A Computational Approach to Assessing Rhetorical Effectiveness: Agentic Framing of Climate Change in the Congressional Record, 1994–2016

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to consider rhetorical effects as the propagation of rhetorical expressions across large sets of texts, measured by the extent to which rhetorical expressions, structures, or practices become replicated in texts and sites of rhetorical in(ter)vention. The paper draws on lines of scholarship in the digital humanities and computational rhetoric-primarily, sequential structuring of semantic contexts, semantic parsing of unstructured text, and diachronic tracking of textual expressions-to extend their conceptual and methodological insights into a computational framework for assessing rhetorical effectiveness. It offers a test case for this concept through an analysis of how Congress has framed human agency toward addressing climate change.

Five considerations for engaging with Big Data from a rhetorical-humanistic perspective

“…A metaphor like the aforementioned "tipping point" would, after its invention, effectively serve as a resource in the context of a growing need to deliberate about climate change, for example. In an earlier essay, I cite Luhmann's (1992) use of the term "redundancy" as a kind of "memory that can be called on by many persons" (Majdik, 2019; see also Mays, 2017) as an example of how Big Data can reveal emerging patterns. There, the movement of two competing agentic frames across time represents the texture of rhetorical ecologies that "recontextualize rhetorics in their temporal, historical, and lived fluxes" (Edbauer, 2005, p.…”

Changing Climate, Changing Terrain: The Stasis Metaphor and the Climate Crisis

“…Weems and Subramaniam (2017) write about how reframing the discussion to focus on attitudes and responsibilities of the individual, rather than on attitudes and responsibilities of the nation as a whole, can lead to greater change. Majdik (2019) uses computational and corpus analysis as a way to examine the various ways Congress has framed the climate crisis in its own debates. Finally, Stephens and Richards (2020) discuss narrative framing as one aspect going into project design of an interactive map of sea-level rise and coastal flooding.…”

The Opioid Epidemic and the Pursuit of Moral Medicine: A Computational-Rhetorical Analysis

“…With this kind of computational/circulation studies framework in mind, the research presented here is most directly influenced by Majdik’s (2019) “A Computational Approach to Assessing Rhetorical Effectiveness: Agentic Framing of Climate Change in the Congressional Record, 1994–2016” and my prior work in “Statistical Genre Analysis: Toward Big Data Methodologies in Technical Communication” (Graham et al, 2015). Technically speaking, the Graham et al article probably article probably occupies a middle ground between traditional rhetorical inquiry and computational rhetoric in that humans preform the bulk of the analysis prior to the quantification of results.…”

“…Majdik’s analysis too seems to understand rhetorical effects as a function of discursive systems. Intentionally eschewing a psychological model of persuasion, Majdik (2019) arguesthat computationally tracking how distinct rhetorical expressions increase or decrease in prevalence over time provides a framework for engaging questions about rhetorical effectiveness; it allows for mapping the “life,” or circulation, of rhetorical expressions as textual imprints that are replicated across general or specialized discourses relative to and against other rhetorical expressions. (p. 207)…”

“…In evaluating these hypotheses, the present study offers a computational-rhetorical analysis of all articles and essays (1954–May 2019) published in the New England Journal of Medicine ( NEJM ) or Journal of the American Medical Association ( JAMA ) that mention “opioid” or “opioids.” In so doing, I extend recent work in computational rhetoric (Majdik, 2019) to account for diachronic shifts in opioid and related discourse. Specifically, I offer two multipart analyses: The first provides an integrated set of analyses evaluating both how opioids are framed and documenting the distribution of pain management and opioid dependence content in the dataset.…”