text at scale: corpus analysis in technical communication

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.