Call for Participation

Proposal submission deadline: December 1, 2016

Submit proposals here.

The Journal of Writing Analytics and the University of South Florida invite proposals for papers to be given at the 4th International Conference on Writing Analytics: Writing Analytics, Data Mining, and Student Success. This two-day conference will be held in St. Petersburg, FL on Thursday and Friday, January 12-13, 2017. The conference will provide a mix of featured speakers, who are leaders in the emerging field of Writing Analytics, as well as peer-reviewed presentations. Proposals are due December 1st.

Conference purpose

This conference will bring together theorists and researchers from Writing Studies, Predictive Analytics, and Corpus Linguistics to explore the emergence of writing analytics and data mining as a primary concern for academe, both as a business and a methodology for constructing knowledge. Featured speakers will report on new educational data and text mining methods, advances in intelligent tutorial systems and artificial intelligence, pioneering research on machine feedback for formative as opposed to summative commentary, and research on ways to provide more helpful feedback on student work in less time. Participants will discuss how scores and comments on writing projects in the freshman year can be used to predict retention and student success. We invite scholars to speak about ways digital ecologies can measure tool behaviors such as time-on-task, comments and trace patterns can measure intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies, and how machines can pitch tutorials to students based on their needs.

Accepted presentations will address ways writing analytics and data mining methods can leverage the affordances of digital tools to improve writing feedback to students and assessments of writing programs for institutions. The conference will provide a space for developers, researchers, writing program administrators, and university-based entrepreneurs to showcase their software, big-data research, and theoretical work regarding ways technologies are challenging traditional approaches to teaching, learning, and assessment. We invite submissions to be peer-reviewed by December 1st, 2016, via this Google form.

Please share your research with us. We invite paper proposals asking:

  • What are writing analytics? What sorts of analytics are being used across academic disciplines–especially writing studies, corpus linguistics and business? Are writing analytics a professional service or an academic, university-based service? Based on your experience, what are the best practices for adapting state-of-the-art data mining approaches to the educational domain, with specific attention to teaching and assessing writing? What policies and resources encourage understanding of data gathering and analysis practices?  What parameters define ethical uses of learning analytics?  
  • Why are writing analytics important for academics, university assessment experts, businesses? How can writing analytics facilitate student learning and student success?
  • How are corpora typically constructed? How can data mining and analytics be leveraged to better meet the needs of students and educational institutions? How can Writing Analytics prioritize and scaffold feedback? How can researchers detect and assess students’ affective and emotional states while engaging the writing construct?
  • Who is using writing analytics? How are they challenging disciplinary assumptions and methods?

Proposal Format

Proposal submissions should be no more than 300 words and include no identifying information. Proposers may choose to present a research paper or practitioner presentation.

Research paper:

Practitioner presentation:

  • Innovations in Writing Analytics or Data Mining
  • Single blind peer review

To submit a proposal, use our Google Form.

Journal of Writing Analytics:

A newly-launched journal from Colorado State University’s Open Press, the Journal of Writing Analytics  is situated at the intersection of Rhetoric and Composition/Writing Studies, corpus linguistics, educational data mining, and predictive analytics. Analytics will be published once a year in association with this conference.

Timeline

  • Proposal submissions for the conference are due December 1st, 2016
  • Proposal notifications for the conference acceptance will be sent December 5th, 2016
  • Manuscripts for Analytics are due January 30, 2017 (to allow discussion with authors in Tampa)
  • Manuscripts are returned following peer review March 6, 2017
  • Final accepted papers are due April 10, 2017
  • Issue 1 of Analytics will be published June 5, 2017

Contact

For additional information concerning this CFP and the conference, please email: conference@toolsforwriters.com.