David West Brown and Danielle Zawodny Wetzel, editors. Corpora and Rhetorically Informed Text Analysis

Exploring the field of computational rhetoric, or as the authors describe it, rhetorically oriented corpus analysis, this book delves into how computational techniques can be used to study and generate rhetorical strategies and persuasive texts.The authors explain various applications of a tool called DocuScope, which is freely available as an online application, and also available to download and use in Python scripts via a dedicated library.It provides powerful text analysis capabilities, making it an invaluable resource for researchers and students.Importantly, DocuScope is free to use for noncommercial purposes, providing an accessible entry point for those wishing to explore computational rhetoric and rhetorically-oriented corpus analysis.The book is not a manual or tutorial on how to use the tool, but rather explains different areas of research where such a tool can be useful and how it can be used to obtain relevant data for the discipline.The fact that DocuScope is freely available for research and that the book covers several areas makes it of interest to a wide audience.This is an edited book that includes contributions from scholars from rhetoric, writing studies, education, data science, political science, and literary and cultural studies.Thus, the book is divided into six parts with two contributions in each part.The first part of the book, "DocuScope and Computational Rhetoric," offers, on the one hand, a history of the project including interesting concepts and theories of rhetoric, and on the other hand an introduction to the book itself.Authors here point out the goal of this volume: "both to reflect past applications of DocuScope in a range of historical, literary, educational, professional, and political contexts, as well as to provide space for new and experimental applications" (25).In Part 2 of the book titled "Variation across Academic Disciplines and Contexts," the chapters explore genre similarities and differences,