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Revision of Welcome to the Writing Studies Tree! from Thu, 04/05/2012 - 13:33

About this site

This is an interactive archive for the Writing Studies Tree, which shows scholarly relationships in Composition and Rhetoric and adjacent disciplines.

To add or edit content, you must be logged in; use the form at the right to request an account or enter your username and password. Once that's done, you can use links on the left of your screen to add a new node -- that is, a person or institution -- to the database. Even more exciting, you can create relationships between these nodes through a simple widget when you're looking at their pages.

Further help on navigating this process is forthcoming. We're trying to put together something in this space, and make it grow, but -- as George Harrison sang -- it's gonna take patience and time to do it right. Please bear with us through this developmental period, and let us know if you have any suggestions.

Who’s involved?

The Writing Studies Tree was seeded in 2011-2012 by a team of students and faculty at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY): Ben Miller (project leader and site administrator), Amanda Licastro (project administrator), Sondra Perl, Jill Belli, Diana Epelbaum, Chris Leary, Erica Kaufman, Andrew Statum, Lisa Vaia, and Dominique Zino. The tree and network visualizations were written by Matt Miller, a graduate student at Pratt Institute.

But we having planted the seeds, we want your help to make the Tree grow! Our chief design goal has been to make it easy to pool our collective knowledge and time. In March of 2012, we are presenting the system at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) as a Featured Session in the A block; we will also have a booth set up throughout the conference where visitors can get our help in adding information. If you would like to contribute, you are welcome to do so! Simply create a free account using the link at the right, and follow the instructions on the FAQ page.

Future Plans

As Franco Moretti, Edward Tufte, and others have convincingly argued, visual representation of large datasets encourages pattern-finding because it consolidates the information into something the eye can take in at a glance. Therefore, our goal moving forward is to offer an increasing range of visualization options for visitors to the site, allowing users to choose a mode of viewing (e.g. timeline, force-directed graph, matrix) and limiting parameters such as dates or distance of relation. Ideally, we would like to make a public API for the data, enabling new analyses and data-representations that we haven’t yet envisioned. Our goal is that the Writing Studies Tree become a powerful resource for understanding the dynamics of our discipline.

We welcome collaboration with Writing Studies scholars at any level, and would be especially excited to partner with the many skilled members of the TechRhet and Computers-and-Composition communities. For open discussion of possibilities, you can use the forum; you can also send us a private message at admin@writingstudiestree.org.

Can I use this data?

Data entered in the Writing Studies Tree database is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. This means that, so long as you give credit to writingstudiestree.org and refrain from using our material for commercial purposes, you may copy, distribute, transmit, and even adapt the work -- for example, to generate new data visualizations or analyses. If you are working on something like this, we'd be excited to hear about it! For public notice, you can use the forum; you can also send us a private message at admin@majoringinmeta.net.

Creative Commons License
This work by writingstudiestree.org is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.



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