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14 C o o R d i n aT i n g C i TaT i o n s a n d T h e Ca R To g R a p h y o f K n o w l e d g e finding True north in five scholarly Journals Brad E. Lucas Drew M. Loewe With The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (MKC), published in 1987, Stephen North took on a daring effort to map complex sets of investigations and practices under the big umbrella of composition, studying disparate sites of research on their own terms. Within a year, MKC had gained enough attention to warrant three separate reviews (by James C. Raymond, Richard L. Larson, and Richard Lloyd-Jones) in the February 1989 issue of the field’s flagship journal, College Composition and Communication (CCC). For over two decades, MKC flourished as a publication central to the field’s debates about history, research, and disciplinary practices. According to SUNYAlbany , North’s home institution, MKC “is required reading in virtually every graduate writing program in the country” (Excellence Awards). Moreover, as this very collection attests, North’s work has become a part of the field’s collective consciousness: regardless of one’s opinions about MKC, North’s book is a part of the intellectual landscape and has generated conversations that continue to influence our work as scholars and teachers. Of course, it is easy to support claims that a book is important to a field. However, when considering importance, questions of kind and of degree draw our attention. In other words, how important is MKC to the field we call rhetoric and composition, and how has it shaped our scholarly conversations? As a means of invoking the crucial role of citation in scholarship, we offer a familiar passage from Kenneth Burke: Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion Coordinating Citations and the Cartography of Knowledge 265 too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (1974, 110–11) Burke’s metaphor of the parlor debate is perhaps one of the most frequently cited passages from his work, and it highlights the ongoing “conversation ” that we all entered late and learned to understand while the arguments raged on.1 Our particular aim in this chapter is to explore how MKC has played a role in composition’s parlor and how it has shaped the conversation in the decades since its publication. Through citation analysis, we reveal both the erratic peaks of scholarly engagement with MKC and how those trends were to some extent shaped by publications in CCC. While we discover patterns of our collective scholarly behavior, we also conclude that most of our field’s academic “moves” are unique. Moreover, through our bibliometric analysis, we also illustrate an underemployed method for assessing the circulation and impact of scholarship on the field, providing a quantitative dimension to the complex qualitative discussions that have shaped the discipline’s thinking about its history and its publishing practices. Rather than mustering an argument about North’s impact on the field or tracing how his ideas gained importance, we wanted instead to identify scholarship that cited MKC and to gain a better sense of how MKC was used and positioned in composition scholarship from 1987 to 2006. Given unlimited time and resources, we could have collected citations from every publication that referenced MKC; instead, we decided to work with a set of five academic journals to provide data for bibliometric analysis. Our decision was not simply one of convenience. We wanted to have a sufficient number of publications and authors to conduct our analysis, and we were interested in tracing citations...

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