David Kaufer: Tools for Building Social Communities Around Texts and Text Analysis

David Kaufer will present a talk titled "Tools for Building Social Communities Around Texts and Text Analysis" 

Date: September 13, 2012
Time: 1:30pm
Location: ETS, Conant Hall, Lounge A (directions | campus map).

ABSTRACT:

This talk will present two technologies used at Carnegie Mellon in the English department for creating social communities around texts (Classroom Salon) and text analysis (DocuScope). Classroom Salon (www.classroomsalon.org) is a web-based tool used to support writing and content classrooms.  Classroom Salon supports both anchored and global annotation of text and in humanities classrooms allows teachers and students to create classroom discussions around text before the class meets.
This allows teachers to monitor each student's participation and depth of reading.  In science classrooms, Classroom Salon has been used to assess student's comprehension of difficult concepts.  It is being tested at the University of Wisconsin -- Milwaukee with a Gates Foundation Grant. Preliminary results show science teachers like it because it helps them gauge students' understanding of the material and adapt it accordingly.

DocuScope (http://www.cmu.edu/hss/english/research/docuscope.html) is a stand-alone java application that consists of large string-based dictionaries of English rhetorical patterns developed over a decade of inspection of texts.  These patterns have been shown to accurately classify major genres of written English.  They have been used to understand precisely how one genre of English differs from another (letters vs. reminiscences) or the variation that takes place within a single genre (the different rhetorical strategies that can define a reminiscence).  In this talk, I'll review the main breakdown of the dictionaries. The dictionaries were first developed to support a course in comparative genres of English and I will also discuss some educational applications.

BIO:

David Kaufer is Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon. From 1994 to 2009, he was the Head of the Department. He serves on the Executive Board of the Rhetoric Society of America. He is the lead author of five books and co-author of two more. He is the author of over 100 refereed articles in the fields of text-based rhetorical analysis, rhetorical theory, and written composition.