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.

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.  ↩

Digital Publics and Participatory Education

Last week, an article that I worked on earlier this year saw publication with the open access journal Digital Culture and Education.

Back in January or thereabouts, Christa Teston and I were talking about different collaboration opportunities, and I suggested that we prepare a manuscript for a special issue of the journal. We put together a plan to explore the complex of blogging, backchannel communication, and Google Reader as a way to open up classrooms to broader public participation, drawing primarily from experiences in my Fall 2009 senior seminar at BSU.

Following Schön (1983), we took a reflective practice approach, inviting three participants as coauthors. Garrett Cox was an undergraduate in the model course, and he contributed a participatory perspective from inside the curriculum. Bolutife Olorunda was a student participant from the edges of the curriculum, and his perspective details his experience as a self-directed participant motivated by interests in the core subject matter. Finally, Noah Dunker, an Information Security professional from Kansas City, MO, contributed a participatory perspective from well outside the curriculum, as a public participant in the course, unaffiliated with BSU.

While the manuscript wasn't a good fit for the special issue, it was reviewed positively, and invited for inclusion in the next issue. In the article, we make an argument about operationalizing collaborative knowledge work within a specific curriculum and pedagogical approach—enacting a form of participatory education in digital publics.

In the process, we also detail a fairly novel approach to guided discovery (Clark & Mayer, 2003) and student blogging as a literate practice. Finally, we suggest practical methods of incorporating feeds—via Google Reader's "Bundle" feature—as a primary source within a given curriculum.

The abstract for the article is below, and the full piece can be found at Digital Culture and Education.

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This article—a collaborative exploration between instructors, students, and members of the broader, digital classroom community—explores how the strategic incorporation of sociotechnical networks and digital technologies facilitates literate practices that extend the classroom in productive ways. The article builds toward coauthors’ reflective practices (Schön, 1983), or “participatory perspectives”, had during an undergraduate English Studies course at a mid-sized, public, American university. Specifically, participants argue that these literate practices afforded not just information sharing, but the opening up of a traditional classroom to include broader digital publics and collaborative knowledge work (Spinuzzi, 2006). Toward this end, we ground literate practice in scholarship that attends to public writing in online spaces, and theoretically frame our argument using Jenkins et al.’s (2006) principles of participatory education. We then detail the specific curricular approach deliberately designed to create digitally connected publics and end with generalizable significance of coauthors’ participatory perspectives.

:: 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.

On the Atomization of Rhetoric

Faust sits translating the Bible. He is working on the beginning of the Gospel according to St. John. The troublesome word is logos, which he renders as "word," then “mind,” then “power,” then “act.” ~Scott (1967)

This post explores theoretical propositions that have potentially broad implications for researchers and practitioners in the field of Rhetoric and Writing Studies and related disciplinary and professional domains.

These propositions and speculation about their implications have developed as a result of ongoing collaboration between myself and Christa Teston as we've sought to examine how our field, writ large, understands, theorizes, enacts, and inculcates various modes of representation and rhetorical action (visual :: aural :: haptic :: spatial :: embodied :: linguistic) in both our disciplinary episteme, and when creating meaning about our discipline for broader (extra-disciplinary) audiences.

Specifically, this post is inspired by recent professional deliberations and experiences that seem to suggest that our field fails to centrally position and explicitly theorize the epistemic and ontological nature of rhetoric when investigating and articulating how various modes of representation afford knowledge-making; implications abound, then, for how the complex act of constructing knowledge with rhetoric-as-epistemic at the helm informs our discipline's theories and practices.

Following Scott's (1967) assertion that “the terms 'certainty' and 'knowledge' confront one with what has become known as epistemology,” we are interested here in what and how rhetoric means, how our disciplinary gazes should be governed, and what our philosophical and pragmatic understandings of rhetoric say about our discipline beyond academe.

Consequently, this post aims to foster theoretical discussion about the implications associated with what we're calling the atomization of rhetoric. We present here a credo of sorts, a series of propositions concerned with our desire to better understand rhetoric as object/focus/field of study, and rhetoric's role in meaningful (everyday) human activity.

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Scott (1967) posits that “rhetoric may be viewed not as a matter of giving effectiveness to truth but of creating truth.”

We argue, therefore, that rhetoric is no mere tool, the dressing or art of language. It cannot simply be just the art of persuasion.

According to Enos and Lauer (1992), "Aristotle holds not that rhetoric creates all reality but rather that it creates the meaning of that reality." And yet, Scott argues that “if truth is somehow both prior and substantial, then problems need not be worked out but only classified and disposed of.” Consequently, Scott rejects “prior and enabling truth as the epistemological basis” for rhetoric; so do we.

We argue, therefore, that rhetoric is worldview; it is underlying philosophy and tacit understanding.

We argue that rhetoric is no more teleologic than time. Rhetoric makes as it goes, and defines its ends along the way. It is not circumscribed; it circumscribes. Rhetoric deploys as it is deployed.

We argue that rhetoric ought not be treated as a conduit, a dumb pipe connecting human knowledge to an a priori Reality and Truth. Rhetoric does not discover; it invents and produces.

These propositions neither invalidate nor ignore the role of human agency in the making of meaning. In fact, we argue that rhetoric is embodied and materially instantiated, and because of this, rhetoric is grounded in human agency.

Pierre Thevenaz claims that “man acts and speaks before he knows. Or, better, it is by acting and in action that he is enabled to know” (quoted in Scott 1967).

So, because rhetoric is being and knowing, because knowing and being are rhetoric (and not merely rhetoric-al), we argue that rhetoric structures, facilitates, and makes possible human agency. Human agency and rhetoric cannot be excised from one another. They are mutually constitutive.

Further, Brummett (1979) asserts that rhetoric "is epistemic in an ontological sense," and "creates all of what there is to know." He asserts that "discourse does not merely discover truth or make it effective," but that discourse "creates realities rather than truths about realities."

We argue, therefore, that rhetoric is epistemic. It is ontological.

Rhetoric is "a dimension of all activity rather than [...] an activity in its own right" (Brummett 1979).

These are not beliefs. This is not theory hope.

These are propositions that ground our theorizing about and approaches toward understanding how meaning gets made in the overlap between modes of representation, human interaction, and everyday experiences--experiences bound by space and time. But we sense that these propositions are not shared within our field. There are profound disciplinary and pragmatic implications for accepting, rejecting, or ignoring these propositions.

Our observation is that rhetoric as an academic discipline and professional practice suffers from a kind of insidious atomization—a context-stripping particularity that reduces rhetorical practice to departments, domains, specialties, sub-disciplines, colloquialisms. And yet we simultaneously recognize that such atomization has been historically productive; atomization has fostered new approaches and understandings that, for so long, have been othered or invisible. Atomization in part yields feminisms, body studies, LGBT studies, Critical Race Studies. Atomization gives us rhetorical criticism, writing studies, technical communication. Atomization is crucial to the viability of studying and doing rhetoric.

And yet atomization separates, bifurcates, siloizes. Atomization necessitates a particularized and specious division of multivalent, polymorphous, polycontexts.

Atomization comfortably compartmentalizes—culturally, philosophically, theoretically—meaning and being. It ameliorates our need to explore through the practice of exploding contexts. It assuages our uncertainty, allows us to reduce writing to this, visual to that, performance to here, orality there. Consequently, atomization draws lines, then builds fences, then erects walls, borders, and territories.

Image becomes a province, alphabetic text an imperial kingdom, orality a third-world domain, art a margin, film a continent to be conquered, digital media a competing power.

In the atomization of rhetoric, the visual in particular is seen from across the border, with suspicion—a potential threat. When atomized, the visual is simultaneously embraced and othered. It is not granted the capacity for meaning without the contextualization of alphabetic text, a decree of its (un)worthiness.

Our argument proceeds from these principles. Image and alphabetic text are not atomized domains, but mutually constitutive actors in meaning making. Yet the very atomization of rhetoric, which generously gives and insidiously takes away, will not let image stand alone, even though the image is always already rhetoric.

Similar bifurcations materialize themselves in troubling ways. News anchors claim to "get to the bottom of" or beyond a certain politician's "rhetoric." Oral presentation skills aren't taught in Business and Professional writing courses because it's a course on "writing," not "communication."

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Rhetoric as a discipline suffers from failing to join the productive tensions of atomization with a kind of theoretical baseline or shared understanding among contingencies that all discourse is at once particular and holistic, situated and situating, epistemic ontologically.

Taking to be true,

(i) Scott's (1967) argument that, if there can be "truth in human affairs," it is "the result of a process of interaction at a given moment," and

(ii) Toulmin's (1958) assertion that "claim(s) to knowledge" can't always be "backed by an analytic argument," else "the future, the past, other minds, ethics, even material objects: about all of these we ought, strictly speaking, to admit that we know nothing,”

we see meaning making as always already mediated in and through rhetoric.

Instead of considering the rhetoric of images or the rhetoric of alphabetic text, therefore, we propose an approach to rhetoric, proper. We eschew the "of"--an indication that rhetoric is part rather than whole. We no longer need the "of" if we are to learn from our atomization and challenge ourselves toward holistic theorizing. We argue for is rather than of.

The visual is rhetoric. There should be no rhetoric of the visual.
Writing is rhetoric. There should be no rhetoric of writing.
Bodies are rhetoric. There should be no rhetoric of bodies.

The bricolage of visual~writing~bodies is not merely rhetoric-al, since being rhetoric-al pigeonholes rhetoric as a mere attribute, appendage, or add-on, rather than understanding rhetoric as the constitutive property of that polycontextual whole.

This is not to say that in order to know we cannot or should not first fracture and make strange previously held assumptions or understandings about our objects of study (a la Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1997). What we propose is that the lines upon which those fractures take place ought not be solely dependent on mode, medium, or material form. We argue, instead, that by exploring knowledge-making holistically and in situ, rhetoric is precisely what facilitates the ontological reevaluation, reassembling, and restructuring of previously held assumptions and understandings.

We accept that our propositions are potentially troubling or problematic for a discipline that has, for years, been wedded to close textual analyses and hermeneutic approaches to understanding phenomena. We acknowledge that the arguments above are deserving of refinement; we ask you to consider this work as but a “process of interaction in a given moment.” Above all, we invite you to join us in “cooperative critical inquiry” (Scott 1967) so that we might reevaluate, reassemble, and restructure previously held assumptions and understandings about the field of Rhetoric and Writing Studies.

Our aim is to move from the above described philosophical revival of rhetoric-as-epistemic toward constructs that support more grounded investigations of rhetoric and writing practices as they occur in the world. We want to explode contexts, to make strange, and to complicate without sacrificing the holistic nature of rhetoric. Grounded, activity- and practice-based methodologies and methods, therefore, are where we turn from here. We welcome and look forward to the ongoing conversation that will develop from this and any subsequent posts.

Brian McNely
Ball State University

Christa Teston
Rowan University