Duncan Buell, University of South Carolina Abstract: The pedagogical center of many university First Year Composition programs is the revision of essays, the notion that the draft of a student’s English 101 essay should be revised before being turned in as a final version. Most of the established research on FYC concludes that students revise in a shallow way, correcting minor grammatical errors and doing minor word substitution. This research has, however, been conducted by human beings examining small sets of FYC essays. Dr. Buell, together with Dr. Chris Holcomb, Director of First Year English at USC, have been looking at revision in the ENGL 101/102 as a “big data” computation. They have written Python code to compare draft and final versions on specific and targeted features that can be examined by computer. Based on an early corpus of 439 papers from 2014-2015, it would seem that the established conclusions about student revision are just wrong, and that student revision is much different thing. Buell and Holcomb, with a team of graduate and undergraduate students funded by the Center for Digital Humanities, are working to collect all 10,000 (plus or minus) essays from ENGL 101 and 102 in the spring 2016 and following semesters, and to process them all to examine revision and writing characteristics. This is thus a combination of a “big data” and a “natural language” computation. We emphasize that although we use natural language packages, this is not software to “grade” or “assess” the writing. Rather, we have targeted characteristics thought to be typical of student (and compared against “academic”) writing, and we are computing quantified measurements of these characteristics. Bio: Duncan A. Buell is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Unviversity of South Carolina. His Ph.D. is in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Chicago (1976). He was from 2000 to 2009 the department chair at USC, and in 2005-2006 was interim dean. He has done research in document retrieval, computational number theory, and parallel computing, and has more recently turned to digital humanities as one of the emerging “marketplace” applications for computing. He is engaged with First Year English at USC on the analysis of freshman English essays, searching for an understanding of actual student writing in an effort to improve pedagogy for first year English instruction. He has team taught four times with Dr. Heidi Rae Cooley on the presentation of unacknowledged history on mobile devices, and he and Dr. Cooley are actively engaged in ways to go beyond text to fully enable the use of visual media in mobile applications that present humanities content, especially content that might normally remain unacknowledged by institutional authority. This seminar is open to anyone who is interested, not just students enrolled in the CSCE 791 class. Please consider attending.