edge of Risk." CCC. 54.2 (2002): 264-288. 

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geogg Bennington and Brian Massumi. 1979. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995.

---. "Database as a Genre of New Media." AI & Society. 2 Feb. 2005. < http://time.arts.ucla.edu/AI_Society/manovich.html>.  17 Nov. 2001.

Qaeda, Quality, Question, Quickly, Quickly Quiet. Dir. Lenka Clayton. Lenka Clayton, 2003.

"The Words Speakers Use." Chart. New York Times. 28 Sep. 2004.  <http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/09/02/politics/campaign/nat_02WORDS.gif> 3 Sep. 2004.

Villanueva, Victor. "On the Rhetoric and Precedents of Racism." CCC. 50.4 (1999): 645-661. 

Yancey, Kathleen. "Make Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key." CCC. 56.2 (2004): 297-328.