Technical and professional communicators need to continue to interrogate how the seemingly mundane documents they create, such as terms of service (ToS) and community guidelines, and the systems those documents become a part of can oppress, exclude, and affect marginalized and hypermarginalized communities. This article presents an adapted corpus-assisted discourse analysis of how “sexual content” is defined across a corpus of 176 ToS and community guidelines from 118 social media sites. The findings show how ToS and community guidelines can work together to complicate our understanding of how values are intentionally and unintentionally embedded in these documents in order to uphold power or to meet emancipatory ends.

The discourse-based interview (DBI) allows researchers to explore writers’ tacit knowledge. This article describes how we taught and learned to adapt a DBI-based interviewing process through the reflections of both the professor and two graduate students in a graduate-level course, Field Methods in Technical Communication. By participating in a large-scale research project focusing on how online PhD students viewed their education post-graduation, current graduate students learned about planning, conducting, and analyzing interviews. The authors reflect on how they not only learned qualitative methods, but how the experience made them feel like part of a research community (as well as an academic community). Taking a dialogic approach, the professor and both graduate students weave narratives, reflections, and the voices of their participants to share their experiences in uncovering tacit knowledge using a DBI-inspired process.