Crow at Purdue Undergrad Research Conference

Sarah Buwick and Naomi Islas are presenting “Developing a Collaborative Coding Framework for Onboarding Undergraduate Researchers” in the poster session at Purdue’s Spring Undergraduate Research Conference. Stop by and say “Hello!” if you can. They’re presenting 9:00 to 10:00am on Tuesday April 8 in the PMU Ballrooms.

This work builds on Buwick & Islas (2024), presented as part of the SIGDOC 2024 Student Research Competition and published in the conference proceedings.

Update: Congratulations to Sarah and Naomi for winning second place poster for the Digital Humanities category!

Interdisciplinary, collaborative research teams often work in distributed spaces using team communication platforms to meet, plan, and conduct research (Saldaña, 2016). Researchers working with Crow, the Corpus & Repository of Writing, have often analyzed data through collaborative and iterative coding methods (Smagorinsky, 2008).

In a previous study, we individually and collaboratively coded 68 threads from Basecamp, our team communication platform, to holistically examine how the Crow research team coordinates work (Buwick & Islas, 2024). This was the first phase of two investigating Constructive Distributed Work, our heuristic for sustainable collaboration. In the second phase, we coded an additional 163 threads to identify how interactions between researchers align with Crow’s three core principles: fostering rhetorical confidence, developing a networked model of mentoring, and building a sustainable infrastructure (McMullin & Dilger, 2021).

Throughout both coding phases, we established a coding workflow to maximize the efficiency and quality of our codes. We are developing a written framework that documents this coding process so Crow can better onboard future researchers to coding, aligning with two of Crow’s goals: (1) developing sustainable approaches to building interdisciplinary research teams; (2) cultivating writing research methods to share broadly (Banat et al, 2022). In this poster, we share the workflow and describe the next steps of its development, in the hopes our framework will be used by other academic research teams who analyze data through iterative coding methods.

Here is Naomi & Sarah’s poster:

Download a PDF version of this poster.

And — a shout out for our ExLing friends, who are also presenting as part of the Literature, Linguistics, Languages, & Culture (LLLC) Colloquium on Thu Apr 10 in STEW 218D:

10:40a Talk #8003: “Animacy in English Object Relative Clause Structure Choice: A Comparative Study Between L1 and L2.” Marley Grace Mack, mentored by Elaine J Francis and Yue Li.

2:20p Talk #8013: “Semantic Interpretation in Humans and Large Language Models of Quantified Statements.” Lauren Mackenzie Matthews, mentored by Shaohua Fang.

We hope everyone at Purdue will take some time to support undergraduate research — Crow, ExLing, or otherwise!