Grasping Rhetoric and Composition by Its Long Tail: What Graphs Can Tell Us about the Field's Changing Shape

Presented as a series of graphs, bibliographic data gathered from "College Composition and Communication" provides perspective useful for inquiring into the changing shape of the field as it continues to mature. In its focus on graphing, the article demonstrates an application of distant reading methods to present patterns not only reflective of the most commonly cited figures in "CCC" over the past twenty-five years, but also attendant to a steady increase in the breadth of infrequently cited figures. (Contains 11 figures and 20 notes.)