Comp Program faculty member Dr. Ben Miller is celebrating the launch of a collection, Composition and Big Data, coedited with Dr. Amanda Licastro. (A double celebration since it’s also a Pitt Press book, in the series edited by Jean Ferguson Carr and Dave Bartholomae!)
In a data-driven world, anything can be data. As the techniques and scale of data analysis advance, the need for a response from rhetoric and composition grows ever more pronounced. Composition and Big Data brings together a range of scholars, teachers, and administrators already working with big-data methods and datasets to kickstart a collective reckoning with the role that algorithmic and computational approaches can, or should, play in research and teaching in the field. Kairos editor Douglas Eyman writes of the collection, "I’m particularly impressed with the breadth of applications, from using big data in the classroom to tracing the contours of the discipline. For anyone concerned about the continual encroachment of data analysis and algorithmic structures on our lives as teachers and scholars, this collection offers a foundation for understanding how to turn these tools to productive uses for our own practices, which helps us to resist and mediate big-data analyses that are antithetical to the mission of the humanities." For more information and to order a copy of the book, visit the University of Pittsburgh Press.