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.

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!

TCQ Special Issue: Contemporary Research Methodologies

Are you developing novel research methods or methodologies in technical and professional communication? Are you working on adaptations, extensions, or reevaluations of existing technical communication methodologies? Are you interested in shaping new research directions in the field?

We want to hear from you!

Along with Clay Spinuzzi and Christa Teston, I’m editing a special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly on contemporary research methodologies in the field. The full CFP is included below—please download it and consider putting together a proposal!

We’re also happy to talk with you about proposal ideas and to field queries; please feel free to email me at brian.mcnely@gmail.com!

Annotations | Hutchins and Klausen, 1996

[ NB: “Annotations” are occasional posts that explore selections from my research reading—articles or books—in rhetoric, technical and professional communication, and related fields. ]

Hutchins, E., & Klausen, T. (1996). Distributed cognition in an airline cockpit. In Y. Engeström and D. Middleton (Eds.), Cognition and communication at work (15–34). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This piece is interesting from a number of perspectives, but I want to focus here on the methods section, which is both fascinating and disappointing to me. So, this isn’t a full annotation of the piece, though I will provide a bit of context up front.

The chapter begins with a transcript from a flight simulation involving a commercial airline Captain, First Officer, Second Officer, and two different ground crews (air traffic control). This transcript, of course, makes little sense unless you are familiar with the vagaries of commercial airline flights; indeed, this is part of the point.

The authors foreground a systemic approach for analyzing this scenario early in the chapter. Analysis of a system, rather than an actor or even (only) the interactions between actors, calls for a different unit of analysis, they contend, one that must foster the description and exploration of “the cognitive properties of the cockpit system that is composed of the pilots and their informational environment” (p. 17).

The unit of analysis, then, is a system of distributed cognition (p. 17). The chapter, Hutchins and Klausen explain, is a descriptive implementation of a theory of distributed cognition—they’ll go through the episode of flight simulation chronologically and describe the actions and operations of actors as occurring within a system of distributed cognition.

“We will attempt to show,” they argue, "that certain observed behaviors are instances of certain theoretical concepts. It is only by mapping from the data to a theory that we can generalize beyond the specifics of these observations” (p. 17). This leads them into the cognitive problems of actually doing what they say they’ll do, a meaningful digression, therefore, into their methods section.

In their study, “the theoretical interpretation of some events may depend on the meanings that the participants themselves attach to those events” (p. 17). There are no simple operational definitions of terms that will easily and seamlessly allow readers to interpret, with the authors, the meanings at the research site. So, the authors argue, “we must rely on an ethnography of the setting to provide the interpretive bridge from the structure of the recordings of activity to the terms of the theory of distributed cognition” (p. 17). This moves them into a discussion of their data collection, and the specific affordances of those forms of data. Some of this is very Inside Baseball (which is worth attending to), but it’s also somewhat cynical, as we’ll see below.

They note that “One way to protect oneself from the possibility of unexamined assumptions” in writing up ethnographic research is to try to build some kind of “objectivity” through which such assumptions are banished (p. 18). They point out that these kinds of approaches “cling to a ‘coding scheme,’ a set of ‘objective criteria’ for the existence of instances of various classes of events” (p. 18). Here’s where the cynicism creeps in, for me. Beyond the scare quotes, this seems a very cynical view of qualitative coding; they note that coding schemes are a function of the skill and situated interpretations of particular researchers. Well, yes. Who is arguing otherwise?

I don’t know any qualitative researcher who would claim objectivity because of a coding scheme. I don’t recall reading any key sources in qualitative methodology from around the time of this chapter (cf. Miles & Huberman, 1994; Strauss, 1987; Strauss & Corbin, 1990; etc.) that claims as much (I could certainly be wrong, of course). Instead, coding schemes provide, among many other things, analytic systematicity and transparency.

But the authors argue for another approach: making sure that their assumptions do not remain unexamined (p. 18). They “ground the translation from video and audio record to transcription in an explicit set of propositions that are independently verifiable in the ethnography of the setting” (p. 18). But shouldn’t a grounded coding schema be expected to do the same? This is where they’ve lost me to a certain extent. They seek to be “completely explicit about the grounds for the composition of every action” (p. 19). “The development of ethnographic grounding,” they argue, “leads us to many sources of cultural knowledge,” including documentation, layout and arrangement of cockpit instrumentation, heuristics, interviews, observations, etc. (p. 19).

I’m with them here, but I’m not sure how this differs from other forms of qualitative analysis except for the fact that they intend to be more narrative about an ethnomethodological dataset (looking at very small episodes of high granularity, using a narrative to richly describe each action and operation rather than a coding scheme to represent broader chains of actions).

Make no mistake: this is a worthwhile read, but I was really puzzled by their methods section. Have you read this piece? What do you make of the methods section?

Annotations | Nardi, 1996: Studying Context

[ NB: “Annotations” are occasional posts that explore selections from my research reading—articles or books—in rhetoric, technical and professional communication, and related fields. ]

Nardi, B. (1996). Studying context: A comparison of activity theory, situated action models, and distributed cognition. In B. Nardi (Ed.), Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction (69–102). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

In my last post, I considered how and why human beings become attached to particular artifacts and technologies. Trauman offered a compelling response in the comments area, and I thought I’d respond to at least part of his query here: how to get started with activity theory…

This semester, I’m teaching a special topics graduate seminar exploring activity theory and writing technologies. I’ve posted the syllabus for the course on Scribd, but the actual reading list is hardly innovative—it’s all the usual stuff to get one primed on the basics of AT and its application in rhetoric and writing studies. For deeper reading, have a look at Clay Spinuzzi’s list of activity theory sources on Mendeley.

But I thought I’d address some of the basics of activity theory by considering one of its primary applications: studying particularized contexts and situatedness by deploying a methodological framework (activity theory) that moves a given researcher beyond an overdetermined particularity. This is actually one of Nardi’s (1996) goals in her excellent chapter comparing activity theory to situated action models and distributed cognition.

I thought I’d kill two birds here by exploring some AT basics through an annotation of Nardi’s chapter.

This chapter of Context and Consciousness is, like the one before and the one that follows, essential reading for the budding activity theorist. Nardi explores the notion of context in a given research site by considering perspectives from three similar methodological/theoretical approaches: activity theory, situated action models, and distributed cognition. In this chapter, she asks:

• What exactly is context?
• What is the correct unit of analysis if the individual is no longer the primary locus?
• What are the relations between artifacts, individuals, and social groups?

Nardi begins by making the argument (drawing on several other studies) that it is simply not possible to understand how people learn or work when the unit of analysis is “the unaided individual with no access to other people or to artifacts” (p. 69). In other words, artificial lab settings are no longer sufficient for truly approximating the complexity of human beings acting with technology. She also asks, crucially, how we might study complex, situated contexts while still producing research findings that are generalizable (p. 70).

Essentially, Nardi’s goal is to explore the three approaches noted above to see how each deals with the problem of research contexts, considering the benefits and drawbacks of each for studying HCI in particular.[1]

A situated action model, Nardi argues, “deemphasizes study of more durable, stable phenomena that persist across situations” (p. 72). Situated action models, therefore, are highly particularistic: “These analyses offer intricately detailed observations of the temporal sequencing of a particular train of events rather than being descriptive of enduring patterns of behavior across situations” (p. 72). She adds that situated action models suggests that the structuring of activity emanates from the immediacy of a given situation. This is extremely problematic, of course, because it essentially elides cultural-historical factors that surely impinge upon how a human being uses a particular artifact, for example.

Nardi moves next to a discussion of activity theory, where activity systems are the unit of analysis, comprised of “subject, object, actions, and operations,” and where the object held by any one subject “motivates activity” and gives it shape and direction (p. 73).[2] “Actions are goal-directed processes that must be undertaken to fulfill the object,” she states. Actions are conscious, and different actions may be linked in the service of the same goal. Chains of actions work in support of the more complex activity.

Objects, Nardi notes, are not immutable structures, but they also don’t change on a moment-by-moment basis, thus offering some stability (p. 74). Actions also have operational aspects—routinized, unconscious operations (such as accelerating and breaking while driving a car). Nardi points out that “Activity theory holds that the constituents of activity are not fixed but can dynamically change as conditions change. All levels can move both up and down” (p. 75).

Nardi then describes mediation as a key notion in activity theory approaches. “Artifacts carry with them a particular culture and history,” she argues, drawing on Kuutti (1991), and they are “persistent structures that stretch across activities through time and space” (p. 75). Activity theory, she argues, has a very strong notion of context: “the activity itself is the context. What takes place in an activity system composed of object, actions, and operation, is the context” (p. 76, emphasis in original). Moreover, “People consciously and deliberately generate contexts (activities) in part through their own objects; hence context is not just ‘out there’” (p. 76).

Nardi takes us next through the particulars of the distributed cognition approach, where the representation of knowledge is both in the head and in the world, that is, in and between individuals and artifacts (p. 76–77). For distributed cognition, “we cannot understand how a system achieves its goal by understanding ‘the properties of individual agents alone’” (p. 77). Distributed cognition “moves the unit of analysis to the system and finds its center of gravity in the functioning of the system” (p. 77).

In this chapter, we can see that Nardi establishes a continuum, with the constrained particularity of situated action models at one end, and the systems level approach of distributed cognition at the other. Activity theory, with its recognition of both individual particularity and collective sociocultural histories within a given context, sits somewhere in the middle of this continuum.

Nardi moves next to exploring the key differences between these frameworks, starting with how each structures or models human activity. In an activity theory approach, “activity is shaped first and foremost by an object held by the subject” (p. 79). Activity theory, therefore, emphasizes motivation and intentionality of the human or collective. This differs markedly from the situated action approach, where plans, and presumably intentions, are “retrospective reconstructions” (p. 79) that somehow justify an individual’s response to a given situation.

Nardi’s chapter is as much about research methods as it is exploring the three frameworks noted above. For example, she notes that interviewing is a way of bringing operations to a research participant’s “conscious awareness,” and that doing so can empirically demonstrate “the dynamism of the levels of activity as posited by activity theory” (p. 82). In a situated action model, Nardi argues, “what constitutes a situation is defined by the researcher; there is no definitive concept such as object that marks a situation” (p. 82). This is extremely important, methodologically: in activity theory, “the structuring of activity is determined in part, and in important ways, by human intentionality before the unfolding in a particular situation” (p. 82). So, for a researcher to identify an activity system, she can simply start with the object defined by a given research participant rather than imposing her own view (p. 82–83).

Nardi’s next section explores the important role of persistent structures. She notes that understanding the role played by persistent structures—“artifacts, institutions, and cultural values” (p. 83)—in the structuring and shaping of activity is crucial. Drawing on Leont’ev (1974), she illustrates how activity theory is “concerned with the historical development of activity and the mediating role of artifacts” (p. 83). Nardi then explores the ways in which each approach considers the mediating role of artifacts, suggesting that distributed cognition “has taken most seriously the study of persistent structures” (p. 85). In activity theory approaches, things like artifacts or the work practices in a given community are important “precisely because they span particular situations” (p. 86). In other words, the activity theorist looks for patterns that stretch across individual situations, since those patterns are indicative of larger contexts comprised of genres and norms (Engeström’s “rules”), collaborations and interactions (Engeström’s “division of labor”).

Despite the focus on artifacts, for activity theory, unlike actor network theory, “people and things are unambiguously asymmetrical” (p. 86). Nardi argues that, compared to distributed cognition’s tendency to overdetermine the cognitive properties of artifacts, “The activity theory notion of artifacts as mediators of cognition seems a more reasonable way to discuss relations between artifacts and people” (p. 87). “Activity theory says, in essence, that we are what we do,” she argues (p. 88).

One of the most important contributions of this chapter is Nardi’s argument that activity theory gives researchers a shared vocabulary and outlook on a given research site, and that this shared vocabulary and approach allows us to generalize qualitative research. She gives a compelling example of the three different walkers in a forest near the end of this chapter, and in so doing she provides an application of an activity theoretical lens—one that helps researchers see how situatedness constrains human beings, but doesn’t determine their agency.

Of activity theory, Nardi argues:

Aiming for a broader, deeper account of what people are up to as activity unfolds over time and reaching for a way to incorporate subjective accounts of why people do what they do and how prior knowledge shapes the experience of a given situation is the more satisfying path in the long run. (p. 94)

Activity theory, therefore, comes with the following methodological implications:

1. It requires “A research time frame long enough to understand users’ objects”
2. It requires “Attention to broad patterns of activity rather than narrow episodic fragments”
3. It suggests “The use of a varied set of data collection techniques, including interviews, observations, video, and historical materials” (without an over-reliance on any one method)
4. It suggests “A commitment to understanding things from users’ points of view” (p. 95)

Nardi concludes with the argument that “Activity theory seems the richest framework for studies of context in its comprehensiveness and engagement with difficult issues of consciousness, intentionality, and history” (p. 96). I would add, following Kaptelinin (1996) and Engeström (1999), the centrality of mediation (which is especially important for writing researchers), and following Tolman (1999), I would further stress the “societal nature of the human individual” (p. 71).

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1. I’m making the tacit assumption that we have much to apply from this approach to studying writing, especially as it largely occurs today, as technologically mediated human-computer interaction…  ↩

2. If you are new to activity theory, the nomenclature can be a bit disorienting at first. “Object,” for example, refers not to an artifact, but is more akin to objective. The object is the thing motivating activity…  ↩

Annotations | 100 Questions About Research Methods

[ NB: “Annotations” are occasional posts that explore selections from my research reading—articles or books—in rhetoric, technical and professional communication, and related fields. ]

Salkind, N.J. (2012). 100 questions (and answers) about research methods. Los Angeles: Sage.

In this slim, concise volume, Salkind poses and then answers questions about research methods that are organized into nine different categories. Salkind claims that the book is “a reminder, a resource and refresher of sorts” that’s geared toward graduate students preparing for exams or undergraduates who will have no primary course in research methods (p. xi). Written for students in a variety of disciplines, the questions and answers are necessarily broad so that they’ll appeal to beginning researchers across the spectrum.

In the first section, “Understanding the Research Process and Getting Started,” Salkind provides a general overview of the need for empirical research and the processes for inventing and then exploring testable, measurable research questions. Rather than falling into the common trap of dividing research methods between quantitative and qualitative, Salkind proposes two very “general categories of research models: nonexperimental and experimental” (p. 6). This distinction then allows him to group historical, descriptive, correlational, and qualitative methods under “nonexperimental” and quasi-experimental and experimental together. This is a simple, but useful distinction, especially for beginning researchers who may be primed for a quantitative/qualitative binary or opposition. Salkind also makes similarly useful, concise comparisons between basic and applied research (p. 10).

Salkind’s concise introduction is also useful; he states: “Qualitative research examines individuals, institutions, and phenomena within the context in which they occur” (p.11). More importantly, he adds that the qualitative researcher “is interested in gaining an in-depth understanding of behavior and the reasons for that behavior” (p. 11). One of the most useful aspects of Salkind’s first section is a very handy checklist with criteria for evaluating scholarship (p. 15–16); this is something I think I will adapt for both graduate and undergraduate instruction.

In Part 2, Salkind offers some salient advice for researching, organizing, and writing up a review of literature. This section will be review for most readers, but graduate students in the humanities, for example, might benefit from seeing this section’s decidedly social-scientific approach to generating a lit review. One of the key pieces of advice that always bears repeating is the need to annotate while reading—this writing process will help ease the final production of the lit review in several meaningful ways (see p. 26–27 and p. 31).

Part 3 explores questions of ethics for researchers, beginning with a brief overview of what is covered in a typical university IRB training program. Given its concise format and clear language, this section might be especially useful to anyone unfamiliar with the IRB process (such as researchers embarking on their first empirical study).

Part 4 explores questions and answers related to hypotheses and variables. For beginning researchers and for those versed in more qualitative methods, this section acts as a solid review. Salkind also does a good job of describing systematic research methods as important to professionals working in a variety of fields and domains, leading to a perspective which posits research methods as a set of tools and techniques for systematically answering questions and exploring real world problems.

This is a significant point, for professionals in both academe and industry may benefit from better understanding “the process of asking and answering a question systematically” (p. 48).[1] Such questions might trend academic (e.g., “will an increase in parent-to-student reading time at home lead to an improvement in reading comprehension scores for a standardized test?”) or professional (e.g., “will a redesign of the organization’s webpage lead to more customer engagement as measured by time on the site and movement toward a purchase?”). In both scenarios, understanding methods for systematically testing and answering such questions is paramount.

In his question about “fit” between research questions and methods, Salkind makes an understated yet powerful claim: “The research questions should always drive the method selected and not the other way around” (p. 60). Again, this is research methods 101, but I know that I have often ignored this important advice, choosing to design a research question around a qualitative study; to be fair, most of the questions I ask about writers and writing technologies explore situated action and activity, so I can feel somewhat justified, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about designing a quasi-experimental study because I think it will be more appropriate for answering a certain research question I’ve been pondering. In short, this is great advice, and it’s something we need to remind ourselves and our students frequently…

Part 5 covers questions and answers in one of the most consistently misunderstood areas of research methods for students in the humanities: sampling. Salkind does a fine job in this section of not only providing clear and concise answers to fundamental sampling questions, but providing easy to understand examples as well. Of all the sections in this book, this is the one I’d most like to copy or extract for beginning researchers. In Part 6, Salkind covers descriptive techniques, while the remaining sections continue the theme, exploring testing and measuring, experimental design, and inference and significance. This is another way of saying that the final sections of the book basically all deal in some way with inferential statistics.

Overall, this is a handy book for beginning researchers in need of a quick reference for understanding basic concepts in research methods. I can imagine someone trained in the humanities, for example, who is reading work that uses quasi-experimental methods: “what’s a two-tailed t-test, again?,” they might wonder. They could easily turn to Salkind’s book, get a one or two page discussion of the term, and then happily return to their reading. This book is no substitute for the many in-depth tomes on research methods available, but it’s a nice primer for someone new to scientific and social-scientific methods.

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1. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why I consistently read blogs like Measuring Usability, which describes research methods used in industry.  ↩

Annotations | A Reading of the Field with Dorothy Winsor

[ NB: “Annotations” are occasional posts that explore selections from my research reading—articles or books—in rhetoric, technical and professional communication, and related fields. ]

Read, S. (2011). The mundane, power, and symmetry: A reading of the field with Dorothy Winsor and the tradition of ethnographic research. Technical Communication Quarterly 20(4), 353–383.

This is a rather interesting article in terms of genre—Read draws on an interview she conducted with Dorothy Winsor in 2009, using that conversation to frame her exploration of ethnographic research in technical communication. In this sense, the article is part interview, part conceptual lit review, and part discussion of ethnography as methodology for studying writing within organizations.

When I saw this article, I immediately jumped in; I’m a big fan of Winsor’s work, and I know I’m not alone there. I think, too, that Read’s article offers much to our field, as it creatively weaves Winsor’s interview into a broader discussion of an important methodology for studying writing work.[1]

Read’s article moves through three topoi: the mundane, power, and symmetry. These themes emerged from Read’s interview with Winsor, and they constitute a frame through which Read considers the maturation and future of methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of technical communication. In fact, Read contends that “Winsor’s words, career, and scholarship serve as a productive interpretive lens through which to read the development of the field” (p. 354).

Read begins by recounting Winsor’s distinguished career, focusing in particular on the latter’s skillful incorporation of theory. Read suggests that Winsor’s timely theoretical appropriations complemented (rather than disrupted) the developing identity of the field. Read then details the three topoi I noted above and argues that the sections corresponding to each theme frames “a set of assumptions or choices that have become tacit knowledge in the field” (p. 356).

In her exploration of the mundane, Read describes the influence of Latour on Winsor’s work. Latour (specifically Latour and Woolgar, 1986) helped Winsor see how workplace writing may be “understood as implicated in the functioning of the workplace,” where everyday writing work might be seen “as constitutive of both the organizational contexts and its products” (p. 357). Crucial too is the understanding of the social in workplace writing, and the complex activities and practices that mediate the socially situated nature of writing work. In this section, Read skillfully makes a broader argument about how Winsor’s work helped drive the field toward/during the social turn, and how Winsor’s field-based approach helped “powerfully chang[e] the object of and the methodology of research on writing” (p. 359). In this section, Read—through Winsor—shows how the mundane and regularized are significant to the production of documentation, and how attending to the mundane necessitates a shift in methodology, away from static texts alone and towards “the social context[s] of textual production” (p. 361).

In her second major section, Read considers issues of power in Winsor’s work and in the field. Calling on Winsor’s long history of work in engineering communication, Read describes how “Winsor’s research adopts the view that engineering knowledge is the product of power relations in hierarchical for-profit organizations, and although power has the capacity to constrain and harm, it is also productive” (p. 364). This brings to mind Foucault, but also Faber (2002). Not surprisingly, Read explores three ethnographic accounts of power relations in nonacademic settings, beginning with Faber. His study is juxtaposed against Winsor’s Writing Power: Communication in an Engineering Center (2003), and Smart’s Writing the Economy: Activity, Genre and Technology in the World of Banking (2006).

“For both Winsor and Faber,” Read argues, “power relations operate through discourse, whether the unit of study is image, identity, text, or genre” (p. 366). Where they differ “is in the implications of the functioning of power,” and in how each is positioned within their respective research sites. “If Faber is the ethnographer as activist,” Read claims, then “Winsor’s stance is more accurately understood as that of the ethical disciplinary outsider” (p. 366). With this statement, Read explores the heart of this section: the ethical issues attendant in field research and the power relationships between researcher and participant.

Personally, I found the final section on symmetry to be the most compelling; judging by my marginal notes alone, this was clearly the section with which I was most engaged. Read argues that Winsor’s research “suggests a symmetry between the human and the material” (p. 371), and so begins a wide-ranging discussion of agency and writing work. Granting agency to materiality “opened, and is still opening, new ways to understand the increasingly complex and unstable relationships among authorship, technology, information, and social and organizational contexts,” Read argues (p. 372).

This discussion leads Read into an exploration of posthumanist frameworks, particularly ANT, distributed cognition, and genre field analysis (p. 373). Read does a good job in this section of placing Winsor’s work (and interview responses) in conversation with Latourian perspectives on agency. A key moment in the follow-on discussion of epistemic rhetoric is Read’s quoting of Winsor (1990, p. 59): “‘even this field [engineering], which seems so tied to physical reality, is necessarily accomplished through language’” (p. 374). The mechanical engineer that was Winsor’s primary participant in this study “found that writing, both his own writing and the writing of others, was an essential means by which he generated knowledge about an engine” (p. 374). This perspective is perhaps taken for granted in our field, but I think it can’t be stated enough, especially when it is yoked to field research.

Read briefly discusses distributed cognition before moving on to a conclusion which considers the role of ethnographic research in the field of technical communication. Because of the work of Winsor and others in bringing field-based methods and methodologies to technical and professional communication, it is now “difficult to imagine a methodology that might aim to isolate documents from their environment or the perspective or actions of a single worker from the context that shapes them and that they also constitute” (p. 377).

That’s well said.

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1. And Read may not remember this, but she and I were actually on a panel together at CCCC in 2007; I was impressed with her work then, and was encouraged by her perspective in this article.  ↩

Annotations | "What Does the Transactions Publish?"

[ NB: “Annotations” are occasional posts that explore selections from my research reading—articles or books—in rhetoric, technical and professional communication, and related fields. ]

Carliner, S., Coppola, N., Grady, H., & Hayhoe, G. (2011). What does the Transactions publish? What do readers want to read? IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 54(4), 341–359.

As I mentioned in my previous Annotations post, I’m a big fan of meta-analyses and systematic lit reviews. This recent piece by Carliner et al. isn’t exactly a meta-analysis, but it’s in the same ballpark,[1] and their analysis of what major journals in technical and professional communication have published in the last 5 years is really interesting to me (and, I hope, to you as well).

In addition to exploring the major genres and methods comprising the sample of articles they selected, Carliner et al. report findings from a survey of Transactions on Professional Communication (TPC) readers in order to determine what kinds of congruencies and gaps exist between what the TPC publishes and what TPC readers would like to read. One of the most interesting gaps they established was a desire among readers for more case studies, lit reviews, and tutorials; this is is especially surprising, since the TPC primarily publishes experimental and survey-based studies.

The impetus for the study[2] was a change in TPC editorship, and Carliner et al. “sought empirical evidence on which to base decisions about the future direction of the journal” (p. 341–42). In order to do so, the authors placed findings from the readership survey in conversation with their analysis of 5 years’ worth of peer-reviewed scholarship from: the TPC, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Technical Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly.

One handy subsection of this article is the lit review, which amounts to a review of previously published systematic lit reviews and meta-analyses. If I was wanting to know more about this methodology, the brief lit review provided here would get me off to a strong start.

As Carliner et al. note near the end of their lit review, the study actually contrasts “the content published by one peer-reviewed journal [the TPC] and other journals in the discipline with the preferences of readers” (p. 343, emphasis added). I think the italicized bit is key; if you’re an academic researcher in technical and professional communication, this article provides a very useful snapshot of the major journals in the field, the kinds of articles they publish, and the relationship among them.

Also useful, if you have an interest in conducting or evaluating systematic lit reviews, is the methodology section. I think the decision to adopt STC’s technical communication Body of Knowledge classification scheme is sound, and the authors provide a clear description of where and why they amended the scheme. They contend that the “full disclosure of the methodology and the dual coding[3] of each article ensures the trustworthiness of the data” (p. 345).

The authors provide findings for each journal, and then detail (in both table and narrative forms) findings across the journals—“the three topics that received the most coverage were: (1) Information Design and Development, (2) Deliverables, and (3) Academic Programs” (p. 347). “The three most common categories of research methods” across the articles in their sample were: “(1) Critical—Document Review, (2) Experience Report, and (3) Quantitative—Survey” (p. 347). The “critical document review” category, it should be noted, uses critical methods to explore texts without disclosing a sampling method or systematic methodology. My assumption is that most of the articles in this category were rhetorical analyses of one form or another.

The discussion of what readers of the TPC want was less interesting overall, but contains some very surprising tidbits. For one, though the sample was small (n=88, a 9.4% response rate), it was professionally diverse. Only 33%, for example, were academics, while 56% work in industry (p. 349). The survey used the classification scheme described above and asked respondents to rank the three topics of most interest and the three of least interest (p. 351). They did the same with research methods.[4]

As I mentioned briefly above, of most interest to readers were case studies and lit reviews, while survey-based studies and document analyses were of least interest. TPC rarely publishes case studies, and they publish a lot of survey-based work.

The authors note that the finding is somewhat problematic, as the term “case study” is broadly interpreted across journals. Personally, I follow MacNealy (1999) here, and see case studies as both systematic and rigorous, otherwise we’re not talking about a case study but a case history or experience report. I realize that I’m probably in the minority, though, and it’s a good idea if you’re conducting and writing about systematic qualitative case studies to clearly explain how your work is systematic, well-triangulated, and rigorous, so as to avoid the sometimes pejorative perception. But I digress…

Carliner et al. suggest that the survey findings indicate a “strong interest in research on communication in engineering workplaces,” and that “readers have a preference for applied research rather than the basic research that the Transactions has emphasized in recent years,” hence the preference for more in-depth (dare I say?) qualitative work (p. 352).

Overall, this was a fun read. The article provides a really nice snapshot of where we are in terms of current scholarship in technical and professional communication. And to me, it suggests a lot of opportunity for new kinds of work.

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1. Carliner et al. include a detailed reporting of their methods, which means that their study is replicable, or better yet, extensible (by covering a decade’s worth of articles from these and related journals, for example).  ↩

2. Really, Carliner et al. conducted two different studies and compared them in this article; for the sake of clarity, I’m referring to the article itself as a “study.”  ↩

3. Two of the authors coded each article by first conducting a series of “norming sessions” where they jointly coded two full issues of each publication under scrutiny. Because of this approach, the authors didn’t provide any measures of inter-coder reliability.  ↩

4. Interestingly, they did not include ethnography, usability testing, and experience reports in the survey…  ↩

Annotations | "Innovation in qualitative research methods"

[ NB: "Annotations" are occasional posts that explore selections from my research reading—articles or books—in rhetoric, technical and professional communication, and related fields. ]

Wiles, R., Crow, G., & Pain, H. (2011). Innovation in qualitative research methods: A narrative review. Qualitative Research 11(5), 587–604.

There's a particular genre of academic article that I highly value, and Wiles et al. have produced a good example in this form. This article, a "narrative review," is similar to what MacNealy (1999) describes as meta analysis, a literature review "that is conducted empirically and analyzed statistically" (p. 109). While MacNealy's discussion of meta analysis largely relies on statistical measures of a group of previous experimental studies, the methodologically rigorous manner in which a meta analysis is carried out can provide researchers in a variety of fields with a very useful approach to exploring an existing body of research literature.

In short, the meta analysis or systematic literature review provides a valuable service to scholars in a given area; such articles are difficult to do well, and are fairly infrequent (Carliner, et al., 2011, have recently published a similar piece in the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, and I'll review that soon...). At the most basic level, the feature that distinguishes a meta analysis or systematic literature review from a bibliographic essay, annotated bibliography, or conceptual literature review is the systematicity involved in sampling and analysis. In any of these genres, a purposeful sample must be identified from the broader range of available articles in a given subject area.

Exactly how a researcher moves from the total population to this purposeful sample is explicitly articulated in a meta analysis or systematic lit review; this is important because such transparency means that the analysis is replicable. A solid meta analysis clearly defines the total population and criteria for inclusion, describes how and why articles were selected or excluded, and proceeds along a clearly defined schema for analysis. Performing this kind of rigorous, systematic review of literature in a given area can be tremendously useful for other researchers; this is the primary reason I appreciate a strong meta analysis or systematic lit review.

Wiles et al. (2011) provide qualitative researchers with a narrative review—a systematic literature review—of 57 articles published between 2000 and 2009 that make claims of innovation in qualitative research methods. Overall, this article is useful for two important reasons: first, it acts as a good model of how a researcher might conduct a systematic literature review—an approach that differs from MacNealy's (1999) meta analysis in that it relies on a qualitative coding schema rather than statistical measures as the primary method of analysis; and second, the article explores how and why researchers make claims to methodological innovation and explore the implications for doing so.

"A claim to innovation," they argue, "should be rooted in genuine attempts to improve some aspect of the research process" (p. 588). But in order to explore a given researcher's claims to methodological innovation, the authors first set out to define what constitutes such innovations (p. 588). Ultimately, the authors seek evidence for "Travers' (2009) assertion that there is an increasing tendency for authors to claim innovation, that such claims are exaggerated and that they are detrimental to qualitative social science" (p. 589). Wiles et al. list five research questions that act as an analytic schema for exploring the articles included in their sample.

Wiles et al. describe how their project "used traditional methods of qualitative systematic review for summarizing data as well as qualitative analysis of text to explore the narratives of the claims being made" (p. 589). They next describe their sampling procedures, moving through a systematic search of the all the articles published in 22 relevant journals during the 2000s. Wiles et al. provide a table of the journals where relevant papers were identified (based on their sampling criteria); more importantly, they have published a full list of these papers as an annotated bibliography at the National Center for Research Methods, so that other researchers can see which papers were identified from the population but excluded from the sample.

The article also explores "sites for innovation," the actual research sites where innovation claims were carried out. This is important, as new media environments were related to innovation claims, often because a researcher was adapting or extending methods intended for traditional (that is, non-digital) sites. Of the 57 papers in the sample, "The majority of innovations claimed were at the level of methods, techniques, or tools with only a minority (10 papers) focusing on methodology" (p. 592). Wiles et al. then describe six different categories of innovation claimed in the sample: creative methods, narrative methods (including autoethnography), mixed methods, online methods, software tools, and focus group methodology (p. 592).

After establishing their procedures and sample and identifying major categories of innovation claims, Wiles et al. define three analytic categories to understand innovations that emerged from their analysis of the articles in the sample; they suggested that innovations could be categorized at the level of inception, adaptation, or adoption. They note that "None of the authors defined innovation when they used the term," and that overall, "much innovation in social science research methods involves adapting established methods rather than inventing completely new methods" (p. 593). Claims at the inception level, then, "are those in which the authors claim to be using a new method, approach, or tool" (p. 593). Claims at the level of adaptation "are when an author claims an established method has been adapted or changed in order to improve the method or to meet specific needs within the research context" (p. 593). Finally, claims at the level of adoption "are when an author claims they are taking an established method, relatively unchanged, and applying it into a new discipline or sphere of study" (p. 594). Given these categories, Wiles et al. note that "the majority of papers appeared to claim innovation at the inception level (32 papers)" (p. 594).

In their next section, Wiles et al. explore why authors make claims to innovation, identifying three key reasons: theoretical, moral/ethical, and practical. These reasons were distributed in fairly uniform ways across the sample. Finally, the authors look at the uptake of innovations—are other scholars citing and deploying the innovations claimed by the researchers in the sample? A little more than half of the papers had between 0–3 citations in Google Scholar; however, nine papers had 12 or more citations (p. 599). It is interesting to note that "there was a markedly higher citation rate of papers on online software innovations" (p. 599).

In their discussion section, Wiles et al. argue that "This study indicates the majority of innovation or novelty claims in these papers might more appropriately be called developments in that they involve adapting methods either to meet the needs of a particular project or to meet some moral, ethical or theoretical standpoint" (p. 600). Most of the papers, therefore, draw from and adapt existing methods, and "there is little evidence of paradigmatic shifts in qualitative research methods within these 'innovations'" (p. 600). Wiles et al. suggest that "many of the 'innovations' identified in these papers are little more than the day-to-day adaptation that researchers have always, rightly, undertaken in applying methods to a specific research context" (p. 600). Trends toward over-claiming innovation, therefore, can be "potentially detrimental to qualitative social science" (p. 601).

Too many claims of innovation may dilute the appreciation and understanding of the ways in which contemporary researchers adopt and adapt well-established methods and methodologies.

Informal Communication, Sustainability, and the Public Writing Work of Organizations

My most recent paper, "Informal Communication, Sustainability, and the Public Writing Work of Organizations," was recently published on IEEE Xplore. This piece offers findings from two different qualitative studies of social software use within professional organizations.

Because the paper will not be accessible to folks without an individual or institutional subscription to IEEE, I have provided a pre-publication version below. As always, I welcome your thoughts on this work!

Twitter and RSS

Over the last year or so, there's been a lot of talk about how Twitter killed its RSS feeds. What Twitter killed, in actuality, was the button that made subscribing to Twitter feeds (from users or search terms) simple.

As Dave Winer notes: "If you have a Twitter account you have a feed." Where people sometimes run into problems is simply finding those feeds—in particular, it can be difficult to find a user's ID number.

Luckily, Matt Matteson built a handy little tool that queries the Twitter API for the ID of any public user: idfromuser.com. Once you have the ID number for the feed you'd like, simply plug the ID into this URL:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/[useridnumber].rss

Then, just grab the URL and drop it in Reader (or your preferred RSS reader). That's it.

Update: well, since I started writing this post a couple days ago, I noticed a problem with the "idfromuser" site—it doesn't seem to be returning IDs for some reason. So, I made a quick screencast showing a workaround in case the "idfromuser" site isn't working for you:



Update #2: Tommy, a former colleague at the Center for Media Design here at Ball State, created an elegant little bookmarklet that does all of the above in a fraction of the time! It quickly retrieves the user ID for any individual Twitter user, then returns the RSS feed for that user. Grab the bookmarklet here! Below is a quick screencast of the bookmarklet in action:



Follow Tommy on Twitter. He's awesome!

Now, If you'd like the feed for a specific hashtag, simply use the following URL:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23[hashtag (without pound sign)]

Take the new URL and drop into Reader. Piece o' cake.

How is any of this useful?

Well, since I'm a qualitative researcher who studies writing, I often try to document—as much as possible—the places where my research participants write. That sometimes means tracking their tweets.

In previous and current studies, a particular hashtag has been important for exploring collective writing work. Since I'm not dealing with huge numbers of tweets—I'll typically collect anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand for a given study—RSS makes sense for a few different reasons...

First, I drop feeds into my database application, DEVONthink, for archiving. I then mirror those same feeds in Reader as a backup. If I happen to have a list of start codes or a pretty well-defined coding schema, I can use the tagging feature in either DEVONthink or Reader to code data as it comes in. This is tremendously useful during data analysis, but it also allows me to detect trends as I conduct a study, giving me opportunities to shape interview questions or fieldwork while it's happening.

Taking Stock: AY 2010–2011

In this post, I recap some of my research activity from the 2010–2011 academic year primarily as a way of sharing some of the things I've been working on, and how they lead into things that are coming up...

The last year was a busy one, no doubt. In addition to the usual stuff—teaching, grant writing, administrative and service work, etc.—I led and managed four different empirical studies that will be the focus of this post.

My ongoing study of Eucharistic Adoration practices continued into its second year of data collection (more about the methods and scope for this study can be found in screencasts of conference presentations here and here). After a bit of a lull in this project during the latter half of 2010, I've hit upon some especially intriguing ideas and participant practices in the last six months or so. I'm not quite prepared to publicly discuss even preliminary findings, but I will note that I'm seeing things that I intentionally wasn't looking for and didn't expect to find. Very exciting things that I think will make a real contribution to rhetorics of religion and spirituality.

This is a longitudinal, multi-sited ethnographic study, one that is currently planned to continue through April of 2012. I'll decide whether to continue data collection into 2013 sometime in early 2012. Right now, it looks like I'll do so, as my vision for the amount and types of data to collect is ambitious and still wanting. This is despite collecting a strong amount of data to this point. I'm currently considering strategic opportunities for dissemination—an edited collection or special issue, perhaps—where I could detail some early findings, but I have nothing planned as yet (which is probably for the best!).

I'm currently drafting the first of two planned manuscripts from a qualitative case study of transmedia storytelling that I conducted between December, 2010 and April, 2011. The impetus for this project was the work of my colleague and friend Brad King, a professor of journalism at Ball State and a leader in teaching digital and transmedia storytelling. In close collaboration with Nina Steiger of London's Soho Theatre, Brad led a transmedia summer school in 2010 that introduced playwrights to emergent digital story forms.

Preliminary findings indicate the importance of indexing practices for both teaching and carrying out transmedia stories. For my participants, indexing is most often realized as mundane, background, infrastructural writing work that supports narrative forms by organizing and linking multimodal (digital, print, material) assets. In this sense, indexing as a verb carries two concurrent meanings: the commonly assumed act of recording and organizing, and the less frequent usage (at least in writing studies) of tracing the value of assets (as in a stock index). I'm really excited about this project, and I'm indebted to the wonderful insights provided by Brad, Nina, and five of the ten playwrights who participated in both the summer school and my case study.

During the spring semester, 2011, I led an ethnographic study of the writing work supporting the collaboration of computer science undergraduates. My colleague and friend Paul Gestwicki was the instructor for the course that I studied, and a collaborator on the project (he wasn't involved during data collection but is now involved in analysis and dissemination, following our IRB protocol). Paul and two undergraduate honors fellows, Holden Hill and Phil Parli-Horne, developed a prototype application called Uatu that worked with Google Docs to visualize collaborative writing activity.

Our study, therefore, focused primarily on how students leveraged networked writing practices in conjunction with agile methods of software development. Our key research questions explored the role of networked writing in collaboration and learning, with participant use of Uatu providing us a way into secondary research questions concerning visualization and metacognition. We're still working through the data that we collected, but we already have a short piece out for review and plans for another manuscript later this summer. This was a really fun project, and my data collection was aided by a graduate assistant, Erika Johnson, who took a lot of field notes.

Finally, between July, 2010 and March, 2011 I conducted an ethnographic study of media researchers working on a large qualitative project of their own—from the earliest stages of planning and development all the way through execution of their study and public dissemination of their findings. I had collected rich, granular data in previous and concurrent studies, but nothing in my previous experience matches the amount of data that I collected for this project. This is due in large measure to the generous accommodation of my research participants, who provided me with tremendous access to their work.

Most of July and August will be spent working through the data, and I'm grateful to have a summer graduate assistant, Jenn Stewart, who has been tearing through the formidable pile of audio transcriptions while also offering insights by way of her own analytic memos.

I'm not entirely certain what kinds of outputs I plan to generate from this study, but I have a good idea of where I want to take this research. I've already discussed preliminary findings from one aspect of the study at ATTW 2011 (the screencast of the talk is here), and I'll publish more details from those findings at IPCC 2011 (discussed briefly here). I also have a short piece coming out soon that relies on one observed practice from this study. The majority of my work from this project is ahead, and I'm really looking forward to developing this work.

From these four 2010–2011 projects, only the first remains in a state of open data collection. This means I have a lot of writing to do!

I've already got firm plans for two more studies beginning in the fall, one of which extends my exploration of transmedia work by employing ethnographic methods. I'm also working on another smaller-scale case study (2–3 months of data collection) and have yet another ethnographic study tentatively planned for the spring of 2013.

I'm lucky to have some grant support for much of the work of analysis and dissemination during the summer and fall.

So there you go. Taking stock of my empirical research activity for the last academic year just reminds me of how much exciting work I have ahead of me!

ATTW and CCCC 2011

I recently gave two talks—one about some ongoing research in professional communication at ATTW 2011 (by far my favorite conference) and another about research methodologies in rhetoric and writing at CCCC 2011.

I've created screencasts of both talks, and I'm happy to discuss them further or to share my scripts.

:: Deliberative Ecologies :: Technologies, Practices, Actants

As a follow up to last week's collaboratively written post, On the Atomization of Rhetoric, Christa Teston and I have written a companion post: Deliberative Ecologies: Technologies, Practices, Actants, which is published on Christa's professional blog.

Please have a look at our post when you have a moment; it describes in more detail the messy complexity of our collaboration, and we take initial steps toward thinking through the notion of "deliberative ecologies" by attempting to surface our formative rhetorical knowledge work.

As always, we appreciate feedback--here, there, or on Blogora.