Introduction to the Special Issue: Data-Driven Approaches to Research and Teaching in Professional and Technical Communication

• Published in: IEEE transactions on professional communication 2018-12, Vol.61 (4), p.352-355
• Main Authors: Boettger, Ryan K., Ishizaki, Suguru
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Analytics; Artificial intelligence; Big Data; Communication; Computation; Computational linguistics; Content analysis; Corpus analysis; Corpus linguistics; Data analysis; Data management; Data mining; Data models; Linguistics; Network analysis; Professional communication; Software; Special issues and sections; Technical information
• ISSN: 0361-1434; 1558-1500
• DOI: 10.1109/TPC.2018.2870547

The quest to understand the nuances of professional communication using computational tools have continued since, and many researchers in our field have embraced the new interdisciplinary approach now known as data science. Our quick metadata search on the journals and conference proceedings in technical and professional communication (TPC) revealed an increasing number of articles associated with terms commonly used in data science (e.g., big data, content analysis, text mining, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, network analysis) originating from numerous disciplines (e.g., corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, statistics, business analytics). Yet, the field of TPC is just beginning to embrace the power of data-driven approaches. This special issue extends Orr’s work by taking a snapshot of current work in data-driven approaches to the study of TPC.