Tag: research

IST 700: Next steps and Research Muddles

On By BrettIn research, teachingLeave a comment

Project update: I’ve heard back from all of my core research participants and have been able to ask a few follow-up questions over the course of the past weeks. While some aspects of e-mail interviews have been tedious, as noted, I feel largely happy. I have a decent amount of stuff to work with and think through future problems.

I haven’t had much time to “do” next step stuff, as I’ve been trying to get a paper in this Monday, but that may be good, as I have time to think through the next steps.  I’m not sure whether I’ll do coding or not. I think I may go through and read the data a bit, trying to get a general sense of things, before making more specific moves. I also want to print out copies. Something about looking at a paper copy, instead of a screen, feels more appealing, like I may catch more or be less inclined to skim. On screen, I tend to have such an F-style reading pattern, which would not be good for research.

At this point, too, I’m trying to remain somewhat inductive in my approach, as noted in my last post for this class. I have my focus: intertextualtiy and the tensions created by openly intertextual work. I want to see what people are saying about this.

Shifting gears a bit, I’ve been thinking a lot this semester about presenting research in different ways. I think I often tend to “think” better in a PowerPoint setting sometimes. The way it breaks down units of thoughts into discrete slides helps me think more clearly about what those units are. In my head, they often get muddled. And though more long-term, free-writing thinking (much like this blog) helps me think through ideas, I have had trouble transitioning from that thinking into the presentation of thought in a paper. I can’t quite straighten out, simplify, and de-muddle.

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IST 700: The Research Life

On By BrettIn researchLeave a comment

After a productive spurt this past week, this weekend has been a bit of an up-hill trudge. But one continues. I have my favorite tea and a door open to a sunny spring day. This is good.

First, an update on the current fanfic project. I’ve started hearing back from people. Just two for now, though one asked for a more set deadline for responses. I probably should have given an earlier day, like this weekend, so that I could reply, but I feel odd about imposing, as these questions are an intrusion I’d imagine. Like a lingering survey, stuck in an inbox because you may do it and win the free gift card–one day.

Only, I don’t have any gift cards.

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IST 700: Interview Angst

On By BrettIn research, social media research2 Comments

When it comes to interviews, I come back to my journalism background. My first interview was as a freshman writing a profile piece about a tennis player for the sports section–a mysterious assignment, as I don’t really like sports.

I talked to the player and a few of his teammates for a few minutes, recording the conversations in a tape recorder and making meaningless notes in a spiral notebook.  I was terribly nervous, nervousness only matched by gawkiness, gawkiness only matched by social anxiety.

Overtime, I got good at interviews. I got better at putting people at ease with small talk, at taking short notes, quoting accurately. I built a whole ecology of interview practice–of ritual and method. Most of these interviews were face-to-face, short, with one or two meetings, often in a public place, and with largely innocuous conversations. For some stories, I did need to be careful, and often had long interviews that I transcribed. Some were outside and on the run. Others were behind closed doors. Some were relaxed. Others tense.

So when I started to prep for interviews this semester, I was confident. But, oh, experience is an unwieldy beast.

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IST 700: Sentiment, Affect, and Twitter

On By BrettIn digital humanities, research, social media researchLeave a comment

This week’s readings brought me back to my time teaching in Egypt, during the election of Morsi and the coup the following summer that put him out of power. Though my Internet access was limited both summers–largely relegated to communal computers and one dodgy PC in the prep room–I often tried to check in with Twitter.

My second summer, the day of the military takeover, a few tweets entered the stream about tanks in Cairo and the Presidential Palace. I saw journalists and activists positing frantically, while others were trying to get confirmation. No one knew what was happening. For a few days, protestors for Tamarod had taken to the streets against Morsi. Meetings both with and without Morsi went on amid these protests. For my part, the seminary where I was teaching was on lock down, preventing anyone from coming or going without approval. So beyond the nightly sounds of protestors gathering for nearby hot spots, Twitter was my only window–or “stream”–on the action.

I felt surreal during the take sightings. Seeing the news pour in on “real time.” None of the networks had anything, but across Twitter, people were mobilized and locked in.

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IST 700: Content Analysis and Learning Methods

On By BrettIn researchLeave a comment

I first ran into coding last semester in the methods class for our CCR major, a somewhat intuitive and exploratory method from Foss and Waters’ Destination Dissertation. 

In this method, basically, one works through the sample, looks for examples that connect to the research project’s focus and label them. Gradually, one refines the codes looking for higher-order conceptual connections.

From there, I got more into discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis. I also read through parts of Saldaña’s coding manual and tried practicing some of it in my own research–though I am still not very good.

I found myself exhausted by the time it takes and the slipperiness of interpretation involved with coding and content analysis, particularly the qualitative variety. As Herring (2004) notes, interpretation is both “art” and “craft,” but I often found this art and craft pervade the work more generally.

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CCR 711: Junius Wilson and “Being” on Trial

On By BrettIn disability studies, researchLeave a comment

“Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the men closed round his throat, just as the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it twice.” -Kafka, The Trial

“Unable to elicit responses that suggested the contrary, staff and doctors concluded from the available court documents that Wilson’s alleged criminal behavior was the result of deviant biology— of a bad nature. ” -Susan Burch and Hannah Joyner, Unspeakable

Kafka’s writing displays a tension between an individual trying to  make his way in the world who gets marked or entrapped simply for being alive. In the Metamorphosis, Gregor Samson wakes up into the nightmare of being transformed into a “gigantic vermin,” often depicted as a beetle. In The Trial, Josef K wakes up to find himself on trial for no reason–though the narrator insinuates that “someone must have been telling lies.” In The Castle, K finds summoned by The Castle to work in a town, when the same castle, through a near-comical network of bureaucratic dysfunction, executes him. From “The Country Doctor” to “The Penal Colony” and “Poseidon,” Kafka’s characters face alienation, guilt, and bureaucratic bulwarks against basic freedoms. Their being gets sentenced, suspect and shamed.

Moreover, his characters try to fight these existential sentences as best they can. But this is to no avail. As “The Messenger” makes clear:

“he is still forcing his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; never will he overcome them; and were he to succeed at this, nothing would be gained: he would have to fight his way down the steps; and were he to succeed at this, nothing would be gained: he would have to cross the courtyard. . . and if he were to burst out at last through the outermost gate—but it can never, never happen—before him still lies the royal capital, the middle of the world, piled high in its sediment.”

Reading Unspeakable, like many of the readings thus far in 711, Kafka has been close by. Here, Junius Wilson is “guilty,” much like Kafka’s characters, for his own mode of being. He is guilty by being black in the Jim Crow South. He is guilty by being deaf, muted and uncomprehensible to many–a break further exacerbated by the limitations his Raleigh signs later play compared with ASL. Later, he is made guilty of a crime he never commits, it seems, by Arthur Smith. And still later, under the sterilization law, his misdiagnosis of being “a danger to himself and others” leads to his castration.

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IST 700: Ecologies, Spheres, and Messy Research

On By BrettIn digital humanities, networks, research, social media researchLeave a comment

“We conceptualize a web sphere as not simply a collection of web sites, but as a site of dynamically defined digital resources spanning multiple web sites deemed relevant or related to a central event event, concept or theme, and often connected by hyperlinks.” -Steven M. Schneider and Kirsten A. Foot

“That the web arrived as infrastructure awaiting content, as opposed to content awaiting infrastructure, is often not appreciated.” -Richard Rogers

I was feeling a lot of synthesis with this week’s readings. Not just among texts but also with past reading–especially the readings on bounding–and readings from my other classes, like this piece by Jody Shipka on lower-case “a” archiving. These notions of archive and “websphere” also connect to my larger interests in networks, authorship, ambience, and intertextuality.

Rogers’ distinction between “infrastructure” and “content” captures one of the elements of Internet research that fascinates me: the role in the the ever-changing infrastructures in this ever-changing content. For example, Rogers as well as Schneider and Foot point out the role that linking has or advertisements in composing a website, and archiving a page as pure content–basic texts, images, sounds, etc.–does not capture this infrastructure.

Early on in my interest in composition and rhetorical studies, the “ecological” thinking of Marylin Cooper, Sidney Dobrin, Thomas Rickert, Nathaniel Rivers, Jody Shipka, Jenny Rice, etc., proved particularly illuminating. Especially Rice’s piece on rhetorical ecologies. The way texts circulate, get re-purposed, get buried or dug up, acted on by different authors in different genres with different exingencies and audiences–all of this ecological richness spoke to my outlook on the complex ontologies of textuality, digital or otherwise.

More concretely, I think that fanfiction has a dynamic websphere surrounding a given fandom, ranging from site-archived pieces, fanwiki pages, author pages and social media outlets, the texts themselves, the comment section. Both context (text, artwork, and Podcasts) and infrastructure (links, searches, folksonomies) inform practice and community, which is likely why many studies take an ethnographic approach. One can study texts and artifacts (through content, rhetorical, or discourse analysis), but these are entwined with fan practice. The artifacts have hand prints and metadata, and the users with these hands and metadata are part of this ecology, along with the nonhuman structures.

These fascinating linkages and the social practices they bolster and bound, like the 9/11 Memorializing, challenge the potential boundary between users, content, artifacts, offline, online, time, space, etc. I think this is why a clear question–and a well-steered method–are worth thinking over as much as the potential results. Phrased another way, the hows, the whats, the whos, and the whys of research need to be in close communion.

This complexity, as Jason might say, is messy.

IST 700: Using Ethnography to think through my own project

On By BrettIn research, social media researchLeave a comment

The main thing I took away from these ethnography readings in light of my own project(s) centered around fanfiction is my positionality as a researcher and the role that ethics plays in that. I guess I can largely think on this along three main lines: access, position, and representation.

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IST 700: Locating and Drawing the Boundaries of Research

On By BrettIn digital humanities, research, social media research4 Comments

A few things struck me from the reading, in particular the messy boundaries (and lack thereof) between online and offline and the difficulty of mapping and bounding digital projects. These pose significant implications for conducting online research. For now, I was mainly thinking about how some of these readings are impacting how I look at my own research project.

A map of the Internet by Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly, image via Brain Pickings.
A map of the Internet by Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly, image via Brain Pickings.

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