Academic life is uneven: sometimes I’ve worked for multiple semesters without seeing a single publication come in, only to have multiple arrive in the same month. Happily, this month found me in the latter condition. I have several new publications to announce:
First is “On the Current Moment in AI: Introduction to Special Issue on Effects of Artificial Intelligence Tools in Technical Communication Pedagogy, Practice, and Research, Part 1.” This editorial opens the first part of the special issue that I edited for the Journal of Business and Technical Communication. (The second part arrives in January/February 2025.) In it, I gave some context for the specific moment that the special issue was writing from; with AI moving so quickly, it’s hard to know exactly what conditions people were writing from when work is published on AI. I also gave short introductions to each of the articles in the special issue. It’s my first solo editorial, and I’m very happy with it.
In addition to the special issue, Daniel Liddle from More than Memos interviewed me about the process of creating the special issue. The results of that interview are up in video form now! Many thanks to Daniel and the More than Memos team for making such a great interview. (Also, I do have arms; the camera angle on this video makes it look like I don’t, though. Whoops, that’s on me.)
Beyond the AI work, I am still wrapping up some old projects. Eric Nystrom and I have published what I consider to be the capstone work on my six-year Kickstarter project: “Asking is Hard: Appeals Language in Kickstarter Crowdfunding Campaigns.” The abstract is here:
Asking for money is one of the core communicative functions of a crowdfunding campaign. This article uses a novel corpus analysis scoring technique to investigate appeals language in a corpus of 312,529 Kickstarter campaigns. Our results show distinctive use patterns involving the verbs need, raise, please, make, and hope. Conceptual patterns, such as inviting the reader to participate in the creation of a product, underlie specific formulations of successful and unsuccessful word patterns and sentences. We conclude with theoretical and practical outcomes to aid technical communicators in more effectively writing crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter.
Thank you to Eric for being a fantastic co-author, without whom this article could not have existed. It was a truly collaborative, interdisciplinary work.
Finally, stretching way back, the print version of Text at Scale: Corpus Analysis in Technical Communication is now available for pre-order! The open-access online version is still available here from WAC Clearinghouse. Thank you to WAC and its partners for enabling both to exist!
Now it’s back to the work of writing! It’ll be a while before any more pubs arrive, I think.