Five considerations for engaging with Big Data from a rhetorical-humanistic perspective

This essay offers five conceptual entry points for engaging with Big Data from a rhetorical perspective. These five concepts—data in/as relationships, observability/action, patterns, diachronicity, and audience—serve as points of deep conceptual commonality between definitions of Big Data and principles in rhetorical studies, and are offered here as considerations for critiquing uses of Big Data from a rhetorical-humanistic perspective, as well as for guiding rhetorical work that uses Big Data

Building Better Machine Learning Models for Rhetorical Analyses: The Use of Rhetorical Feature Sets for Training Artificial Neural Network Models

In this paper, we investigate two approaches to building artificial neural network models to compare their effectiveness for accurately classifying rhetorical structures across multiple (non-binary) classes in small textual datasets. We find that the most accurate type of model can be designed by using a custom rhetorical feature list coupled with general-language word vector representations, outperforming models with more computing-intensive architectures

A Computational Approach to Assessing Rhetorical Effectiveness: Agentic Framing of Climate Change in the Congressional Record, 1994--2016

The goal of this paper is to consider rhetorical effects as the propagation of rhetorical expressions across large sets of texts, measured by the extent to which rhetorical expressions, structures, or practices become replicated in texts and sites of rhetorical in(ter)vention. The paper draws on lines of scholarship in the digital humanities and computational rhetoric – primarily, sequential structuring of semantic contexts, semantic parsing of unstructured text, and diachronic tracking of textual expressions – to extend their conceptual and methodological insights into a computational framework for assessing rhetorical effectiveness. It offers a test case for this concept through an analysis of how Congress has framed human agency toward addressing climate change

A Computational Approach to Assessing Rhetorical Effectiveness: Agentic Framing of Climate Change in the Congressional Record, 1994--2016

The goal of this paper is to consider rhetorical effects as the propagation of rhetorical expressions across large sets of texts, measured by the extent to which rhetorical expressions, structures, or practices become replicated in texts and sites of rhetorical in(ter)vention. The paper draws on lines of scholarship in the digital humanities and computational rhetoric – primarily, sequential structuring of semantic contexts, semantic parsing of unstructured text, and diachronic tracking of textual expressions – to extend their conceptual and methodological insights into a computational framework for assessing rhetorical effectiveness. It offers a test case for this concept through an analysis of how Congress has framed human agency toward addressing climate change.</p