Datastories

A Disciplinography of Technical and Professional Communication

Welcome. The tools collected under this tab are part of an in-progress monograph project, Datastories: A Disciplinography of Technical and Professional Communication. They're available here in a working state, password-protected, while the book takes shape.

About the project

Datastories uses the bibliometric infrastructure I've built on Pinakes to check the inherited narratives of TPC against what actually got published, cited, and connected over the field's roughly seventy-year history as a distinct scholarly enterprise. Each chapter begins with a specific computational method (main path analysis, community detection, bibliographic coupling, sleeping beauty indexing, and so on), surfaces a pattern in the citation or co-authorship data, and holds that pattern up against the disciplinary self-accounts TPC scholars have inherited or constructed. Sometimes the data confirms what we thought we knew; more often, in my testing so far, it complicates the picture.

The project takes its theoretical bearings from Maureen Daly Goggin's Authoring a Discipline (2000), which coined the term disciplinography and argued that journals are the sites where disciplines are authored, and from Derek Mueller's Network Sense (2017), which computationally operationalized disciplinography for rhetoric and composition. To my knowledge, no one has yet done this kind of work for TPC specifically. Pinakes makes it possible, with a different corpus, a substantially different set of computational tools, and a different set of questions about field identity.

The argument across the book is twofold: first, that bibliometric data becomes meaningful only when it is narrated, situated, and questioned; and second, that the distance between the stories a field tells about itself and the stories its data tells back is a productive space for disciplinographic work.

What's here

The tools on this tab are scoped to the TPC corpus (Technical Communication Quarterly, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, with adjacent journals available for cross-field comparison). They're working tools, not finished products, and they'll change as the analyses for each chapter develop.

Availability

The book is under development with a target manuscript submission of Fall 2027. The tools collected here will eventually be made publicly available alongside the book, with embeddable widget versions accompanying the born-digital edition. Until then, this page remains password-protected for collaborators, editors, and readers I've invited into the project's earlier stages.

If you've landed here and you're curious about the project, I'd be glad to hear from you. You can reach me at justalewis1@gmail.com.

— Justin