Chapter 9: Mining Textual Knowledge for Writing Education and Research: The DocuScope Project
David S. Kaufer, Cheryl Geisler, Pantelis K. Vlachos, Suguru Ishizaki · 2006
This chapter reviews progress on a new corpus-based text analysis technology developed at Carnegie Mellon, called DocuScope. It describes a new technology used to support research and education involving digitized text, especially corpus-based rhetorical analysis and on-line writing education. The first half of the chapter lays out an overview of analytic choices we have made for conducting textual research. The second half of the chapter explores how the knowledge derived from the DocuScope tool can benefit writing education and the evaluation of writing curricula. The chapter overviews different frameworks and describes a specific system as a result of the choices that confronted us within the space of these frameworks. It overviews some applications of our system, notably using student samples both to evaluate and improve writing instruction and writing curricula itself.