Here you'll find our methods for collection as well as some explanations for why we did things the way we did, along with a few apologies. You'll also find your methods. All we mean is that you can explore the text and analyze it in ways we didn't. So we've got some suggestions if ya wanna play with Tindorhick and make meaning, get textually active.
Our Methods
Matchmaking
When we were considering both popular ‘cites’ and sites in the field of rhetoric and composition, we selected the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) as our starting points. Both organizations hold well-attended conferences and have associated journals—College Composition and Communication (CCC) and Rhetoric Society Quarterly (RSQ)—that are highly respected in the field. By focusing on CCCC and RSA, we were able to cast a wide net in terms of the disciplinary emphasis and impact of scholars in the field. For both RSA and CCCC, we created a database of presidents and the years they served. For every topic we analyzed, we went back 20wenty years (2003 - 2022/2023).
Dating Editors
We felt that, in order to make claims about who is and is not being represented in the field–what voices are being heard and what perspectives are being highlighted, we needed to be careful in selecting how we defined the field, and by using CCCC and RSA, we hoped to capture both rhetoric and composition broadly. We selected editors because they play a substantial role in selecting the topics that are covered in the journals, selecting editorial boards, and shaping what and who are included or excluded from being published in these flagship publications.
Dating Chairs
Similarly, we felt that looking at the presidents of RSA and CCCC was important because they also shape the conferences and themes of the field. While we initially wanted to create a database of all citations throughout the history of both the RSQ and CCC journals, we realized this was outside the scope of our skills and time; however, we chose the authors of the award-winning journals for each year and collected all of their citations because their research was deemed to serve as significant contributions to the field. We reached back twenty years primarily because going further back made it difficult to find images of editors, presidents, and authors, as many had retired or never had web presences to begin with.
Dating Winners
We also created a database of RSQ and CCC editors with the years they served. Both journals have awards associated with them that recognize an outstanding article published in each journal each year. For RSQ, the award is the Charles Kneupper Award, which recognizes an article published in RSQ each year that is considered the most significant contribution to scholarship and rhetoric. Notably, the award is selected by the editorial board and editor. CCCC gives the Richard Braddock Award to the author of the year’s outstanding article on writing or the teaching of writing in the journal. We added to our database the winners of the Charles Kneupper Award and Richard Braddock award for the last twenty years.
Dating Cited
We looked through each award winner’s citations (mentioned above) to find if any of the award winners were citing the same scholars over a twenty-year period. We started with the most recent, Sonia Arellano’s, and listed each source she cited in a separate row. When that was complete, we began to list the next award winner, Antonio Byrd’s, sources, and if one had already been cited in Arellano’s article, we did not create a new row but instead put an “X” in the column under Byrd’s article so that, by the end, we could count (or create a formula to count) the number of times a particular article had been cited across the 20wenty years of award-winning articles. The link to the image below shows a small snippet of our spreadsheet. It is a really big image!
The top column going across has all of the award winners and the names of their articles listed. Any time we found an author that was cited in multiple award winner’s works, we put an “X.” The column on the left side going down includes the authors that were cited more than once. The “X” that goes across signifies which award winners cited this scholar.
Image of Dating Cited Spreadsheet
Dating All
It's everyone put together. You'll get a broader view of the project and who is influential and cited and, well, textually active. And you'll see some people twice! That's because they were part of more than one category: crossover stars!
All Profile Content
We tried our best to be fair with the information we found and keep it similar! It was challenging and we are sure we missed some things for authors, but we hope the gist of interaction and what’s easily/readily available gets our points across.
Pictures
As far as the pictures are concerned, we used Google and College/University profiles. The main goal was to find a profile that was good quality so we tried to use pictures with better resolution, at least when we could find one. Again, we might have missed something and could have made a better choice. For that we apologize! Paul aPAULogizes:)
Content
When coming up with the information that comprised the profiles, we used Google and YouTube to search and find information about the scholars: both professional and personal. We did this to imitate what occurs in dating profiles and also to present a fuller view of the person one is citing, beyond the professional information he/she/ze/they mostly control.
In the profiles you’ll find information divided into two sections. The first is information scholars mostly have control over about themselves. We call this “InFORmation: Info FOR Potential Citers.” These include things like personal websites, college/university profile pages, social media, GoogleScholar, and ResearchGate profiles (professional scholarly spaces). Though some information is redundant we tried to limit our searches to first results pages of searches. and we tried not to go beyond that unless there just wasn’t anything about the scholar,, which happened somewhat frequently. Though a few scholars have social media besides Twitter, we focused our search on Twitter because of how much easier it is to find scholars and it is used in ways that merge professional and personal. Of course, we understand that the migration happening from Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover may make Twitter less important and/or used than it was. If a scholar had a YouTube channel, that was also included here.
The second section of the profile is “InFROMmation: Info FROM Potential Citers.” This section is comprised of information that might be outta the scholar’s control. The section includes things like Wikipedia pages, RateMyProfessors ratings, and YouTube search results. Wikipedia was considered InFROMation because of its editability and how scholars cannot completely ever control what is composed, though certainly they can take part in the editing of their own pages. RateMyProfessors (which needs to be taken with a grain of salt) was used because it is nearly always on a first results page, kids still use it (Bailey testifies), and, well, if we think in terms of shopping and movies and college rankings, ratings do often help us understand our views on something and what to learn more about. We included YouTube search results when a scholar had a lot of hits and we considered these outta control since, well, there were often interviews, discussions, presentations with an audience that might help a citer know more about the scholar that’s more “off the cuff.”
We also have a Wildcard subcategory of information. The links here added information about the scholars we thought were curious, compelling, unique, or just kinda interesting. For example, one wildcard is Akua Duku Anoyke's TEDTalk. Another was Vershawn Ashanti Young's PBS interview. And Susan Jarratt we learned was a naturalist. There were a few we couldn't find anyone for, really! And a couple, GLHF finding, we linked to book reviews on Amazon. Just thought they were kinda fun/funny and couldn't really find much else.
Overall, we prioritized and valued (both in terms of order and what we actually displayed on the bio) the scholars’ personal websites first (when available and they had pertinent information) and their college bios second (when available) since those are spaces where they can control the information that is provided about them. Additionally, while we included the “InFROMmation,” we put those links toward the end of the bios to make it clear that this information is out of the control of the scholars and readers should therefore consider the accuracy of the information. Finally, we hope we were accurate in all our pics and profiles; however, people make mistakes and we don't think we did but something may have slipped through the digital cracks. Please understand we really tried to be accurate and fair with the profiles. But with any dating profile or, in this case, digital detective work, there is more thats revealed by some than by others, there's more readily available for some than others.
Dating Us
These profiles are ours and they represent a different way to think about information and what you might want or need to know about a scholar. We don’t really wanna talk much more about it and would rather have you think about it, design about it, argue about it, and let us know.
Your Methods
You'll just find some ideas, questions, and suggestions for playing with Tindorhick and taking our research in different directions. Enjoy!
Social Categories Overall: Try to find who identifies their social categories explicitly. You know, who identifies their race explicitly? Class? Disability? Sexuality? Gender? Are there differences? Are there patterns?
Social Categories Dating Categories: What, if anything, do you notice that's different about the profiles in the different categories? Like are past chairs a diverse group? How so and how not? Are there patterns? How does your own conclusion about this diversity inform your opinion of the organizations and their focal points, if at all?
Scholarly Ethos: Play with swipes and learn more about scholars. How'd the profiles change what you think/know about their ethos? What other information do you wanna know about? What would be useful?
Metaswipes: Swipe right. Swipe left. Who did you swipe right on? Who did you swipe left on? How come? What does it say about you as a scholar? A person?