This year is the tenth anniversary of the CCCC-IP Annual, a publication created to fulfill the CCCC Intellectual Property Committee’s charge to keep the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s membership informed on key events and developments in intellectual property that took place over the previous year. Archives can be found at http://www.ncte.org/cccc/committees/ip.

As 2014 nears its end, we are looking back on what happened over the course of the year in copyright legislation, fair use cases, open access publishing, and notable high-profile plagiarism cases. Developments take place regularly that challenge our notions of what these terms mean, and we engage these developments in a timely manner each year in the CCCC-IP Annual . Typically, each article is an explanation of a particular development in intellectual property and analysis of what its implications are for teachers and scholars of rhetoric and composition. For example, the 2012 Annual contains an analysis of the rise of MOOCs written by James Porter. Starting this year, we encourage multiple genres, such as short (1000-1500 words) scholarly articles, listicles (“7 Things Rhetoricians Need to Know about the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology (FIRST) Act”), and infographics.

Some articles for the 2014 Annual have already been planned and are in progress; a working table of contents appears below this CFP. In addition to these, we invite submissions on interesting developments in intellectual property. Some ideas include:

* review of Electronic Frontier Foundation white paper published October 27, 2014: "Who Has Your Back: When Copyright and Trademark Bullies Threaten Free Speech" https://www.eff.org/press/releases/which-service-providers-side-users-ip-disputes

* Internet Slowdown campaign: https://www.battleforthenet.com/sept10th/ and https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/43692

* FIRST Act (open access): https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/42765

* Open Source Seed Initiative: https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/42771

Please write to Clancy Ratliff (clancy at louisiana dot edu) if you are interested in contributing to this year’s Annual by writing about one of the above topics or other current events in copyright, authorship, and intellectual property. Manuscripts will be due February 28, 2015 for publication about one week before the CCCC convention.

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Working Table of Contents, 2014 CCCC-IP Annual

Kim Gainer, Sherlock Holmes case

Jeff Galin, Georgia State University fair use case update

Wendy Warren Austin, Slavoj Žižek book review plagiarism case and Nic Pizzolatto "True Detective" plagiarism accusation

Laurie Cubbison, Taylor Swift removes her music from Spotify

Karen Lunsford, California open access law on publicly funded research

Carol Mohrbacher, review of EFF white paper "Unintended Consequences - 16 Years Under the DMCA"

Christopher Gerben, review of EFF white paper "Open Wi-Fi and Copyright: A Primer for Network Operators"

Steven Engel, Montana senator John Walsh plagiarism case

Mike Edwards, review of EFF white paper "Collateral Damages: Why Congress Needs To Fix Copyright Law’s Civil Penalties"

Traci Zimmerman, review of documentary film "The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz":

I'm interested to read this book by the president of Barnard College: Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection. I don't know that it's gotten much play with the news media or the academic media (Inside Higher Ed, etc.), so I want to do what I can to fix that. Debora Spar is a mom of three just like me. Maybe I'll be a college president one day too, heh.

Thanks to Jonathan's coding skills, we have a list of the most cited works in composition studies. These are from the journals Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, College Composition and Communication, and College English.

Jonathan has done some more technosorcery, producing this time a citational network graph of rhetoric and composition: specifically, the journals College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Rhetoric Review. JAC wasn't included because it wasn't in the Web of Science database, and College English might go in later; it has so much work in literary studies that we decided to omit it for now.

Much of this is as one would expect. For example, clusters show us that Kenneth Bruffee, John Trimbur, Greg Myers, and Joseph Harris are cited together. They all wrote about collaborative learning at a particular time.

What I find most interesting about this graph, though, is its more-or-less objective illustration of margins and center. I can't even drag Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations out of the center. Same with Susan Miller's Textual Carnivals, just about everything by James Berlin but especially Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900 - 1985. Patricia Bizzell “Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know about Writing.” Maxine Hairston "The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing." Peter Elbow Writing Without Teachers. These seem to be cited more than, and linked to more varied types of conversations than, any other works of scholarship in rhetoric and composition.

The margins are very interesting too. I find it kind of sad that Paul Kei Matsuda, Min-Zhan Lu, Bruce Horner, and Suresh Canagarajah are in their own diamond shape, so far outside the network that I didn't even have to drag. An island, Jonathan called it. Shows how little engagement our field has with multilingual writers.

Right next to that island is another little one about authorship and intellectual property. Not too far from that, another one in lavender about community engagement and public writing: Ellen Cushman, Christian Weisser, Bruce Herzberg, Susan Wells. Above that, an island that's almost all Kenneth Burke. Above that, in orange, an island about genre with Carolyn Miller, Carol Berkenkotter, John Swales, Charles Bazerman.

I'll certainly be sending this to our graduate students who are preparing for comprehensive exams; I imagine it will be immensely helpful to them. I wish I'd had this back then! Anything you notice that interests you or that is remarkable that I didn't pick up on? (I'm sure that one's a yes.)

Edited! This version has College English as well.

And THIS version has a slider that lets you limit the number of points that show up on the graph.

Jonathan has now made a browser for rhetoric and composition topics. Click on a truncated topic on the list, and you see the full topic, a graph showing its career in the journals, and a list of the articles most closely associated with it. Each title on the list is a link directly to the article in JSTOR. Preliminary findings:

1. I wouldn't have guessed that the articles most closely associated with television film radio tv popular media movie movies news magazine films newspaper magazines sports newspapers entertainment advertising examples pictures would be published between the years of 1950 and 1979, but there you go.

Also, I'm finding so many articles I wouldn't have found otherwise, including Macrorie's "A Literature Without Criticism" from the above list.

2. Another interesting-to-me topic was attack defense attacks liberal favor conservative defend political responsibility failed attacked standards accused faith claim typical education attacking dismissed, where I found two articles by Donald Lazere that I'd never read. These articles will help me with some work I'm doing right now with agonistic argumentation.

I encourage all of you to poke around in the browser; that's the best way to understand what all the topic modeling fuss is about.

I’m just getting into topic modeling as a research method, thanks to my husband, Jonathan Goodwin. This post represents my first attempt to make sense of it, because its value hasn’t been immediately comprehensible to me. You take a huge corpus of thousands of academic articles (or whatever), and then run a program, which extracts and presents you with groups of words that tend to occur together in the articles (topics).

Jonathan took all of JSTOR’s archives of College English, CCC, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and JAC and generated 100 topics. Some were coherent, while others seemed more random – though also somewhat interesting; see postscript. Here’s an example of a coherent one:

The program will show you a long list of articles that are associated with the topic. So if you were determined to find absolutely everything having to do with Hugh Blair, this method might give you some articles you wouldn’t have found via a regular JSTOR search.

OK, but besides that, what do you DO with the topics? That has always been the confusing question for me, though I have read some work about topic modeling. I want to write a series of posts explaining what I’ve been doing with the topics, to sort it out for myself.

When Jonathan sent me the list of 100 topics, I went through all of them and selected 53 that I thought were interesting. Mostly these were the ones that were most coherent, like the Blair example. I then pasted them into a document, labeled each one, and grouped them together, like so:

History of Rhetoric

classical cicero ancient rhetoric greek roman oratory orator eloquence quintilian invention renaissance speaking aristotle orators rhetoricians vols modem history

plato sophists gorgias socrates sophistic greek phaedrus ancient platonic greece athenian greeks athens sophist protagoras logos dialogues carolina isocrates

lectures belles century lettres historians rise influential reform hugh british campbell scottish southern rhetorical blair late alexander england founded

philosophical philosophy truth logic philosopher rational doctrine philosophers theory aristotle essays thing writings mere science thinking human mind truths

rhetoric rhetorical persuasion rhetoricians kenneth communication speech burke aristotle classical audience argumentation philosophy discourse persuasive arguments quarterly speaker invention

Now, I haven’t yet looked at the lists of articles associated with these topics, but here’s a list of questions that might be answered by giving these lists a close review:

How has the interest in these topics changed over time? This seems to be a favored approach among nerds like my husband – visualizations: graphs that plot the trajectory of when people started becoming interested in the topic, when interest peaked, and when it waned. Below is an obligatory graph for the Hugh Blair topic:

Another question I’ve never heard anyone ask, though, is this: which journals are publishing the most on these topics? Most of us in rhetoric and composition assume that if you have a manuscript about Cicero, you send it to Rhetoric Society Quarterly or Rhetoric Review, not to College English, because they don’t publish that kind of thing, generally speaking. But are we sure about that? To what extent? I can now do a frequency count of the journals that are represented in the “classical cicero ancient” topic and make a pie chart showing the breakdown. More on that later.

And Now for Expressivism

For six of the topics, I wasn’t sure what they meant, but I went ahead and labeled them “Expressivism.” Because expressivism doesn’t have an attendant set of terms, and is misunderstood so often and so profoundly as a theory of writing and teaching philosophy, I was interested in seeing what kinds of articles were listed. As it turns out, most of them were actually about literature, or were works of creative writing. But one of them yielded a few interesting bits:

Most of those, of course, are commonly used words, and I’m not really convinced that this is an “expressivist” topic. Still, I did find these articles, among many others:

Richard K. Redfern, "A Brief Lexicon of Jargon: For Those Who Want to Speak and Write Verbosely and Vaguely", College English, 1967
Donald Murray, “Henry James in the Advanced Composition Course,” 1963 College English
Peter Elbow, "Exploring My Teaching", College English, 1971
Joseph J. Firebaugh, "On being Unacademic", College English, 1946
Geraldine Hammond, "How Gladly Do We Teach?", College English, 1951
Winfield H. Rogers, "Responsibilities of the English Teacher in the Urban University" 1940 College English
J. Mitchell Morse, "Why Write like a College Graduate?" College English, 1970
J. Mitchell Morse, "The Case for Irrelevance", College English, 1968

In reviewing the list of articles associated with this topic, I think I now have a better handle on the sources of the theory some of us call expressivism: certainly it arises from attitudes of respect, concern, and care for students (see Rogers, 1940; Hammond, 1951). But I now see the overlap between expressivist values and the study of literature, as well as the study and practice of creative writing, and descriptive approaches to linguistics*. Those connections should have been obvious, but they weren’t. I can see that as early as 1940, some of the ideas associated with expressivism were in circulation – though certainly some would say that the seeds were planted even earlier, with Fred Newton Scott’s work (see Linda Adler-Kassner’s excellent article “Ownership Revisited” in CCC, 1998). I also think there are many more expressivists than we'd realized, and that a lot of people are/were expressivists but don't/didn't know it. No one is old enough to have witnessed all of this, comprehensively, in real time, and topic modeling is almost like having such a person.

More to come. For now, I’ll say that the best way to grasp the value of topic modeling as a method is to focus on one topic and mine the articles.

* I’m prepared to argue that James Sledd was an expressivist; I think I have a good bit of evidence.

In preparation for my CCCC presentation, I did the following alignment of the WPA Outcomes with the Common Core State Standards:

WPA Outcomes Aligned with the Common Core State Standards for ELA Grades 11-12 by Clancy Ratliff

I'm excited to teach this class this semester! I had to leave a lot out (there's so much to read in this area of scholarship), but these are what I selected in the end.

English 556 Syllabus