Computer-Aided Rhetorical Analysis
Suguru Ishizaki, David S. Kaufer · IGI Global eBooks · 2012
This chapter presents a corpus-based text analysis tool along with a research approach to conducting a rhetorical analysis of individual text as well as text collections. The motivation for our computational approach, the system development, evaluation, and research and educational applications are discussed. The tool, called DocuScope, supports both quantitative and quantitatively-informed qualitative analyses of rhetorical strategies found in a broad range of textual artifacts, using a standard home-grown dictionary consisting of more than 40 million unique patterns of English that are classified into over 100 rhetorical functions. DocuScope also provides an authoring environment allowing investigators to build their own customized dictionaries according to their own language theories. Research published with both the standard and customized dictionaries is discussed, as well as tradeoffs, limitations, and directions for the future.