The Dartmouth Summer Seminar for Writing Research is designed to support higher education writing researchers who would like to engage in data-driven research coming out of their personal or research-project inquiry. The seminar emphasises models of inquiry, and methods for analysing sets of data, and engaging in critical analysis with statistics and statistical tools for publication. For our project, we specifically applied to attend the seminar to further develop and receive a review on the work we do and how this work informs current questions and frictions in the field of writing researchers from colleagues, seasoned researchers, and experts in the field.
During the two weeks, we honed the analysis of one of our most critical features needed to determine what a writing tradition looks like, namely Metadiscourse markers. The months leading up to the seminar had been used by all our teams to code a large set of our data using Hyland’s metadiscourse markers. The seminar provided an opportunity to further determine the reliability of the coded data and more importantly a framework on how to proceed with the analysis and reporting of the results obtained from the coded data.
These results will directly feed into the next steps of our study: automatic coding of our larger dataset and applying machine learning to determine the writing tradition models across our data and languages.
We are very grateful for the extensive feedback we received from all the session leaders, Charles Bazerman, Chris Anson, Neal Lerner, Cheryl Geisler, Dylan Dryer, Joanna Wolfe, Jason Swarts, Bradley Dilger, Mya Poe, and Tiane Donahue, and all our seminar colleagues.
