Constructing Automated Revision Graphs: A Novel Visualization Technique to Study Student Writing

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel technique of constructing Automated Revision Graphs (ARG) to facilitate the study of revisions in writing. ARG plots sentences of a written text as nodes, and their similarities to sentences from its previous draft as edges to visualize text as graph. Implemented in two forms: simple and multi-stage, the graphs demonstrate how sentence-level differences can be visualized in short texts to study revision products, processes, and student interaction with feedback in student writing.