John R. Gallagher

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · Department of English

Creating new emojis is predicated on a system of technical writing that lobbies for new emojis to the Unicode Consortium. Emojination, an activist collective working for cultural inclusivity, helps everyday people write proposals for inclusive and culturally sensitive emojis. Through a case study of Emojination, this article describes ways that Tac...

Writing studies has long been interested in histories of how the field writes. The recent turn to corpus-driven results about disciplinary trends opens opportunities to examine writing studies journals in the early twenty-first century longitudinally. This study presents an analysis of published articles (n=2738) in seven major writing studies jour...

Keywords are often used to shed light on shared words and their meanings, including their contestation. Often these are determined using small samples or author inferences. However, identification large sample, data-driven keywords is important for writing studies to avoid a range of biases including socioeconomic, confirmation, sampling. We use th...

Identifying the effects of online templates, such as empty state pages (ESPs), sheds light on the user writing habits and best practices for user design. By using assemblage theory and extending Gallagher and Holmes’s (2019) study of ESPs to grant proposal writing on the crowded-funded website Experiment.com (Mehlenbacher, 2017; Mehlenbacher 2019),...

This article advocates for web scraping as an effective method to augment and enhance technical and professional communication (TPC) research practices. Web scraping is used to create consistently structured and well-sampled data sets about domains, communities, demographics, and topics of interest to TPC scholars. After providing an extended descr...

This article uses a machine learning algorithm to demonstrate a proof-of-concept case for moderating and managing online comments as a form of content moderation, which is an emerging area of interest for technical and professional communication (TPC) researchers. The algorithm sorts comments by topical similarity to a reference comment/article rat...

This article advocates for web-scraping as an effective method to augment and enhance technical and professional communication (TPC) research practices. Web scraping is used to create consistently structured and well-sampled datasets about domains, communities, demographics, and topics of interest to TPC scholars. After an extended description of w...

Chronos and kairos are often understood as separate from one another in discussions of rhetorical temporality. For online and other highly mediated contexts, however, chronos and kairos can be understood as deeply related and intertwined. Via the concept of transduction, this article introduces machine time, which describes rhetorical time across a...

This article discusses the ethics of considering algorithms as audiences by drawing on a class dedicated to examining algorithms. While ethical commentary about the use of algorithms has been offered by cultural critics, I argue we need to consider the inner workings of algorithms, which requires demystifying or “unboxing” these things. I draw on m...

BACKGROUND Improving persuasion tactics in response to vaccine skepticism is a longstanding problem. Elective nonvaccination emerging from skepticism about vaccine safety and efficacy jeopardizes local levels of herd immunity, exposing those who are most vulnerable to the risk of serious diseases. OBJECTIVE This article analyzes and taxonomizes pr...

Background Improving persuasion in response to vaccine skepticism is a long-standing problem. Elective nonvaccination emerging from skepticism about vaccine safety and efficacy jeopardizes herd immunity, exposing those who are most vulnerable to the risk of serious diseases. Objective This article analyzes vaccine sentiments in the New York Times...

Providing contextualized, effective writing instruction for engineering students is an important and challenging objective. This article presents a needs analysis conducted in a large engineering college and introduces the faculty development program that was created based on that analysis. The authors advocate for sustained interdisciplinary colla...

As comment functions have proliferated, the role of commenting has played an important role in the attention economy. First, Gallagher situates the chapter in contemporary scholarship about the attention economy and online public to argue that online platforms are imbricated in a capitalist understanding of the information economy. These platforms...

Writing studies uses the case study at its primary method and methodology. This article offers a theoretical grounding about case study research and especially internet case study research. It argues that boundaries and spheres of influences are crucial to constructing an effective case study. It advocates for avoiding overstatement and overload wh...

This article offers a methodology for conducting large-scale audience analysis called “big data audience analysis” (BDAA). BDAA uses distant reading and thin description to examine a large corpus of text data from online audiences. In this article, that corpus is approximately 450,000 online reader comments. We analyze this corpus through sentiment...

This article examines how empty state pages (ESPs) constrain user-generated communication through the ethical lens of Bourdieu’s habitus. We define ESPs as interactive instructional templates that prompt users to input information in order to participate in an online network. Through a case study analyzing ~450,000 online comments from The New York...

This chapter investigates the effects of standardized typography within the context of interactive Internet environments. It lays out the weaknesses and strengths of such typography and presents two examples, Facebook and Tumblr, in order to highlight this ambivalence. It concludes that investigating the standardized typography of Internet environm...

Prompted by an in-depth case study of a web-writer, this article argues that audience may be understood as an emergent process for web-writers who consider their comments. Rather than a group of people or demographic that is prefigured to exist, this article posits that audience might be a concept used throughout the composing process, including pr...

This article examines the role that algorithms may play as audiences when teaching writing on the World Wide Web. It argues that introducing the provisional term “algorithmic audience” reflects three prior conceptions of audience, including concrete situations, discourse community, and participatory audiences. It then offers a three-part classroom...

This article investigates the strategies web-writers develop when their audiences respond to them via textual participation. Focusing on three web-writers who want to “continue the conversation,” this article identifies five major strategies to accomplish this aim: (a) editing after production, (b) quotation, (c) question posing, (d) naming seconda...