Review of Text at Scale: Corpus Analysis in Technical Communication

Abstract

Stephen Carradini and Jason Swarts’ (2023) Text at Scale: Corpus Analysis in Technical Communication presents a practical and comprehensive examination of Corpus Analysis as a significant method for reflecting on the large-scale of practice and texts developed by the field of technical communication over time. This large-scale reflection, they posit, is critical to the development of a deeper awareness of the field’s disciplinary identity (p. 4). The authors focus their discussion on four key areas of the field: practice, research, pedagogy, and program administration, demonstrating how each area has contributed to the maturation of the field of Technical Communication through their practices and material texts. In this book, Carradni and Swarts make a case for how technical communication texts, whose rapid proliferation has been propelled by a growth in online practices, can be productively studied through corpus analysis to yield data-driven insights for even further development in the field. The authors’ call for methods of scale in arriving at disciplinary awareness echoes previous calls made by scholars like Benjamin Miller in his 2022 book where he also conducted a corpus analysis of thousands of doctoral dissertations to investigate what they reflect about the identity of the Writing Studies discipline. Unlike Miller’s work, which does not really go in-depth into corpus analysis as a method, Carradini and Swarts zero-in on the method itself, discussing its theoretical and practical aspects more broadly.