CompBlog

Volunteering as Learning: Inviting Graduate Students to CompPile

[I'm sharing this via CompBlog as a draft. Eventually, this information will be part of the static CompPile site.  The goal here is to encourage faculty who are teaching graduate courses in Comp/Rhet consider incorporating assignments that invite graduate students to volunteer at CompPile, as a learning experience, an assignment, an introduction to ongoing work in our field.  I will be posting a separate set of suggestions related to CompFAQs work.  Comments welcome.]

How can CompPile be incorporated into graduate course work? How can graduate students contribute to CompPile?

• CompPile is quite literally an ongoing project, with work aplenty for all who are willing to contribute. No contribution is too small, and no time spent is too little.
• Any contributions to / participation in CompPile will be subject to formative review, so in a sense, faculty and students do not need to fear “getting it wrong.”

Ideas for contributing to CompPile (and for using CompPile work as assignments in graduate courses):

Indexing:

Journals:

Identify a journal that has not yet been indexed. We provide information about the journals covered by CompPile through the following page:

<http://comppile.org/site/journals.htm>

Here you can follow a link to see journals sorted into one of 19 “scholarly areas” or you can follow another link to see an alphabetical list of all 300+ journals. For each journal listing, you can see its current status and an indication of what needs to be done. If you want to volunteer to work on an index, complete the volunteer form (or if an Associate is listed for the journal, contact her or him).

Using the guidelines described in the Volunteer Guide (see links here: http://comppile.org/site/volunteer.htm), index some or all of the volumes / issues that have not yet been indexed.

Although one of our central principles is comprehensive coverage, and we mean that in the sense of all contents in an issue, all issues in a volume, and all volumes (from the first to the last), volunteers don’t have to complete all of the years or issues that are currently available for indexing. But we do ask that you work sequentially, through an issue, a volume, or sequential years.

Books:

The list of “new books,” sorted by publishers, lists only books published in past two years: <http://comppile.org/site/new_books.php>.

But the CompPile bibliography is not complete through 2008. Volunteers can choose a publisher and do a comprehensive search for relevant titles, match that list to CompPile’s coverage, and index missing volumes. As part of this process, volunteers will identify edited collections for which the individual essays/chapters have not yet been indexed. Any ways that volunteers can help confirm or maintain the integrity of the “books” indexing will be important contributions.

Professional Web Sites:

Currently, CompPile does not systematically index position statements, policy statements, guidelines, etc. that are available on various professional websites. Nor does CompPile systematically index websites of professional organizations. For example, if a user wants to search for information about writing centers (wcenter is the CompPile search term), she will not find a citation for the IWCA website. We need to find ways to index the many professional resources that are available through important websites.

Here’s a short list of organizations whose sites could be indexed in various ways, and I’m sure I’m missing many more:

WPA, WAC,CBW, ATTW, AWP, NCTE, CCCC, MLA,IWCA, and more

Search Terms:

One of the essential keys to CompPile’s longterm success and usefulness depends on the users being able to locate useful citations when they search and perhaps as important, to have some confidence that their search(es) have returned as many relevant citations as were available in the database. This ideal user’s experience—confidence that my search has found all relevant materials—depends in large part on the search terms assigned to indexed items.

To help with one aspect of this challenge, CompPile currently uses a discipline-specific glossary of more than 3300 search terms, developed and maintained by Rich Haswell <http://comppile.org/site/glossary.htm>. It is unique in our field and should become a “standard” lexicon for composition studies. However, although most items now in CompPile use search terms from the glossary, not all of them do. Volunteers can help by confirming that CompPile entries are using appropriate glossary search terms.

From another angle, even if indexed items are using appropriate glossary search terms, those terms might not represent all the ways that the item would be useful. In other words, ideally, we would be adding to and refining the search term entries for ALL of the items in CompPile. Volunteers could focus on a particular journal and focus only on the search terms used for all items in that journal. Or volunteers could focus on publishers, books, edited collections, focusing only on search terms.

Aside from maintaining the extensive and comprehensive index of scholarship in our field, perhaps the most important task for volunteers will be refining the search terms associated with that scholarship. The value of the database depends in large part on the paths we enable to the data, and search terms are essential path-markers.

Annotations:

This is a new and potentially valuable addition to the CompPile feature-set. Thanks to Sue Hum (U of Texas, San Antonio) and the WAC Clearinghouse, 1220 CompPile entries are annotated. Volunteers can choose a particular journal or publisher or edited collection and compose annotations for articles, essays, collections, and monographs. Ideally, every item in CompPile would be annotated.

For now, we are asking that these annotations are sent to us for uploading <comppile@gmail.com>; but soon we expect to open access for users to submit annotations directly.

Reviews:

CompReview is another potentially valuable feature of CompPile. For any item in CompPile, users are able to submit a “review.” Different from annotations, reviews offer a professional assessment of the item. Typically, reviews will be more extensive than annotations, and reviews of a particular item can refer to one another as reviewers participate more often. See the information at <http://comppile.org/site/review.htm> to learn more about how to use the CompReview feature.

If you have questions, suggestions, comments, please share in comment section or in an email: comppile@gmail.org