David Kaufer is professor of rhetoric in the Department of English at Carnegie Mellon University. From 1994-2009, he was head of the Department. In 1994, he co-founded a Master of Design degree jointly administered by the Department of English and the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon. His research interests are in the qualitative and quantitative analysis of rhetoric, writing and written information, and technologies for text analysis and text collaboration.
His most recent books include Rhetoric and the Arts of Design (with Brian Butler); Designing Interactive Worlds with Words: Principles of Writing as Representational Composition (with Brian
Butler); The Power of Words: Unveiling the Speaker and Writer's Hidden Craft (with Suguru Ishizaki, Brian Butler, and Jeff Collins). He also has many refereed and invited articles linking rhetoric and design. He is interested in technology to support learning and the analysis of written composition and information. He has been an inventor (with Suguru Ishizaki) on the DocuScope text analysis and visualization environment and (with Ananda D. Gunawardena, Joanna Wolf, Alex Cheek, Aaron Tan) on the Classroom Salon textual annotation and social learning environment. For the latter project, he has grants from the National Science Foundation, the Gates Foundation,  Innovation Works, and the Office of Tech Transfer at Carnegie
Mellon.