What Camera Should I Buy?

tl;dr — This is a long post, so here’s the gist: Cameras don’t really matter, because they all work basically the same way. What, how, and why you make photographs are more meaningful questions to ask when you’re getting serious about photography.

Grab something, anything—even your smartphone—and make photographs deliberately. A deliberative, contemplative, and reflective approach toward the images you make and share is much more important than the camera. This applies to visual researchers, but I’m pretty sure it applies to most image-making scenarios.

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Every so often I get an email or message from someone who writes to ask: “What camera should I buy?”

This is a tricky question to answer, and I usually respond with questions of my own: What are you going to photograph? What do you want your camera to do for you? How much can you reasonably spend? Do you care about having multiple lenses? Do you care about how your camera looks, as an object, in addition to how it sees?

I’ve answered the question of “what camera to buy” enough times that it occurred to me to write a post about it. It’s weird that I even get this question, though; I’m nowhere near a professional photographer, nor do I keep up with gear. If you say “I’m thinking about buying X Camera,” it’s quite likely I’ve zero experience with that camera.

I use cameras to make photographs in the processes of conducting research, and in the processes of living everyday life. That said, I have learned a lot about what I want from photography (and cameras are pretty important to photography), so if reading about what I’ve learned is useful to others, then please to enjoy…

Leveling Up as a Photographer

The folks at DigitalRev recently posted a video that pretty well mirrors my own journey as an amateur photographer. It’s very tongue-in-cheek, and well worth five minutes of your time:

Thankfully, I skipped Level 1; I’ve experienced several of the remaining levels to varying extents, though. For example, I did completely geek out on gear (Level 2) before I became a student of photography (Level 3) and embraced the philosophy that a camera should go with one everywhere (Level 4). I dabbled in the hobbyist phase (Level 5), but became bored by message board arguments and the gear pedants and zealots that thrive there as an invasive species (see Level 1).

I’m nowhere near an “Online Legend,” Level 6, though I have had a couple of photos make Flickr’s “Explore” page, including this one, which picked up 300 faves and over 20,000 views in a 24 hour period. That was a trip, since I’m lucky to get 1,000 views and 20 faves on any given Flickr photo. Flickr and Instagram mystify me. Images that I think are well-composed and interesting, such as this one, rarely receive much love. DigitalRev’s take on this is spot on, but I digress…

Obviously, I don’t earn my living as a photographer, so I kind of sidestepped Level 7; like many photographers, amateur and professional, I strive to reach Level 8, in my own way. But it takes a while to figure out what you want from photography. It has taken me the better part of the last 3 or 4 years, shooting and editing almost daily, to kind of be happy with what I’m doing and to get what I want from cameras—to get them to see what I see with my eyes and brain. Your mileage will vary, of course.

So, What Is a Camera, Anyway?

It’s a box with a hole in it. Seriously, that’s it. Every camera, ever, is a box with a hole in it. Despite the dizzying array of dials, buttons, and menu options on contemporary digital cameras, the damn things are just boxes with holes in them. I wish someone explained this to me many years ago.

“Wait a second,” you’re thinking. “Surely it’s more complicated than that.” Well, yes, I need to add one other element: material that’s sensitive to light. The predominant light-sensitive material used in photography for 100 or so years was film. Now, our predominant light-sensitive material is a digital sensor.

So, a camera = box (that shuts out light) + hole + light-sensitive material (film or digital sensor). Really and truly, that’s it. Have you ever heard of a pinhole camera? Box, itty-bitty hole, film.

“Wait a second,” you’re thinking once again. “Surely it’s more complicated than this.” It is more complicated, but not much. The things we add to cameras are simply variations on the theme of box, hole, light-sensitive material.

For example, a lens helps us focus the light that comes through the hole and hits the film or sensor. Blades inside the lens help us control the size of the hole, known as aperture. Controlling the size of the hole lets us adjust to different light sources and intensities, and lets us control what’s in focus and what’s out of focus (known as “depth of field”). A shutter gives us control over how long we allow light to shoot through the hole and reach the light-sensitive material. And something called ISO allows us to choose the sensitivity of the light-sensitive material.

Are these things—lens, aperture, shutter, ISO—very complicated? Not really. The first three are all simply improvements upon characteristics of the hole; ISO is an improvement upon the material where light is written. [1]

In sum, the composition of any given photograph involves light passing through a hole into a light-proof box (that is, the light can’t spill out the sides or back) onto film or a digital sensor. You can make a camera with a roll of film and an Altoids can.

If you already knew all this, then I apologize for making you read the last few paragraphs. I write this because I didn’t know this stuff with this kind of clarity until a couple years ago, even though I’d been making photographs since the early 1980s. In fact, it wasn’t until I started seriously shooting film again, in the spring of 2014, that the simplicity of the technical aspects of photography clicked into place for me.

Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO

This is the stuff to learn, no matter what camera you shoot. What’s the definition of a “user friendly” camera for most people? One that doesn’t make you think about these three things.

But you want to think about these things, because they’re the only things that matter when it comes to the technical side of photography. And once you learn them, they work on any camera. Any camera. Because all cameras work the same way, remember?

Aperture. The aperture is the size of the hole, period. Bigger hole, lower f-stop number; smaller hole, higher f-stop number. F2 means the hole is wide open, while F22 means the hole is really small. Big hole = small focus area. Small hole = everything in focus.

Shutter Speed. Fast shutter speeds freeze movement. Slow shutter speeds blur movement. Want to take a picture of a waterfall? You don’t want to shoot it on automatic mode, with a 1/2000sec shutter speed. Why? Because you’ll get a crappy picture of water frozen in time. Instead, put your camera on the ground or some other stable surface, switch over to “shutter priority mode” and shoot it at 1/2sec or 1 second. Your rocks and trees will be perfectly sharp, but the water will be a smooth, pleasing blur.

ISO. It used to be that you could only control ISO within a very limited range of film sensitivity—between about 50 and 1600 ISO. You selected your ISO when you bought your film, and once that film was in your camera, you were stuck with it. With today’s digital sensors, we can adjust the sensitivity to light (ISO) on the fly, shooting one picture in broad daylight at 100 ISO and the next indoors, in very low light, at 3200 ISO. Because digital cameras are so good with this, you basically almost never need to worry about ISO. It helps to know how it affects your images, though.

Here’s a great little infographic with everything you need to know about how aperture, shutter speed, and ISO affect your shots. This is the stuff to learn.

Shooting Modes

Pretty much any digital camera you can buy nowadays comes with these basic shooting modes:

• Automatic: camera controls aperture, shutter speed, and ISO
• Aperture Priority: you control the aperture (e.g., “I want my background to be blurry, so I’m shooting this at f2”), the camera controls shutter speed and ISO
• Shutter Priority: you control the shutter speed (e.g., “I want the water in this waterfall to be a silky-smooth blur so I’m shooting this with a 1 second exposure”), the camera controls aperture and ISO
• Program Mode: basically a fully automatic mode, but with a little more control (e.g., “I don’t want the flash to fire, but I want the camera to figure out everything else”)
• Manual Mode: fully manual—you choose aperture, shutter speed, and ISO

Most professionals and hobbyists shoot in manual mode, right? Wrong. In my experience, most shoot in aperture or shutter priority mode.

When I’m shooting digital, I’m usually in aperture priority mode. I also have my camera in “Auto ISO” mode. This means that I tell the camera: “shoot between 200 and 3200 ISO, depending on the available light.” (I don’t want it shooting over 3200, because the pictures become grainy in my particular camera—yours may shoot fine up to 6400 or even 12800 ISO).

On the technical side, the only thing I’m thinking about for most everyday shots is the aperture and depth of field—what do I want to get in focus in a given shot? I select the aperture and let the camera figure out shutter speed and ISO. Easy. If I’m shooting something where I either want to freeze movement or show movement, then I’m probably switching over to shutter priority mode.

Put simply, aperture priority and shutter priority modes cover roughly 90% of my digital photography.

If I’m shooting with a flash, or if I’m shooting film, that’s when I’m in manual mode. My film cameras are all fully mechanical—there are no batteries, no electronic components, and so everything is set manually for each exposure.

So, What Camera?

The first thing to consider in any digital camera is whether it has all of the shooting modes I detailed in the previous section. If it meets this very, very basic test, you’re good to go.

The next thing to consider is: fixed lens, or lens system?

I’m not going to delve very far into this at all. But here are some basics:

• “Kit” lenses—those that come bundled with cameras such as the Nikon D3300 in an Amazon deal—are serviceable, but not great.
• Zoom lenses, unless very very expensive, tend to be of lower quality than prime lenses.
• Prime lenses have a fixed focal length—e.g., 50mm.
• Prime lenses typically have a greater range of aperture options, which gives you more control over the creative and aesthetic aspects of your images.
• Prime lenses may be extremely expensive, but they are also sometimes super affordable—Canon and Nikon both make stellar 50mm and 35mm lenses for around $200.

That should suffice. Back to the question: fixed lens or lens system?

A fixed lens camera has one lens that cannot be swapped out for another. If you buy such a camera, you’re stuck with that lens. For many digital cameras, that fixed lens is a zoom.

Lens system cameras allow you to purchase the camera body and lenses separately, giving you lots of flexibility and room for growth over time.

I own several fixed lens cameras (one digital and four film), and two lens system cameras (one digital and one film). They’re all great, and all used to make different kinds of images. My fixed lens cameras are much better looking, as objects, than my lens system cameras, which are big, bulky, and kind of awkward.

Right now, I’d say 95% of my photography happens with a fixed lens camera; I pull out the lens system camera for special situations (photographing written artifacts, shooting portraits, etc.). Don’t make anything of this—it’s a personal preference based on the kinds of things I like to shoot and how I like to shoot right now. It will likely change, so this not an evaluation or endorsement of either approach.

What camera should you buy?

At a minimum, one that has the shooting modes above, and one that will serve you in what you want from photographs now and in the near future (2–4 years or so). If an inexpensive digital camera with a good sensor, full shooting modes, and a competent zoom (or prime) lens will serve you well, go for it. If you want to have the option to add lenses and do specialized kinds of shots, go with a lens system camera.

The stuff that follows is more important, though…

What do you want from your photography?

What do you really want to shoot? Landscapes? Slices of everyday life? Your kids? Archival materials? All of the above?

How you answer these questions will in large measure dictate the kind of camera you buy. But really, no one cares about your camera.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve become most interested in street photography. This is not the art of making shots of streets, but of simply capturing everyday life, unposed, unscripted, as it happens. It’s really hard to do well for a variety of reasons, but my best street photos have emotion and heart, and they make me really happy when they turn out well.

I could shoot my street photos with my digital lens system camera, but it would be… not exactly joyless, but less joyful. Instead I use a small, fixed lens rangefinder camera, either film or digital. I recently finished a research project using only one of these cameras, and it was very satisfying, both while shooting and during processing. The camera fit the project so well.

The thing is, I didn’t know what I wanted from photography until I’d spent a few months shooting every day.

My advice then, is simply this: Grab something, anything—even your smartphone—and make photographs deliberately. A deliberative, contemplative, and reflective approach toward the images you make and share is much more important than the camera. This applies to visual researchers, but I’m pretty sure it applies to most image-making scenarios.

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1. BTW, improvements to the box are responsible for most of the complexity we feel are part and parcel of digital cameras. But the fact that a very complex computer now sits inside the box doesn’t really change anything about how cameras work.  ↩

Visual Rhetorics, Visual Methods

Just before the Fall, 2015 semester began, I tweeted a link to my Pinboard collection of articles and blog posts related to visual research methods. My message was simple: if you teach visual rhetorics or visual methods, here are hundreds of syllabus-worthy links in one handy place.

But even as I shared that collection of links, I worried about how colleagues in the field might interpret the collection, and whether they would even find use in them. This worry stems from the possible mismatch about what each of us considers to be representative of visual rhetoric. I don’t mean this in some strictly subjective sense, but in the broader sense in which our field’s view of visual rhetorics has congealed and become normative.

Even though I’ve written about the relationship between visual rhetorics and visual methods in various places, I’m aware that I’ve never made the connections, overlaps, and productive divergences particularly clear in spaces such as Twitter and here, on my blog. My fear is that teachers and scholars who are familiar with (and teach) mainstream approaches to visual rhetorics may be unclear as to how links such as this Slate post about Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese brooms—to take just one recent example—is useful for teaching and exploring visual rhetorics.

In this post, then, I’ll try to clearly and succinctly explain my perspective on the relationship between visual rhetorics and visual methods for teachers and scholars in rhetoric, writing studies, and related disciplines.

Historical interests in the visual, aural, multimodal, and multisensory aspects of persuasion and composition are by now well established. But our approaches to the visual, in particular, are predominantly reception-oriented. This is no critique, but a statement of fact regarding the scope and methodological focus of most of our field’s formative scholarship on the visual. Research in visual rhetorics overwhelmingly involves analysis of extant images (still and moving) and other extant visual phenomena. Those projects that use images in the processes of empirical research—for example, Cushman (2011) or Wickman (2010)—are outliers rather than evidence for prevalent or even emerging trends.

It may seem as if I am oversimplifying; I am not. The differences really are this simple.

But make no mistake: reception-oriented approaches to visual rhetorics are essential to our (and our students’) understanding of visual phenomena. My own arguments for using visuals in the processes of empirical research of writers and rhetors, I hope, draws from, complements, and extends reception-oriented approaches in different ways, toward different ends. Visual research methods, in other words, are closely parallel to the traditional analyses and subject matter of visual rhetorics.

The great majority of the links posted in my Pinboard collection are selected with my empirical, visuals-made-in-research approach. There are many, many posts highlighting what we might call documentary photography or photojournalism. There are very few posts featuring the work of anyone who might unambiguously be called researchers of writing or rhetoric.

So why did I argue that this collection is useful for teachers and researchers of visual methods and visual rhetorics?

For those interested in making images as part of research in rhetoric and writing (or teaching such approaches), there are hundreds of links that serve as inspiration, that feature compelling and often novel subject matter, that execute common visual methods (though for admittedly different purposes and audiences), and that present challenging or even orthogonal approaches that might help clarify and improve our work.

And for those interested in analyzing extant images from a variety of perspectives, the collection is a treasure trove of opportunity with a decidedly realist bent.

The post I linked to about brooms, for example, is more art photography than photojournalism, but it’s rich with implications for empirical visual researchers and visual rhetoricians.

For visual researchers, the project uses images to: (a) create a typology of like objects and thus a framework for comparison and analysis; (b) to celebrate beauty, craftsmanship, utility, place, and purpose in the everyday; and (c) to explore both situated and comparative experience. I’d be thrilled with any research design exploring writers and rhetors that would help me do so much.

For visual rhetoricians, the project uses images to: (a) foreground the compelling and varied visual aspects of mundane, ready-to-hand materials and objects; (b) to effect a visual typology that demonstrates similarity and difference in designed artifacts; and (c) to foreground work in visual rhetorics by one artist/photographer as a way of speculating on what such visuals do to and for particular audiences.

These analytic axes are off the top of my head, and as you’ll note, there is plenty of productive similarity across lists. Savvy teachers of visual rhetorics could come up with any number of alternative approaches to this example. Good examples, such as this one, will explore both visual methods and visual rhetorics in tandem.

In sum, visual rhetorics and visual methods are complementary approaches to our field’s study of visual composition and persuasion. Many of the links in my Pinboard collection may not appear to be firmly within the traditional realms of visual rhetoric, but I hope to have shown how nearly all of these examples could be productively examined from both perspectives.

Picturing Writing with Visual Research Methods

In Academic Writing as a Social Practice, Linda Brodkey (1987) argued that composition studies needed a new cultural conception of composing, one that reimagined the tired trope of the alienated and anguished writer who writes alone. In a chapter titled “Picturing Writing,” Brodkey relies heavily on visual metaphors; she passionately argued that we need new pictures of writers and composing practices in their rich, socially situated complexity. She asked readers to re-see writing, to consider alternative viewpoints, and in the process, to break away from popular perceptions of composing, particularly because such perceptions obviate new, different, or even challenging perspectives about writing (58).

More recently, Jody Shipka (2011) draws on Brodkey to suggest that one charge of contemporary composition research is to foreground and make more visible the circulatory processes of composing and textual distribution (38). In response to these and similar exigencies, I compose with photography as one way in which to see writing anew—a method for re-seeing the complexity of composing processes by literally and systematically picturing writers and writing.

As a qualitative researcher focused on the activities, objects, and environments of composing, I conduct ethnographies and case studies of writers in everyday life—from academe and industry to religious practice and social gaming. In these studies, I use traditional fieldwork methods such as semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and artifact collection and analysis. In my early fieldwork, I often used photography and videography as well, mainly as means of augmenting observational fieldnotes and capturing informal talk, gestures, and spatial and material arrangements.

A few years ago, however, I realized that my use of visual fieldwork methods, while beneficial, was also somewhat facile in its execution. I learned that over the last four decades, social scientists have explored the nuances of visual methods in studies of social life (see, for example, Pink, 2007; Spencer, 2011; and Pinney, 2011), of which writing is, of course, an inescapable mediator. The subfields of visual anthropology and visual sociology have enriched my understanding and use of visual methods in fieldwork. These approaches have developed in parallel to our own field’s explorations of visual rhetorics, resulting in complementary empirical perspectives on visuality and visibility.

Writing in the world: a tiny geocache container and scroll for logging visits.

More recently, therefore, I have adapted approaches from visual anthropology and visual sociology to the study of writers and their composing practices and environments. Doing so has resulted in many trials and errors, but the struggle has been rewarding: I have learned to use visual methods to explore, analyze, and present the rich materiality of everyday composing practices, and in the process, to formulate new pictures of writers and writing that may be generative for participants and composition researchers alike. More important, by using visual methods in field studies I have been able to create new forms of material engagement with participants about the role of composing in their learning, work, and play.

While critics such as Susan Sontag (1977) have suggested that photography results in the distancing of photographic subjects from photographers, I have found opposite to be true: Visual methods of fieldwork result in qualitatively different forms of intersubjective understanding between researchers and participants. Composing with photography throughout fieldwork can help researchers of writing move beyond mere tautological illustration; by using visual methods, researchers may document and engage simultaneously.

More important, participants may see their own composing environments, tools, and practices in new ways, from different perspectives. A technique known as photo-elicitation uses fieldwork photographs as pivots for better understanding participant practice. For example, by photographically demonstrating a writer’s well-maintained mise en place, the researcher may help make the familiar strange for a participant, and through discussion, develop new insights about their composing practices.

In a similar way, visual methods may result in presentations of experience that are more hyaline and evocative than traditional forms of reporting. Qualitative data is notoriously dense, and for readers, the mass of fieldwork supporting ethnographies and case studies is often opaque. In addition, traditional methods of collection and representation are necessarily sequential; observational fieldnotes, for example, may miss crucial details of actual practice—movements, tools, arrangements, or cross-talk that may meaningfully mediate composing.

A software studio’s whiteboard is a collaborative space for composing and ideation.

Photographs offer simultaneous renderings of practice, what Flusser (2002) terms surfaces rather than lines. A traditional ethnographer detailing the complex, collaborative work pictured above must transform the simultaneously visible surface of a software studio’s whiteboard into a linear representation of activity. A visual ethnographer, however, can present that visible surface in its full complexity; when coupled with an analytic narrative that details punctuated development, a more hyaline rendering of complex composing practices emerges.

Qualitative research is characteristically ideographic; indeed, visual methods foreground the situated materiality of composing practices. This is a key strength of visual methods as I practice them in studies of writers and writing: the ability to document and collaboratively explore particular systemic contexts and the ways in which artifact assemblages participate in composing processes.

However, in developing new pictures of writers and writing, visual methods have the potential to be nomothetic in the aggregate. Because visual methods may be more hyaline—presenting richer data than traditional methods alone—they carry the potential for fruitful cross-case comparisons of composing practices. Imagine, for a moment, systematically composed and collected photographs of 20,000 first year writers’ typical composing environments and the resulting wealth of both particular (ideographic) and tendential (nomothetic) pictures of writing that might emerge from careful analysis.

Visual methods in empirical studies of writing carry the potential to further develop and realize Brodkey’s argument for re-seeing our object of study, and more important, the people who write. Barthes (1981) argued that “the camera can be an instrument of deep meaning, connecting the scene to the viewer and the viewer to existence” (131). With visual methods, writing researchers can reframe cultural conceptions of where, how, why, and with whom people write in their everyday lives.

Shanghai Street Food

During the summer, when I told people that I was going to (or recently returned from) Shanghai, I was often immediately asked about food, and sometimes specifically about street food.

If you know much about me, then you know that I’m a food utilitarian. I eat for calories. I simply don’t care much about food beyond sustenance. This does not mean that I don’t enjoy food; I do. I enjoy the things I eat every day so much that I eat almost the same things, every day. But I am no foodie.

I will try almost anything, and Shanghai presented many opportunities for new culinary experiences. About the only thing I had that was challenging was stinky tofu during breakfast. Served cold, this everyday snack actually smelled fine to me—and was quite wonderful when it hit my tastebuds. On it’s way down my esophagus, however, it exploded in a kind of fermented, spicy, heartburny miasma. Despite that, I’d probably try it again…

As it turned out, just outside the West Gate of the Baoshan campus of Shanghai University, about a 1.5 mile walk from where I stayed and taught, is Jufengyuan Road, and area that Shanghaiist calls one of Shanghai’s street food meccas. I came to know this area well, visiting daily.

As the Shanghaiist post notes,

The actual Jufengyuan strip isn’t even the main attraction with its fruit wagons, skewer carts, etc. The real deal begins at the alleyway just right of the bridge connecting Shanghai Uni’s west entrance to Jufengyuan Lu - identifiable by the covered picnic tables, shrouds of steam, and scraping of woks. Here, you’ll find fried noodles and rice galore, shawarma, skewers, Chinese breakfast crepes aka jianbing , fried chicken, and our favorite, big Xinjiang skewers with ribs, chicken legs, and other animal parts spitted on medieval-looking metal swords.

This area is amazing. The smells, the open flames, the masses of people moving about carrying xialongbao and sizzling chicken and steaming soups—it’s essentially what I envisioned when conjuring the phrase “Shanghai street food,” and it was incredible that I was within walking distance for two weeks. And while I came to appreciate one stall’s very spicy noodles, I was much more interested in simply being there than in sampling all of the food on offer—the street food scene along Jufengyuan Lu was atmospheric, enveloping, all-encompassing.

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At this point, I want to write a few words about my experiences with street photography in Shanghai before I share some photos of the street food scene…

I never felt unsafe during my brief time in Shanghai, even though I stumbled into areas of the city where tourists and laowai are rarely seen. However, there were a couple encounters that I’d describe as “dicey,” and each involved my use of a camera at the time.

I’m fairly conspicuous as a street photographer; I love to shoot in low light and at night, and I’m a stickler for sharpness and legibility. This means that I typically stand out—with a big Manfrotto tripod, a Nikon D7000, a wireless shutter release, and a tendency to shoot low angle, wide frame shots. In other words, people can easily see what I’m doing, and in the process, they may become curious, shy, amused, etc.

This shot, for example, was taken in front of about 25 scooter taxis and their drivers—to the left of frame, and behind the camera—all facing me as I set up, and all watching me with interest. This was photography in front of an audience, and after I made a couple of acceptable shots, I moved along the crowd, showing everyone the resulting images. It was both odd and fun.

But I take few “candid” or furtive street shots. If you see close-up, legible images of people in my street photographs, there’s a very, very strong chance that I asked for permission before shooting. So, in touristy areas like The Bund, nobody cared about my photographic activities. But in a locals area like Jufengyuan Lu, as an obvious laowai with a camera and tripod, I stuck out.

On several occasions in Shanghai, therefore, my conspicuousness was potentially positive or negative (for me, and others). Folks often would set up behind me—squatting down or leaning over my shoulder—as I framed a shot on my tripod, essentially trying to see what I was photographing. When I noticed this, I’d show people my shot, so they could see my results. Then we’d exchange thumbs up or down signs, smiles, shrugs, or frowns depending on what people thought of a given photo.

But on a couple of occasions, people were visibly upset by something I’d done with my camera. The diciest situation occurred just after I’d shot this photo, one of my favorites from the trip:

To the left of the frame, Jufengyuan Road moves out into the distance—a pedestrian, bike, and scooter thoroughfare with major chains (Wal-Mart, KFC), local shops, banks, apartments, etc. Just to the right of the frame is the entrance to the street food mecca.

For me, this fruit stand is visually lovely. I’d purchased cantaloupe skewers here on a couple occasions, and at night, it makes a fantastic photographic subject.

I shot this in the street, about 20–30 feet away from the stand. My tripod was low, the camera perhaps 30 inches above the ground. The woman working the stand moved in and out of frame as I was setting up the shot, and my intention was simply to capture her movement—a blur in the long exposure. In other words, I was shooting the scene—the well-lit stand, the movement of people nearby, the colorful fruit—rather than a portrait.

A man—probably in his 40s or so, shirtless (it was hot and humid), and a bit bigger in stature than I—set up behind me as I framed the shot, clearly skeptical and uneasy. After shooting it, I turned to him, gesturing back toward the camera, indicating as best as I could that I wanted him to look.

Finally, I picked up my camera and held the shot up for him to see. He was pissed. I’m not at all sure why, but he started screaming at me there in the street. He’s yelling in Chinese, I’m offering in English to delete the image, and no one nearby was able to mediate. Finally, he gave me a dismissive wave and I headed off down the street, quickly, hearing a few farewell yells, without taking another shot.

I feel bad, as I clearly did something to cause offense. But I also couldn’t tell if this was the kind of man who often yells at people on Jufengyuan Road. Because of this ambivalence, I kept the photo.

The rest of the photos were shot in the alley, with permission. I returned another night to shoot these, but I was still skittish; I ended up shooting far less here than I would have liked.

This photo is the poorest of the bunch, but it gives a sense of the stalls in the alley. From this view, I am about 2/3 of the way down the alley, so we’re seeing only the final few stalls along the vanishing point. To the right of frame are tables and many, many patrons enjoying their food.

At this stall, a family—a grandmother, son, daughter (or daughter-in-law), and grandchild—were very accommodating, and they really liked the shot after I showed it to them. The huge wok and open flame caught my eye, but I’m really pleased with the little details here—the shovel in the bottom left, the dividing paneling, the electrical sockets and peeling paint. A perfect environment for street food!

This image is intentionally dark; to the left of frame, a line stretched easily twenty people deep. The single bulb illuminating the workspace caught my eye.

Finally, a couple of the few food close-ups I shot, before and after.

Three Ontological Provocations

I was invited to give an Ignite presentation at SIGDOC 2013.

This was my first try at giving a presentation in this format, and I must say, it's much more enjoyable than the typical academic talk.

All of the photos here are from my ongoing fieldwork exploring the geocaching community. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this talk!

Shanghai Graffiti

I have a few more posts from my summer teaching in Shanghai on the horizon, including today’s on graffiti and stencil art.

I spent much of my time on the Baoshan campus of Shanghai University; I learned quickly, thanks to some impressive heat and humidity, that there were areas of campus that remain shaded throughout the day. For example, many of the main instructional buildings had bicycle garages at the ground floor, like this one:

The walk to my classroom was about a mile or so, and I covered most of it by moving through the bicycle garages of a row of instructional buildings. And since I spent a fair amount of time there, I noticed some interesting stencil graffiti, which I couldn’t help but photograph.

Overall, however, there were few examples of graffiti that I saw during my two weeks in Shanghai. It's a big city, though, and I saw only a fraction of it!

Everyday Details

While I was in Shanghai, I spent half a day in and around Jing’an Temple, a key site of contemporary Han Buddhism in China.

This is a fascinating place for many reasons, but what I found most interesting were the everyday details—from the feel of architectural materials and their accompanying visual flourishes to the smell of incense and the sounds of visitors lobbing yuan coins into the central metal tower.

If you regularly read this blog, then you’re possibly aware of my ongoing multisensory ethnography of Eucharistic Adoration practices. Perhaps out of researcherly habit, I found myself zeroing in on Buddhist analogues while I was at Jing’an Temple, taking many photos of the seemingly small, often fleeting and sensory everyday details that help make a sacred space sacred.

What we often overlook, though, are the details that make everyday spaces what they are. We can extrapolate from these exemplary spaces, I think, and look at quotidian spaces in new ways.

Contextual Ambivalence: Images + Inscriptions

In my last post, I talked a bit about the potentially dizzying contexts of production and use that accompany nearly any photograph.

I argued there for the importance of understanding—to the extent possible—the meaningful contexts of production in subsequent interpretations of photos. And while I argued against the notion of a photograph-as-text—as a self-contained unit of meaning irrespective of its social processes of production and use—I also willingly conceded that photographs are indeed meaningful (in fact, ontologically and epistemologically multiple) without rich contexts of provenance and circulation.

My argument was simply that we should strive, whenever possible, to recover contexts of provenance, circulation, and use as a means of transcending superficial “readings” of photographs as texts.

This refresher serves as preamble to an intriguing book of found photographs that speak to a kind of contextual ambivalence which I hope builds upon my last post.

Ransom Riggs’ (2012) Talking pictures: Images and messages rescued from the past is described by the author as a coffee table book of vintage found photos.

It’s a really neat book, with some startling pictures, but it’s ambivalent in terms of how it treats contexts and photos as stand-alone objects.

One the one hand, Riggs presents these images as meaningful in themselves, as examples of the curious, nostalgic, voyeuristic, and vernacular. He argues for their value through arrangement—by placing these geographically, temporally, and situationally disparate photos in a collection together and then arranging them thematically around notions such as “Clowning Around,” “Life During Wartime,” and “Hide This Please.”

Simply doing so has worth and value. The images are arresting, interesting, full of life and pathos and curiosity. They are “crammed” with meaning, as Barthes (1980) has argued—“The photographic image is full” (p. 89).

And yet Riggs’ ambivalence also argues something of the opposite; all of the images in his book are deemed significant because each couples photography—writing with light—and inscriptions—writing with glyphs and symbols. The images are chosen and arranged because they say something in two modalities simultaneously, because they include writing. Because they aren’t crammed full (enough) and overflowing with meaning (enough) on their own. They are not texts-without-writing.

In his brief but insightful introduction (and in the video above), he notes: “I became a collector, albeit an odd one; my primary interest was in snapshots that had writing on them” (p. xi).

He argues that “A photo might seem absolutely ordinary, but for a few words scribbled on the opposite side” (p. xii). Those few words—that microcontext—transforms the images from something mundane (here, he shows a blurry image of a rock wall, a street, a street sign, and some shrubs—“as banal as snapshots get”; p. xii) into “hidden gems” (p. xii).

Indeed, for Riggs, the smallest bit of written context is transformative (p. xii): “It lent the mutest of snapshots a voice” (p. xiii). “The best inscriptions,” he argues, “make a snapshot feel current, no matter when it was taken” (p. xiii). The inscription which transforms the blurry, banal street photo is this: “Rock wall near Rose Bowl, Pasadena Cal. where Dorothy found a Baby Girl on Jan. 24 1961” (p. xii).

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These images+inscriptions include something else for Riggs, and for people who interact with them. Pinney (2011), drawing on Barthes (1980), has described the double temporality of photography. Understanding this notion requires a bit of context from Barthes’ Camera Lucida.

In consideration of an 1865 photograph of Lewis Payne, a comely young man in shackles after his attempted assassination of Secretary of State W.H. Seward, Barthes’ interpretation of the image is: “This will be and this has been” (1980, p. 96; emphasis in original).

Barthes’ own caption for the photograph (his own interpellation, his own inscription, his own figuration of image+writing) is “He is dead and he is going to die…” (p. 95; emphasis in original).

Pinney (2011) describes this paradox of photography, how all photographs “bring the ‘there-then’ of the making of the photograph into the ‘here-now’ of our viewing of the photograph” (p. 85).

As Riggs suggests of the photographs he collected, “many of the snapshots I’d handled were of dead people; they were old pictures, after all” (p. x). But this realization occurs within the context of photography’s double temporality, most viscerally in his description of one of the first found photos that had a major impact on him—a portrait of a pretty teenager who reminded him of a summer camp crush.

He kept the image in a cardboard frame for almost a year, his “fantasy girlfriend” (p. x). At some point, however, he decided to transfer the image from the cardboard frame to a photo album, and at that point, for the first time since acquiring the photo, he saw the inscription on the back: “Dorothy … Chicago, age 15 Died of Leukemia” (p. xi).

A tiny inscription with profound and cascading effects on meaning and context: “Now she had a name—Dorothy—and a city, and a fate. I’d been fantasizing about a dead girl” (p. x). This will be and this has been.

Photographs in themselves are meaningful to someone, “crammed” with real and potential ontologies as they travel and circulate in different social contexts.

But photographs with inscriptions at once limit and extend ontologies. Ontological contexts are ambivalent.

Riggs concludes his introduction by suggesting that “Sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures” (p. xiv).

Contexts, Image Making, and Understanding

“Writing and picture making have, in many significant ways, replaced human memory and become the primary means by which twentieth-century Western humanity remembers.” Ruby, 1995, p. 113.

For the first time in my life, I have grown a beard. When I look in the mirror, I see myself and I see my dad in myself.

For most of my life, my dad wore a beard, shaped not unlike my own at the moment. Before he died, his beard was mostly gray, though his thick, dark head of hair remained.

Growing up, I was most often compared to my maternal grandfather—an active, outdoorsy, stubborn, stocky bull. He was bald save a ring of hair above the ears and around the back of his head. He never wore a beard, so far as I know. He was athletic, strong-willed, even a bit obnoxious at times.

On several occasions during the time between my 6th and 10th birthdays, I remember my granddaddy (that’s we called him, because my mom called him “daddy”) arriving at our suburban Bay Area home unannounced, causing uproar, laughter, shouting, and joy from my mom, my brother, and I. Shortly after the initial commotion, he would head into our kitchen, grab a spoon and a tub of Dreyer’s ice cream from the freezer, and walk out the front door. My brother and I would give chase, and he would speed off—a 60-something man running, with ice cream!—around the block, leaving my older brother and I despondent, unable to keep up.

My granddaddy wrestled with us, and I remember trying to hang on to his legs with all of my strength as he motored through the living room. He taught me how to throw a spiral. I grew up knowing I was like my granddaddy—active, outdoorsy, athletic, strong-willed, and more than a bit obnoxious.

But I didn’t look all that much like my granddaddy. There were physical resemblances—for example, my dad was 6’ 2”, but my granddad was only around 5’ 10”; I take after my granddad.

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No, it wasn’t until I watched my dad die in 2008, after his last confrontation with cancer, that I realized who in my family I most resembled. It’s not even really close, actually.

This was a significant realization. I had developed a narrative that I’d long told myself: I look more like mom and granddad, and my brother looks like dad (my brother is a couple inches taller than I am). But that narrative wasn’t accurate; I’d been telling myself the wrong story. I look like my dad, more and more as I get older. And my brother looks like my mom as he gets older.

With my new beard, I look in the mirror and I see my dad staring back at me sometimes. This is not an unpleasant feeling, but it is unsettling nonetheless.

I suppose that I would know this whether I had photographs of my dad or not. But I can’t help but think that I know this in large part because of those photographs.

I certainly don’t have any writing from my dad to supplement my memory of him—at least none ready to hand. He didn’t leave me a letter or a journal, no will with special instructions. Not that he would.

I have a few vivid memories that I can recall at almost any time:

• The day that he almost got into a fight with another man after one of my Little League baseball games—I remember the light of that day, the slant of sunbeams across a field of grass, looking up at my dad cradling a portable cooler and fold-up chairs, ready to fire on this man for a reason I didn’t know.
• The time he picked me up from a day hike on Mt. Diablo and took me to Frosty Freeze.
• The first time he held my son and played with him.
• The day that he and I took BART to see Cal play football at Memorial Stadium.

But how much can I not recall? How many everyday moments are lost?

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We have images. And images, in themselves, are worthy of our attention.

But photos as objects often carry incredibly significant meanings that may only be even marginally understood with the benefit of rich contextual detail—both about the moment and circumstances of image making and the reception and use of said image.

Ruby (1995) argues persuasively that “An interest in the photograph as a text complete in itself” is insufficient without “a focus on the social processes of construction and subsequent use(s)” (p. 5). Take this picture of my dad, for example:

I shot this photo as my dad watched my youngest daughter play soccer on a blue-bird day in early September, 2007. He was making his way across the country with his dog, driving from Atlanta to California and back to see family and to see the country.

He also knew he was going to die.

He didn’t tell us, of course. He didn’t say much of anything about the trip—he just wanted to get out and see us, his sister and her family, his nieces and nephews, and my brother and his family—to make this trip, to camp along the way, before he got too old.

We thought it was a bit odd, though. We worried about him. We sensed something was off.

We did the things you do with visiting family, and we had fun. I took several pictures, but when I composed the photo above, I was grasping for some significance—here’s my dad in the shade, sitting on the ground with his big red doberman laying next to him, looking out at my daughter play a game as he once looked out at me doing the same.

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Almost immediately after my dad died, just four months later—after a man came to my dad’s house and pushed his dead body on a gurney out the front and into the back of a van as I held the door—I spent some time on my laptop, looking for pictures.

I was in charge of handling his cremation arrangements while my step-mother dealt with so much loss and so much legal minutia simultaneously. I’d mostly done my part by that point.

So many people had helped in small ways during the last months of my dad’s life, and there were many others who couldn’t fly to Atlanta but who wanted to be here to help—these people needed something from us, I felt. Some small measure of thanks, and some recognition of my dad’s life.

I looked at the photo above. A different context and perspective occurred to me.

Perhaps my dad was looking squarely at the now in that moment—the smell of the crab grass, the feel of pebbles and sand beneath him, the smell of the creosote chaparral on the El Paso wind, roving bunches of 4 and 5 year-olds chasing a ball—but perhaps he was looking forward, too. Maybe he was thinking about what he knew he’d miss, what his grandkids might become.

I made a little 3x5 photo card with nothing but this image of my dad and the caption “looking forward…” I ordered a few and sent them to the folks who shared our memory of him.

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Is this photo meaningful without these contexts of production and use? Surely, for not everyone who received the photo card knew the backstory I’ve just provided—the contexts of production. They had other contexts that they brought to bear, however—an understanding that my dad was gone, a follow-on interpretation of the framing and perspective of the image + caption as received, and a host of their own contextual details remembered and stirred in the moments of reception and use.

Though the contextual details differ from person to person, it is the confluence of images and contexts which amplifies meaning in profound and often indescribable ways.

It’s tempting to skim across the top of these rich contexts in our investigations of images, to believe that such objects can be read without stirring up, surfacing, and carefully examining the incredibly detailed and even mundane phenomenologies of production and use.

But it’s folly to assume that such a reading can even marginally plumb the depths of those contexts; the analytic axes available to us without such cultural and historical contexts are largely superficial—lighting, composition, framing, technologies of production and distribution…

Even the term reading is insufficient, a misnomer.

Don’t get me wrong—these are important and even useful analytic axes for any interrogation of an image. Necessary starting points, to be sure.

But so woefully incomplete.

The ontological chasm between such superficial readings and more complex, nuanced, triangulated understandings of images in/and contexts is massive.

Visual Research Methods: A Photo Essay

I spent some time over the Thanksgiving break building a new section to my primary website where I explore empirical visual research methods. [1]

I realized, though, that the new section stands alone as a pretty decent photo essay exploring visual research (and its usefulness) in some of the studies I’ve conducted in the last three years. I’ll say more about visual research methods in forthcoming posts, but for now, I wanted to share an overview of this approach with readers.

This new section of my site is not intended as a detailed discussion of visual research; rather, my hope is to provide some basics for a broader audience that might like to know a bit more about my research program and methods. That being said, for regular readers of this blog with expertise and interest in the study of writing and rhetoric, my hope is that the photo essay is interesting, thought-provoking, or otherwise worth a few minutes of your time.

Check it out if you have a moment! Visual Research Methods

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1. Two quick notes: 1. at the time I wrote this post, the site was working well in every web browser I’ve tested, including tablets; however, I’m having some problems with stability on my iPhone, so reader beware; 2. I used a handy little app called Exhibeo to build the slideshow; there are several hundred lines of Javascript that make this thing work, and I’m happy with the way that Exhibeo streamlined that process!  ↩

From ZPD to WAGR: An Activity Theory Primer

Context

I recently gave a talk to members of Frontera Retorica, a graduate student chapter of the Rhetoric Society of America at the University of Texas at El Paso (and also my grad school alma mater!). They asked me to talk a bit about activity theory basics and some things that researchers in writing and rhetoric might consider when using AT to design a study.

What follows is a written version of my talk.

Tl;dr: a very basic overview of activity theory and why it’s useful, a perspective on why AT and rhetorical genre studies go together like PB&J, and some brief thoughts on deploying AT in studies of writing and rhetoric. If you’re an AT veteran, there’s nothing new here; if you’re new to AT, this may be useful!

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AT as a theoretical frame

Nardi (1996) notes that activity theory is a “a research framework and set of perspectives,” not a hard and fast methodology or single theory (p. 7).

Another way of thinking about activity theory is as a particular governing gaze (Emig, 1982); it’s a way of viewing everyday human activity, with a corresponding framework and relatively stable nomenclature for understanding that activity.

Grounded in dialectical materialism, “activity theory focuses on practice, which obviates the need to distinguish ‘applied’ from ‘pure’ science—understanding everyday practice in the real world is the very objective of scientific practice” (Nardi, 1996, p. 7).

Activity theory, therefore, “is a powerful and clarifying descriptive tool rather than a strongly predictive theory. The object of activity theory is to understand the unity of consciousness and activity," (Nardi, 1996, p. 7) a very Vygostkian perspective (more on that below).

Activity theory is rooted in the phenomenological facets of lived experience: “consciousness is located in everyday practice: you are what you do” (Nardi, 1996, p. 7). And what you do, as Vygotsky, Lave and Wenger (1991), Nardi and O’Day (1999), and Kaptelinin and Nardi (2006), have pointed out, is “firmly and inextricably embedded in the social matrix of which every person is a part,” a matrix comprised of people, histories, genres, technologies, and material artifacts (Nardi, 1996, p. 7). Activity theory “incorporates strong notions of intentionality, history, mediation, collaboration and development in constructing consciousness” (Nardi, 1996, p. 7).

Indeed, mediation is perhaps the key theoretical idea behind activity. We don’t just use tools and symbol systems; instead, our everyday lived experience is significantly mediated and intermediated by our use of tools and symbols systems. Activity theory helps frame, therefore, our understanding of such mediation.

What mediates the everyday lived experience of contemporary individuals absent of writing and rhetoric? Almost nothing…

In this sense, we might view activity theory as a methodological foundation for studying lived experience, following Spinuzzi (2003): “a methodology is the theory, philosophy, heuristics, aims, and values that underlie, motivate, and guide the method[s]” (p. 7).

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A Generational History of AT (aka “CHAT”)

Proto-First Generation

The work of Russian psychologist Vygotsky and his students in the early 1930s may be seen as the (proto)first generation of AT (though most everyone agrees that this wasn’t actually activity theory, as we’ve come to know it; instead, Vygotsky and his colleagues were exploring sociocultural psychology). His main works detailing some of the perspectives (particularly mediation) that would later come to be known as activity theory are:

• Vygotsky, L. (1934/1986). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.

Both books are accessible in translation, and contain many of the formative ideas that would later be developed by AT researchers. Key ideas include a strong focus on material and symbolic mediation, internalization of external (social, societal, and cultural) forms of mediation, and the zone of proximal development (ZPD)—the distance between what an individual (child, in Vygotsky’s work) can accomplish on her own, versus what she can accomplish with the help of another (more advanced or even expert) individual.

Vygotsky saw the past and present as fused within the individual, that the “present is seen in the light of history” (1978, p. 64). His cultural-historical psychology attempted to account for the social origins of language and thinking.

Second Generation

One of Vygotsky’s students, A.N. Leontiev, may be seen as the founder of AT proper. We can consider his work the second generation of activity theory (though this is sometimes seen as the first generation AT; see Engeström, 1999, for more details on the “generations” of AT). His main works include:

• Leontiev, A.N. (1978). Activity, consciousness, and personality. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
• Leontiev, A.N. (1981). Problems of the development of mind. Moscow: Progress.

Several of Leontiev’s most important works, translated into English, may be found online, here.

Leontiev’s breakthrough was primarily twofold: first he theorized activity as resulting from the confluence of a human subject, the object of his/her activity (predmet in Russian—“the target or content of a thought or action” (Kaptelinin, 2005, p. 6)), and the tools (including symbol systems) that mediate the object(ive); second, he saw activity as essentially tripartite in structure, being comprised of unconscious operations on/with tools, conscious but finite actions which are goal-directed, and higher level activities which are object-oriented and driven by motives (Leontiev, at times, seems to conflate object and motive, which is potentially problematic).

Third Generation (3GAT)

The work of Michael Cole and Yro Engeström in the 1970s and 1980s—mostly in parallel, but occasionally in collaboration—brought activity theory to a much wider audience of scholars in Scandinavia and North America. Engeström (1987) in particular is credited with expanding Leontiev’s model of activity, particularly via expansion of the basic activity triangle, an example of which may be found here.

Engeström re-envisioned Leontiev’s basic model of activity to account for assemblages of artifacts and tools and collectives of people working together to accomplish objectives. 3GAT, therefore, adds rules/norms, intersubjective community relations, and the division of labor to the basic model of activity. More importantly, Engeström theorized how multiple activity systems could share an object.

Around the same time that cultural-historical activity theory was becoming increasingly deployed as a way to understand complex human interactions in a variety of empirical and theoretical studies, other, very similar approaches were also coming to prominence, including situated cognition and situated action models (see Suchman, Gibson, Norman, Lave & Wenger, Lave, Wenger), and distributed cognition (see Hutchins, Norman).

In addition, AT was picked up by scholars in the emerging fields of human-computer interaction, interaction design, computer-supported cooperative work, and related areas to both study and theorize how technologies mediate human work, learning, and play. Sometimes scholars used AT alongside approaches like distributed cognition, and sometimes instead of those approaches (because AT was believed to offer something better). Nardi (1996) is a good place to start if you’re interested in digging into this body of work.

The majority of research in rhetoric and writing studies that calls upon an AT framework is 3GAT.

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Genre as Social Action—An Interlude

In 1984, Carolyn Miller published “Genre as Social Action,” calling on ethnomethodology and social science research to see genres as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (p. 31). Miller argued that we needed to explore genres in contexts of use, and that we consider how they are developed within complex social and cultural histories, how they regulate those histories in the present, and how they situate human subjects. Genres, in short, mediate human experience. Sound familiar?

Miller wasn’t the only scholar in our field working on new approaches to (especially everyday and professional) genres around this time. Foundational work in what has been called “North American Genre Theory” or “Rhetorical Genre Studies” was developed by the following scholars in the 1980s and 1990s:

• Bazerman
• Schryer
• Freedman
• Smart
• Devitt
• Swales
• Yates & Olikowski (and vice versa)
• Berkenkotter & Huckin
• and many, many others

Bawarshi & Reiff (2010) argue that RGS “has tended to focus more on how genres enable their users to carry out situated symbolic actions rhetorically and linguistically, and in so doing, to perform social actions and relations, enact social roles, and frame social realities” (p. 59). Genres, as Schryer (1993) has famously argued, are only stable-for-now; they change and develop, they carry along cultural and institutional histories, and yet they seem solid, stable, and even permanent in actual practice. Their use within a given workplace, classroom, discipline, culture, etc., helps maintain, reproduce, and frame the social realities of lived experience.

Everyday contexts, therefore, are viewed by RGS scholars “as an ongoing, intersubjective performance, one that is mediated by genres and other culturally available tools” (Bawarshi & Reiff, 2010, p. 59). Again, this should be sounding very familiar, and very congruent with the general framework of 3GAT. “RGS scholars,” Bawarshi & Reiff argue, “have tended to understand genres as sociological concepts mediating textual and social ways of knowing, being, and interacting in particular contexts” (p. 59).

Proto-WAGR and WAGR

David Russell’s work represents the most comprehensive and salient attempts at synthesizing rhetorical genre studies and activity theory. By now, it should be plain to see that activity theory provides a framework and model for understanding how genres and the artifacts of particular genres and assemblages of genres (read “writing and rhetorical work!”) mediate human activity. Russell’s work is the reason why this synthesis seems obvious, in hindsight. Some of his key works include:

• Russell, D. (1995). Activity theory and its implications for writing instruction. In J. Petraglia (Ed.), Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction (51–76). Mahwah, NJ: LEA
• Russell, D. (1997). Rethinking genre in school and society: An activity theory analysis. Written Communication 14(4), 504–54.
• Bazerman, C, & Russell, D. (2002). Writing selves/writing societies: Research from activity perspectives. Ft. Collins, CO: WAC Clearninghouse.
• Russell, D. 2009. Uses of activity theory in written communication research. In A. Sannino, H. Daniels, and K. D. Gutiérrez (Eds), Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 40–52.

Russell’s 1997 Written Communication article is magisterial, fusing Bakhtinian dialogism, dialectical materialism, rhetorical genre studies, and activity theory. I am calling these early works proto-WAGR, for in 2009, Russell would call the fusion of activity theory and RGS “writing, activity, and genre research,” or WAGR. From a WAGR perspective, written communication genres, Russell contends, are “arguably the most powerful mediational means for organizations and institutions” (2009, p. 40). Genre, therefore (and as we have seen), is a unit of social action; “the object of activity,” Russell argues, “can be seen to attain its stability, reproduction, and continuity through genres,” such that genres then serve as “crucial links between subjects, tools, and objects” (2009, p. 45).

Clay Spinuzzi, one of Russell’s most important students, has continued to develop and refine the scholarly confluence of RGS and AT. Some of his most important works include:

• Spinuzzi, C. (2003). Tracing genres through organizations: A socio-cultural approach to information design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Spinuzzi, C. (2004). Four ways to investigate assemblages of texts: Genre sets, systems, repertoires, and ecologies. In SIGDOC ’04: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference on Design of Communication. New York: ACM. 110–116.
• Spinuzzi, C. (2008). Network. Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Spinuzzi, C. (2010). Secret sauce and snake oil: Writing monthly reports in a highly contingent environment. Written Communication 27(4), 363–409.
• Spinuzzi, C. (2011). Losing by expanding: Corralling the runaway object. Journal of Business and Technical Communication 25(4), 449–486.
• Spinuzzi, C. (2012). Working alone together: Coworking as emergent collaborative activity. Journal of Business and Technical Communication 26(4), 399–441.

In short, activity theory is an incredibly useful and malleable framework for understanding and exploring complex, intersubjective, historically and culturally-conditioned, object-oriented human work and learning and the genres and artifacts that mediate such work and learning.

The final two Spinuzzi articles actually take us toward fourth generation activity theory…

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Fourth Generation AT (4GAT)

The rise of distributed work environments and the dominance of knowledge work has made it difficult to clearly bound new kinds of activity systems and activity theoretical objects. Engeström (2009) calls for a fourth generation of activity theory; as Spinuzzi (2012) explains, knowledge work is potentially problematic to investigate with a 3GAT approach, but “4GAT understands internetworked activities by examining the interorganizational collaborations to which they contribute” (p. 404). Because 4GAT responds to the same kinds of features that have led to the coworking movement that Spinuzzi investigates in his 2012 JBTC article, he adopts a 4GAT approach, seeing coworking as “an interorganizational, collaborative object” (p. 404).

One of the reasons that 4GAT is needed is to better understand what Edwards (2009) calls multiactivity interagency. As work becomes more complex, more internetworked, and distributed across more (and different) professional domains, the utility of 3GAT becomes problematic and will need to adapt. But as several AT researchers have argued over the years, AT is not a monolithic approach; instead, it is dynamic and adaptive.

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So Why Use AT/WAGR?

Different scholars will have different reasons, to be sure, but for my money, AT (and ANT, but that’s for another day) provide rich frameworks for exploring and understanding the true complexity of writing and rhetorical work in everyday practice. WAGR helps us, as researchers of writing and rhetoric, to explore, document, and understand many of the situational variables (Faigley & Witte, 1981) that impact and influence how people write and communicate, and how their written and rhetorical genres help mediate the things they do in the world.

Indeed, as Faigley & Witte argued so many years ago, “Perhaps what we need now are more observational studies of writers revising [and simply working] in nonexperimental situations rather than more studies of student writers in contrived situations” (1981, p. 412). Amen.

The Wikipedia article on AT actually answers the “so what” question well:

“AT is particularly useful as a lens [or framework] in qualitative research methodologies (e.g., ethnography, case study). AT provides a method of understanding and analyzing a phenomenon, finding patterns and making inferences across interactions, describing phenomena and presenting phenomena through a built-in language and rhetoric. A particular activity is a goal-directed or purposeful interaction of a subject with an object through the use of tools. These tools are exteriorized forms of mental processes manifested in constructs, whether physical or psychological.”

Clay Spinuzzi has started a Mendeley Group on Activity Theory, and there are hundreds of articles listed there!

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Designing an AT/WAGR Study

It must be said that AT can be productively applied to many forms of inquiry. Most forms of AT scholarship, however, fall into one of two strains: empirical or theoretical. Most of the theoretical work has been developed by folks who have done lots of empirical work, or who are/have been affiliated with the Vygotskian school. Empirical work, then, is a key to AT/WAGR approaches.

Empirical studies of activity must be well-designed in terms of protocol and research questions, and well-triangulated: collecting multiple forms of data across multiple instances of collection with (preferably) multiple participants is key to understanding complex mediation. It’s nigh impossible to understand activity if you expect only one form of data to carry the weight of your inquiry…

Systematic qualitative case studies and ethnographies are common approaches. The more that a given activity system may be clearly defined, the easier it will be to apply 3GAT. The more that a given activity system is distributed, internetworked, and interorganizational, the more you will need a 4GAT approach.

Above all, you will want to understand the collective object (or at least the assumed or stated collective object) of an activity system as soon as possible; without a shared and understood object, understanding activity becomes very, very difficult (if not impossible).

What kinds of methods work best in WAGR?

• Observation, observation, observation
  • I can’t stress enough how important extended, in situ observation is to understanding activity
• Interviews, questionnaires, and/or surveys
• Visual research methods where ethical, feasible, and appropriate
• Participant-produced artifacts
• Audio recordings (including ambient and non-obvious audio)

Participants are object-oriented, but researchers should be project-oriented. In other words, in what seem to be clear 3GAT scenarios, try to follow participants through a clearly defined project, if possible. Some examples from my own work:

• I and R — visual ethnography, clear participant-defined work object, 8.5 months, solo
• VBC — visual ethnography, clear participant-defined work object, 16 weeks, 4 field researchers
• TM — systematic qualitative case study, assumed collective object, two weeks, solo
• TM IN — visual ethnography, clear participant-defined work object, 10 months, 2 field researchers
• Eucharist — multi-sited visual ethnography, assumed individual objects, 2+ years and counting, solo

Memo, read, code, compare, document, trace, theme. Standard qualitative research practices framed by WAGR will bear fruit and answer many potentially interesting research questions about how people use writing and rhetoric in their individual and collective activities…

The Future 5000

This post has one aim: to explore what I want to do with this blog, going forward.

This is a bit of metablogging, then—blogging about blogging. There’s a good chance none of this will interest you much; I won’t be offended if you click away…

I’ve used my blog to host a variety of different kinds of posts over the years, and I’ve never really limited the direction and scope, other than to say that this is my “research blog,” a way of differentiating what I post here from what I post (or might post) in other, especially shorter-form venues.

Two things have led to this particular post, however: 1. I haven’t blogged much this year, and 2. I haven’t been inspired to blog much this year.

Truth be told, I’ve been less inspired to publicly post much of anything, especially in the last few months. This may come as a shock to some who know me well, considering I have some 14,000 tweets, a few thousand Flickr photos (many of which are private, though), and I’m a fairly regular Instagram user/poster. But in reality, I tweet far less than I used to, I’ve never been on Facebook, I’ve essentially abandoned Pinterest, I never really got into Google+, Meme is dead, and Flickr is mostly for my family and very close friends.

For a while, I thought that I’d found a sweet spot with a shorter form blog, Notemaking, where I’d post more frequently about interesting current issues as a way of publicly thinking through items of potential research/practice interest. But really, that fell flat for two reasons: 1. I didn’t always feel like posting, especially when most of my time is far better spent working on (and writing for) my research program and working on teaching-related concerns; and 2. who the hell cares what I think about such things anyway? There are many awesome folks out there who maintain frequently updated short-form blogs; I’d rather read them than me, too.

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One of the things I really admire about Clay Spinuzzi’s blog is the way that he shares his thoughts on scholarly research through his frequent reviews. I write annotations now (over 100 in the last year), and I’ve played around with formatting and posting some of them to the blog. But after writing many, many more annotations in DEVONthink than I actually posted to my blog, I realized that I likely read and annotate very differently than Clay, and so posting my annotations to my blog—even in revised form—just doesn’t accomplish the same thing that his excellent reviews do.

Moreover, my annotations are my annotations, and while I’ve long been a proponent of public sharing, my research notes don’t translate well to broader dissemination. I like keeping them in DEVONthink and using them the way that I do.

But this is all preamble to the aim I described above: what should this blog be, and how do I want to use it?

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I’ve figured a lot of things out in the last couple of years. It took me a while to develop practices and routines that work for me as a professional academic. By no means do I have everything figured out, but I think I’ve got things pretty well sorted in terms of having a clearly articulated research program and well-defined practices for accomplishing things to push that program forward.

I certainly didn’t know what I was doing when I finished my PhD and took my first academic appointment in 2009. I didn’t really know what I was doing, actually, until sometime in 2011. Yes, I was still productive, and yes I did some things really well, but I didn’t have things really nailed down. There was a disconnect in many of the moving parts of my everyday practice.

Today, there are still a lot of moving parts in my everyday practice, but now I know how they are related; now I know what the effects are when I pull one string—how that act impacts the other strings to which it is connected. I come to work, and I know what the hell it is I’m doing. I don’t worry about what I should be doing, or what might happen in two months. I already know, because I’ve developed a research program rather than a research agenda; the program has tightly articulated, interrelated components rather than a series of projects that may or may not be related.

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This is really important context for describing what I do with this blog, believe it or not.

You see, I’m not posting here much because this particular string is not really attached to the web of other things I’m working on. The future of the blog, therefore, will be literally and figuratively tied to the other strings in my professional web. And it will carry posts that are differentiated in important (and hopefully worthwhile) ways from the many excellent blogs run by my disciplinary colleagues.

I still reserve the right to post whatever I want here—I don’t want to limit this outlet and say “it’s only about x, y, and z.” However, I do envision a more coherent focus, for at least the medium term (let’s say 18–24 months—probably a bit longer, but we’ll go with that for now).

I’m not changing the title, I’m not developing some new, kitschy theme, and I’m not looking to carve out some niche. Hell, I don’t even care anymore about pageviews and such.

Instead, I’m going to post things here that relate more meaningfully to my research program—to current projects, to completed studies, to forthcoming work, to failed projects, to dreamed about projects, to the “b-sides” of published work.

Throughout my academic career, I’ve focused primarily on the everyday work, learning, and play of professionals and students. And beginning with my earliest published work, I’ve been a proponent of empirical visual research methods—even when I was too naive to know that this was a credible and well-established research methodology in the social sciences.

Many folks in my field work with, in, and through visual rhetorics. Comparatively few use empirical visual research methods (VRM) as a key form of inquiry. I do, and I’m working on new ways of tracing and studying writing and rhetorical work by using such strategies—visual ethnography in particular.

Going forward, my posts here will likely have more to do with VRM than other kinds of posts. That also means more visual content.

If you read this, thanks for thinking along with me!