‘I hoped to counteract the memory problem, but I made no impact whatsoever’: discussing methods in computing science using I

This paper is a corpus-based study of how native speaker computing students and experts use the pronoun I when elaborating their methodology (‘methodological I’). Using two corpora, (i) a student corpus of about 62,000 words of postgraduate computing project reports, written at the end of the MSc programme and roughly equivalent to the master’s dissertation; and (ii) an expert corpus of about 88,000 words of computing articles taken from...