Review
Manuscript prepared for Digital
Rhetoric Collaborative, an imprint of Michigan
Publishing. 
In this chapter, we present and discuss numerous interactive visualizations of trends we have noticed unfolding over time in our corpus of 766 articles about new media in English Journal. We begin by presenting visualizations of the corpus as a whole and then we turn to presenting comparative visualizations of similarities and differences in the trends we observed in the four most common forms of media we found in our corpus: radio, film/video, television, and computer. Our visualizations elucidate patterns in how the articles conceptualized new media as tools for student composing and/or as objects of analysis. We also track numerous recurring, ideological topoi that have been associated with media pedagogies over time (e.g., the claim that new media are engaging for students, or the claim that the new media are harming alphabetic literacy, to name just a couple).
Zooming into the level of individual words, we then present word clouds and interactive line graphs that highlight some the most prominent words in our corpus in each decade. These word frequency data were generated through machine reading, although we then made very human rhetorical choices about how to visualize them. In many ways, our word frequency visualizations confirm trends in media lifespans that we’d already begun to see in earlier graphs, but they also call our attention to some aspects of how new media pedagogies have been (re)conceputalized over time that only became apparent through machine reading rather than through human coding. The video below offers a brief overview of the various interactive visualizations featured in this chapter, how to manipulate them, and the types of questions such interactions might prompt.
Chapter 3: Overview Tour (.txt version)
Jason: Welcome to Chapter 3. This chapter is really just a big old collection of graphs that we invite you to play with. For example, here's the first graph we're going to see. It's a timeline of all articles. I can click on "All Articles" here, and I can start to notice--wow, there were articles about new media in just about every decade, except for right here [points to 1920-21]. There's this interesting spike happening in the 30s, and some spikes happening later on. But let's say I want to zoom in a bit more and look at how production pedagogy fared up against reception pedagogy over time. So I can click on "All Articles" again--that line's gone. Now, here's blue, "Reception."
[meow]
And if you heard in the background, that was my cat. Anyway, here's blue, "Reception." You notice a pretty persistent presence. Now I'm going to turn on orange, "Production." And here, I notice some interesting things. It seems like in a lot of points in the corpus, reception is predominating production. But, hmmm, what's happening here in the late 30s that makes production really take off? What's happening here in the 80s and 90s and our current century that seems to lead to a boom in students making projects with new media? It's intriguing, and if I wanted to just get back, I can always just reset the graph.
We visualize this production versus reception question in a multitude of ways. Here's a donut chart. We can see that over time, reception predominated slightly, but production was really holding its own. When you look at radio, that trend seems to hold. When you look at film, reception predominating a bit more, but there's still quite a lot of production here. When you go to television, woo!--production, a much smaller part of that corpus. When you go to computer, and things radically change. And it's clear that the computer was very much seen as a production device, though primarily for alphabetic forms of production early on.
Okay. Now let's take a look at topoi. That's one of the things that we coded for. What are some of the common arguments that keep coming up about new media over time? So one of the ones that probably isn't surprising is: new media have been engaging for students, I can't say since the beginning of time, but I can at least say based on our data since 1912. And then, let's look at a surprising one: the idea that new media are harming alphabetic literacy. That didn't really show up very much in our corpus--much less than we expected. So that's something that we asked questions about.
Okay. Now, let's take a look at radio. We have the option to again compare production and reception. So I'm going to turn the reception line on first. And I'm going to see that, hmm, it seems like the heyday of radio was really the 30s through the 40s--the real Golden Age of Radio--that makes a lot of sense. Although I get intrigued by what some of these other blips were [indicates later in the timeline]. Now I turn on production: hmm. Things look a little bit differently. One of the things I want to do, and you can do this on any of our timeline graphs, is zoom in. So I'm going to double-click here, and now I can just look a little bit more closely at what was happening here in this time period. And what you'll see, too, is that if I get curious about what was going on with production in 1939, I can hover over the dot, and all of a sudden I get authors and titles. And I can actually go and look at one of these. So I click on this, and there you have it! "Students Like Radio Writing" by Mildred Carson--one of my favorites. You can go read it yourself and see how it might help you reinvigorate ideas for your own digital audio teaching.
Okay. And then finally, we have a series of visualizations that demonstrate word frequencies across the decades. You can click through and look at word clouds as they evolve decade by decade. You also have the option to play around with our n-gram viewer and compare two terms. But I'm not really going to say much about these visualizations, because we got so excited about them that we made you some more extensive video tours of them, in which we engage in a dialog with each other about some of the most exciting trends we noticed and some of the most interesting questions these graphs compelled us to ask. Mostly what I want to say in closing is: we made these graphs not to be definitive forms of data, but rather to be inventive heuristics for play. And so we invite you to play with the graphs, see what you notice. Ask your own questions. And feel free to be in touch with us and tell us what you find.
Have fun!
Media assets used in this production listed in Production Notes.
As we present these visualizations, we speculate about the trends we’ve observed—demonstrating how data visualization can enable us to ask new questions and to challenge common assumptions about the field’s history. We start questioning, for example, why film and radio production pedagogies spiked when these media were new and then dwindled over time, or why the field never really saw the television as a medium for production. In the end, we find that our graphs helped us ask new questions about our field’s history, but the use of thin description methods alone did not enable us to offer nuanced contextual answers to these questions. As a result, we see these graphs as springboards that have inspired the more detailed case studies of particular new media moments that we offer in Chapters 4 through 7.