Rhetoric's Outliers in Second Language Writing | Jay Jordan

The Outliers

The graphic below maps the eruptions of the 15 select terms in twelve articles. (See Methods for more information.) Each of the articles includes two terms that appear there a majority of times in the corpus. While I randomized the order of the terms to avoid suggesting a specific order, users may be guided by the relative color intensities on the map. Blue–hued blocks correspond to "rhetorical + ___" terms, and red blocks correspond to "___ + rhetoric." For each term, the color saturation is a function of the corresponding term's frequency of appearance. For example, "new rhetoric" appears 77 times out of a total of 120 instances of "___ + rhetoric" among select terms, or 64%. I thus colored the corresponding block using the Hue, Saturation, Lightness values of 0, 64%, 50% and used the HSL calculator at w3schools.com to convert those values to the hexidecimal color code #d12e2e.