CW2001 Program - Computers and Writing

Friday Afternoon
David Kaufer, Suguru Ishizaki, Kerry Ishizaki, Brian Butler
DocuScope: A Text Visualization Environment for Writing Education
and Text Analysis
DocuScope consists of two integrated components. First, it contains a
fast and robust parser that matches on rhetorical features of texts.
These features can span phrases of any length. The current system
matches on 140 distinct rhetorical categories and recognizes over 250
million unique English patterns. The patterns were created from a base
of hand-codings, but we are exploring machine learning techniques
that will allow the system to “learn” new patterns. Second, the system
contains a suite of dynamic visual interfaces that allows students/
teachers/users to explore, through visualization, the rhetorical patterns
of a single text or a collection of texts. The system keeps statistical data
on the patterns it finds and these can be used for further analysis. The
system has been used in writing classrooms, corporate consulting, and
as a research tool for corpus studies.
Saturday Morning
Jennifer Haley
Too Busy or Technophobic to Learn PowerPoint Check Out MP Express
There is no denying the fact that a multimedia presentation with its
layers of visual rhetoric can be an exciting and powerful alternative to
a traditional student essay or teacher presentation. With PowerPoint’s
extensive features, many educators opt to teach this software to
their students. In my experience, teaching PowerPoint and then
trouble- shooting has taken significant time away from nuts and bolts
writing instruction, especially in a first-year basic writing course. In
a search for a more basic alternative, I looked for a user-friendly
multimedia software that is specifically designed for the educational
context. This poster session will demonstrate multimedia presentation
software for those of us—students and teachers alike—who are too
constrained by time, resources, and technological comfort level to
work with PowerPoint. MP Express is marketed by Bytes of Learning
for younger children as “The Easy to Use Multimedia Presentation Tool,”
and they’re not kidding: a twelve-minute tutorial, and you’re ready to roll.
8 A Cyber Odyssey 2001