APPLAWS: Fall 2018 and Spring 2019

We’re closing out the spring semester with another APPLAWS post, a celebration of the team’s Awards, Publications, Plans, Leadership, Achievements, Wooots, and Surprises over the past academic year. We have lots of exciting updates to share!

Hadi Banat became a PhD candidate, won a Purdue Research Foundation dissertation fellowship for 2019-2020, and with the Transculturation team won a $5,000 CILMAR grant. His chapter “Floating on Quicksand: Negotiating Academe as Muslim” in Harry Denny et al.’s Out in the Center: Public Controversies and Private Struggles published by the University Press of Colorado came out hot off the press. He has also finalized coding and analyzing the transculturation project pilot data set and mentored undergraduate researchers who joined the team. In Crow, he has been working with Shelley, Emily, Hannah and Mark on repository development and helped the grants team with writing the ACLS grant.

Intercultural Team @purdue_english @purdueicap who won the Cilmar grant (: @FemmeRhetor @cbdilger (: pic.twitter.com/9NyDxNbV8L
— Dr. Sweta Gyanu Baniya (@Sunkesharee) April 16, 2019

Bradley Dilger worked extensively with Crow undergraduate researchers to continue spotlighting Crowbirds on our website, to build our inventory of Crow swag (STICKERS!!!!!), and to help Crow develop its outreach strategy. With Michelle McMullin, he is continuing our “Constructive distributed work” project, and is also helping our team update its environmental scans of other corpora and repositories. Bradley also taught Empirical Research in Writing Studies in Spring 2019, and helped the Transculturation team (including Crowbird Hadi Banat) win a third CILMAR mini-grant.

All the stickers. @writecroworg pic.twitter.com/xkqIBqkOha
— Bradley Dilger (@cbdilger) April 18, 2019

Mark Fullmer helped launch a new release of the Crow web interface which included a substantial redesign of the search engine, changes which lay the groundwork for more advanced functionality like wildcard searches. He submitted a patent application for software that allows readers to dynamically assign the gender of personae in prepared texts, as used on https://genderedtextproject.com . In April, he attended DrupalCon, an annual event of the open-source content management system, and his contributions to Drupal’s layout interface were referenced during multiple sessions. He is currently collaborating with developers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on further enhancements.

Jie Gao is a fourth year PhD candidate in Purdue SLS. She led the team that submitted a research article on citation, and also worked on a book chapter titled “L2 Speaking: Theory and Research” during the past 10 months. She is now analyzing data for her dissertation. She hopes to finish a few chapters by the end of July.

Hannah Gill is finishing up her sophomore year at the University of Arizona. This was her first semester working with Crow and she has loved it. She has spent most of her time in the lab processing student texts from the University of Arizona writing courses. In addition, she collaborated with other members of the Crow team on collecting instructional materials to the repository. She also helped in a workshop on CROW/MACAWS which focused on designing DDL activities with the help of the two interfaces. She was also admitted into her major (PPEL—philosophy, politics, economics, and law) which she will begin in the fall semester.

Jhonatan Henao-Muñoz completed his 2nd year as a Ph.D. student this spring and will be taking his last courses on fall. This past semester he co-coordinated the 29th version of #SPGS, worked as an intern in Crow, and volunteered in the NACIL2. At the 18TH SLAT Roundtable, he presented his work-in-progress on L2 peer-editing and online translator self-editing, collaborated in a Crow/MACAWS workshop for designing DDL materials. Finally, he was admitted in the M.A. in French Linguistics and Second Language Learning, and he was awarded with an internship for NHC. Next year he will continue working in Crow and start collecting data from intermediate Spanish and French courses.

Emily Jones is wrapping up her junior year at Purdue, and it was her busiest one yet. In addition to her position with Crow, she interned with Sycamore Review, worked as Editorial Assistant for a journal under Purdue Press, and tutored in Purdue’s Writing Lab. This spring she also presented her research on gendered violence in Victorian literature, for which she received Purdue’s OUR Scholarship. Over the past year, she has done content strategy, information architecture, and branding development for Crow. Next semester she will be fulfilling her history minor while studying at Scotland’s oldest university, the University of St Andrews.

Ge Lan worked on his dissertation this past year, including completing the first draft of his literature review and part of his methodology, writing Python programs for grammatical analysis, and exploring how to use Stanford Parser with command line. He has also been working on processing Crow data that was collected in fall 2018 at Purdue, and modifying a header script developed by UA team.

Lindsey Macdonald worked on her dissertation, “The Right to Health: A Rhetorical Ecology of Mental Health Advocacy and Legislation,” and has so far completed the literature review chapter and part of the methods. She received a Graduate Summer Research Grant, so she will be spending the summer completing her data analysis and hopefully writing a chapter or two.

Michelle McMullin successfully defended her dissertation, “Crafting new materialist research frameworks for collaborative response” in April. She is ecstatic to be joining the amazing faculty at North Carolina State University as assistant professor of technical communication in the fall. She will be presenting with our Crow team and a team from MSU on Humanities Without Walls projects at Computers & Writing at Michigan State University this summer. She will also be reprising her role, this year as Dr. Hawk Girl, as director of iDTech camp at University of Michigan this summer.

So, I did the thing this morning. I'm officially Dr. McMullin. #PhDone pic.twitter.com/meCpHAWyQM
— Dr. Michelle McMullin. Or Hawk. (@chellemcmullin) April 8, 2019

Sarah Merryman worked as an undergraduate tutor in the Purdue Writing Lab, weblog and social media intern for the Purdue English Department, and assistant JTRP editor for the Purdue University Press. She won the English Department’s Outstanding Senior Award and the Albert Viton Scholarship for her work at the Press. In addition to blogging for Crow, she also helped write IRB contracts, create web content strategies, and learned the basics of Python coding. This spring, she presented her research on writing lab data usability at the Purdue Undergraduate Symposium.

Sarah proudly displays her certificate of completion for Ge Lan’s Python Coding crash course

Aleksey Novikov passed his comprehensive exams this semester, and is at the stage of making connections between data and ideas for his dissertation proposal. This semester he has mostly worked with the other Macaws birds to create pedagogical webinars on using Data-driven Learning (DDL) with learner data. He also co-presented two pedagogically-oriented workshops: Crow/MACAWS workshop for designing DDL materials, and Teaching Russian with Real World Language with existing native speaker and learner corpora.

Emily Palese passed her comprehensive exams this semester and will soon begin her dissertation proposal. This past semester she taught English 107, worked on processing UA student texts for Crow, and collaborated on collecting instructional materials for the repository. She co-presented two workshops on pedagogical approaches for supporting multilingual writers, as well as a Crow/MACAWS workshop for designing DDL materials. Next year she will continue working on Crow’s repository as a Graduate Assistant Director in the Writing Program.

Ji-young Shin defended her prospectus and finished the first draft of the literature review for her dissertation. She received two external research awards for graduate students, the 2019 AAAL Graduate Student Award and the 2019 British Council Assessment Research Award. During the fall semester, she successfully conducted two Crow workshops with other Crowbirds at the 2018 TaLC conference and the Crow Symposium. She also contributed to building the teaching material repository for Crow and participated in organizing the Crow Symposium.

Shelley Staples published two peer reviewed articles in English for Specific Purposes Journal, one a single-authored paper on using corpus-based discourse analysis to inform instruction and one with Purdue grads and a soon-to-be grad on complexity in oral language assessment. She also published a chapter on Corpus Linguistics for the Handbook of SLA and Pragmatics and a chapter on conducting Multi-dimensional Analysis in an edited volume. She submitted five additional papers and two grants (results pending). She was an invited speaker at Lancaster University, Universidad de Sonora, Vanderbilt University, and Purdue, where she gave talks on corpus linguistics and also introduced students and faculty to the Crow interface. She took over the editorship of Brief Reports with TESOL Quarterly. With Crow, Dr. Staples led our “citation project” team to their article submission, the UA team in growing our corpus (processing texts from Spring 2018-Fall 2018), and the Repository team on exciting new developments including our new intake form. She also co-led a workshop at the SLAT Roundtable and worked with Adriana, Randi, Ge, and Aleks on writing up research from their AACL presentation. With MACAWS, Crow’s cousin, she led the team in their production of a series of webinars. Finally, she helped 5 PhD students reach the final lap in their careers as students, including Crowbirds Ashley J Velázquez and Aleksandra Swatek, and two Crowbirds (Emily Palese and Aleks Novikov) reach their exciting next stage in their PhD process.

David Stucker, a junior in Purdue University’s Professional Writing program, joined the Crow undergraduate researcher team in early February. He spent the semester developing corpus backend bug report documentation and environmental scan criteria, proposed corpus user-agreement considerations, and performed environmental scans of similar corpora. He intends to continue his work with Crow over the summer and the upcoming fall semester.

Aleksandra Swatek defended her PhD dissertation, “The language of engagement in math instructional video tutorials: A corpus-based study.” She also taught face-to-face courses (OEPP) and online courses (ICaP) at Purdue. She presented initial results of her dissertation research at the Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference. She is currently on the job market in Poland.

Ashley Velázquez successfully defended her dissertation, “What’s the ‘problem’ statement? An investigation of problem-based writing in a First Year Engineering program” in April. She is thrilled to be joining the faculty at the University of Washington-Bothell as an assistant professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences in Fall 2019. Dr. Velázquez was also selected to serve on TESOL’s Standards Professional Council this past fall for the next two years. This summer, before leaving for Washington State, she’ll be leading a workshop or two on how to use Crow and develop DDL materials for teaching second language writing at Wright State University.