Projects

CIABATTA stands for “Corpus In A Box: Automated Tools, Tutorials, & Advising.” It is a distillation of our accumulated knowledge through the corpus researchers and software developers who maintain the Corpus & Repository of Writing.

CIABATTA provides templates and code for corpus building — examples, design patterns, best practices, and step-by-step processes — that provide a starting point for developing new corpora. These guides and guidelines can be used as-is, or can be extended to fit the particular needs of a given corpus.

Development of CIABATTA was supported by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).

• Goulart, L., Staples, S., Novikov, A., Picoral, A., & Reppen, R. (2024). An introduction to CIABATTA: Increasing accessibility to corpus creation for non-experts. Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, 3(3). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rmal.2024.100146
• CIABATTA tutorials on YouTube
• CIABATTA wiki on GitHub

Because Crow is an inter-institutional and interdisciplinary team, our approach to collaboration is described as “distributed work” by technical communication scholars. Our team members are not centralized and managed in a hierarchical fashion, with clearly defined roles, but work on a wide variety of projects, often asynchronously, connecting with each other through online networks.

While this has many advantages for the project, distributing work can erase individual agency and prevent the growth of cohesive professional identities. With this in mind, we’re developing the practice of “constructive distributed work” (CDW) to actively push back against the negatives of distributed work, and ensure its benefits reach individuals, not only the project. We hope CDW shapes not only our team, but other teams interested will apply our methods into their contexts.

Crow researchers at North Carolina State University (NCSU) are currently analyzing data from Crow’s project management system in preparation for an article about the three core principles which are one part of the three-dimensional CDW model.

• McMullin, M., Banat, H., Weech, S., & Dilger, B. (2022). Building ethical distributed teams through sustained attention to infrastructure. Communication Design Quarterly 10(2). 32–43. https://doi.org/10.1145/3507857.3507861
• Weech, S., Banat, H., McMullin, M., Swatek, A., Gupta, A., & Dilger, B. (2022). Assessing equity and inclusion in research teams through constructive distributed work. Proceedings of the International Conference on Professional Communication (IEEE ProComm 2022). 65–71. https://doi.org/10.1109/ProComm53155.2022.00015 
• McMullin, M., & Dilger, B. (2021). Constructive distributed work: An approach to sustainable collaboration and research for distributed teams. Journal of Business & Technical Communication, 35(4). 469–495. https://doi.org/10.1177/10506519211021467