Address Keywords

How best to arrive at keywords (before they are tags)? One humorless punchline is that I will not soon have a degree in computational linguistics. I have dealt
superficially with the question this week, first by thinking about the relationship
of the terms assigned by various methods–where we have keywords at all, that
is. The most prominent journals in composition studies do very little with
keywords, much less with tags (here I am thinking of tags as the digital
iteration of keywords that includes latent, descriptive, and procedural
labeling). Why is that?

The table below grew first from parallel questions about the overlaps between Mehta’s
chronological approach to tag clouds (with hues that explain persistence) and Marlow’s process, which remains important because it can return multi-term noun phrases rather than only
one-word keywords (also because Marlow’s is the one we use for CCCOA). As of yet and because I am short on space, I do very little to account for TagCrowd and ManyEyes:
TagCrowd because I too quickly hit the memory ceiling with the files I am
working from; ManyEyes because there are copyright concerns with uploading full
texts of articles that belong properly to NCTE. Anyway, I will return to ManyEyes in chapter four.

Below I have boldfaced common terms across the three keywording methods. The
second two columns apply duplicable computational methods of great relevance to the diss.
Still, they are not perfect matches. Is this a flaw? I think of it
instead as a sign of life–a slight rattle in the imperfectly fitting (and therefore thought-provoking) works.

Address/Script CompPile
Determined upon data input (it is not clear whether these are assigned
by one person or whether, if they are handled by different people, there
is any shared effort at reconciling them)
Mehta’s PHP Script, Top 10
Uses exclude file and PHP Stemmer
Marlow’s Perl Process, Top
10
Uses EN::Lingua::Tagger; nouns and noun phrases only
1999, Villanueva racism,
profession, Latin-Am, history, pre-conquest, Aztec
American, colonial,
color, ethnicity, Europe, group, latinos,
numbers
, people, racism
color
(30), racism (23), people (20), america (11), latinos
(11), peru (11), ethnicity (10), france (10), gods (10),
numbers
(10)
2000, Gilyard cross-cultural,
literacy, identity, critical-pedagogy, social justice,
learning-theory, language, teacher-student, imagination, flight
dance, Gilyard,
identity, mean, play, social, students, tao,
time
, work
tao
(18), time (15), gilyard (13), king (13), students
(10), brown (9), cannon (9), money (9), discourse (8), dunbar (8)
2001, Bishop profession, ‘Chair’s
Address’, fatigue, renewal
composition,
convention, field, poem, space, teachers,
teaching
, time, work, years
convention
(19), poem (16), composition (14), teaching (11),
time (11), members (10), my (10), teachers (10), field
(9), rhetoric (9)
2002, Lovas professional,
faculty
-status, CCCC, Conference on College Composition and
Communication, professional identity, literacy autobiography, equity,
assignment, curriculum, community college
college,
community, faculty, program, students, teaching,
university, work, writing, years
writing
(33), college (31), students (25), colleges (24),
faculty (20), community (18), work (15),
teaching
(14), university (14), composition (12)
2003, Logan
practice, classroom, language-rights, African-Am, women, mission,
Chair’s Address,
composition,
difference, English, language, learning, rights, statement,
students, teaching, writing
Students
(28), composition (19), language (19), writing (18),
statement
(17), CCCC (16), teaching (16), teachers (11),
position (10), conditions (9)
2004, Yancey Chair’s Address,
literacy
, change, profession, faculty status, practice, pedagogy,
history, curriculum, media, technology, circulation,
production, academic-public, academic-nonacademic
composition,
literacy, public, reading, school, students,
technology
, text, words, writing
students
(60), composition (57), writing (55), literacy
(32), text (31), school (29), circulation (25),
words
(25), moment (23), technology (22)