PHASE 2: "Turns" In The Abstracts: Yearly Frequencies Analysis in Volumes 30-32
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MOST COMMON TOPICS IN TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY
Looking at Mueller's work, I became heavily intrigued about using animated charts to see the moving progression of topics in live form. To be able to accomplish this, I proceed to use all of the abstracts for the published articles with the TCQ from 2021-2023, Volumes 30-32, Issues 1-4. The animation works through numerial data inputted in an ExCel-type format. Hence, I needed to convert these abstracts into words in the Google Cloud generator so that I may be able to generate a siries of word frequency charts as my numerical data.
"BLACK" had the following numerical results going from 2021 to 2023: 0, 21, 0.
In this sequence, it dictates that the publication of Black rhetoric did not take prominence in the last three years until 2022.
While the number are fixed to a year, the publication dates of these articles run late into 2021, but it largest dominance is within the following year.
I concluded that the social activism due to cases like George Floyd and the rise of Black Lives Matter affected rhetoric and composition within this forum.
In 2023, the data for the term itself disappeared. Is this wrong? Is there something much more dominant at play that has caused the practical "...discursive attention...." (Mueller, p. 72) of Black rhetoric to disappear entirely? These are some follow-up questions that can cause another set of research looking at turns and how they reflect what is considered to be of importance to discussed in a year's time. While this statement seems rustic, Black rhetoric and its underlying social dilemmas is deep rooted on the history of this country and a 0 frequency data leave a broad road to interpret this decline in many ways. This openness is what makes an interesting follow-up research.
Animated INDEX: abstracts
Animated INDEX: abstracts
The numerical frequency charts were then inputted into an ExCel document so that I may be able to get a visual of all the most popular words, side by side, for all three volumes. It was impressive to see the pattern of topics influenced by social issues. This, in turn, began to reflect Mueller's "...social turns..." (Chapter3, p.71), which heavily dictated the narrative during the rise of Covid 19 (2020) and the world wide effect of how education shifted from the classroom into our homes, Black Lives Matter (2021), and the rise in more advance artificial intelligence technology such as Chat GPT (2022-2023).
The more I kept organizing the chart, I realize that there were some topic that took prominence in certain years but the seem to have "disappeared" from this forum's discussion. As Mueller indicated, "...turns function as cohering, directional metaphors-named arrows of change that capture trends or shifts...substantial enough to offset an otherwise 'chaotic and patternless' development" (p. 72). In other words, here are some patterns observed numerically through this frequency set between all three volumes. Using this term individually, its explantion is meant to show how the rest of terms were analyzed upon generating all topic trends in the last three years.
HOW OPERATE THE GRAPH
At the top, you can hit the play button arrow and the circles will begin to move, in seemingly sporadic manner, from the left to right and up and down. The left to right movement indicate the progression of the years and the bottom up indicates the frequency of the topic publication within the that year.
By hoveing the mouse cursor over the dots, you can see word and the frequency that determines the size: the higher the frequency, the larger the dot, and the smaller the frequency, the smaller the dot.
The legend at the top with the topic can be clicked to shut them off from the chart. This serves to pick a specific topic and analyze the progression trend.
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