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.

Contextual Ambivalence: Images + Inscriptions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contexts, Image Making, and Understanding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He also knew he was going to die.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even the term reading is insufficient, a misnomer.

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

But so woefully incomplete.

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

Visual Research Methods: A Photo Essay

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

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

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

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

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

From ZPD to WAGR: An Activity Theory Primer

Context

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

What follows is a written version of my talk.

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

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AT as a theoretical frame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Generational History of AT (aka “CHAT”)

Proto-First Generation

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

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

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

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

Second Generation

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

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

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

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

Third Generation (3GAT)

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

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

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

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

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

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Genre as Social Action—An Interlude

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

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

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

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

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

Proto-WAGR and WAGR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fourth Generation AT (4GAT)

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

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

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So Why Use AT/WAGR?

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

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

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

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

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

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Designing an AT/WAGR Study

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

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

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

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

What kinds of methods work best in WAGR?

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

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

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

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

The Future 5000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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