Pre-Proposal!

I. Introduction:

I’ve really been struggling with this. Ultimately, I hope that some of my findings will illuminate the ways in which individuals can hope to create spaces that increases the possibility for agency or at least make them aware of discursive conventions for the purposes of rhetorical effectiveness. But when I ask myself, “So what?” I often respond: so what.

I’ll probably tell a story here as well…

II. Research Questions:

a. How do institutional sponsorship and/or discursive expectations shape responses in online communities?

b. Do online spaces actually “free” users from discursive restraints or institutionalized meaning making?

c. How can these findings be used to maximize the real world, rhetorical effectiveness of composition pedagogy?

III. Defining Terms

a. Discourse: this oughta be fun…I’ll include modality (blog, blog commentary, newspaper article, status update, tweet, etc.) as forming discourse as well.

b. Institution: For my study, I’m going to call institutions those sponsors of web commentary. For example, in my pilot, I’m investigating comments on nytimes.com and facebook.com, both of which I’ll consider institutions. In the larger study, I’ll look at blogs attached to more traditional institutions like specific universities, prisons, hospitals, etc.

c. Agency: In textual analysis, as measured by variation within structural expectations of a discourse as I code it. In the focus group and survey, as defined by respondents. This will be, of course, tricky.

IV. Lit Review (this is where I need the most help!)

a. Bartholomae “Inventing the University”

b. Foucault Archaeology of Knowledge

c. Wysocki “Opening New Media to Writing: Openings and Justifications”

d. Johnson-Eilola “The Database and the Essay”

e. See additional pages

V. Research Design

a. Textual Analysis: I’ll code for discursive features within the sponsoring institutions. I will be looking for certain terms, grammatical constructions, and ideas that the institutions use in discussing various (random?) topics. The features and kinds of features) that pop up the most in my pilot study (see C&W abstract) will form a heuristic that I’ll apply to other institutions and modes. Basically, I’ll be noting the frequency of repetition of institutional discourse as defined by my codes. I’ll also look at personal, non-institutional blogs (or tweets or something) as a kind of control group. But I want my argument to be that discursive features run through even the most anti-authoritarian web stuff…(see introduction)

b. Focus Group: The focus group will help me determine how aware hyper literate and discursively savvy (read grad students) are of the institutional discourses they activate when they blog or facebook or tweet. The group will also help me to identify themes and trends I’ll include on the more widely distributed survey.

c. Survey: I’ll survey grad students like in my focus group. I’ll triangulate by also surveying facebook users randomly selected (I was thinking of approaching everyone with the names of my immediate family…) and those who comment on the various topics or blogs. This will be an online survey, though open ended. Hopefully those who are generous with their opinions online will be generous to my survey as well.

VI. Significance of Study: Hopefully the lit review will help here. Maybe the significance revolves around discursive awareness?

VII. Outline of Study: Not sure what you’re looking for here…how different is this from the Research Design?

Basis for Methodology

I am passionately committed to equal rights and responsibilities for all people regardless of their various positioning within institutional discourses. I feel heartbroken when I think of the narratives, the words, the imaginary BS that controls and manipulates the choices of women, black people, people with warts, sex workers, academics, homosexuals, and people who like to read. I hate the fact that this short life in this huge world, blessed as it is with some degree of creativity and variety, can be so limited by forces that often seek only to increase their own power or profits. I hate the academy for defining intelligence and holding the big volume control knob for the world. I hate the media for being in control of the microphone. But I also realize that we have very little opportunity, if we want to continue to be social, to move outside of these limitations. Even though we are all stuck in metaphorical boxes of meaning making (and even though those boxes, even as metaphors, are always empty) I desperately want to make the boxes bigger.

So I would certainly say that my research project—an attempt to identify and describe the ways institutions leak into the language of commentary and criticism of those same institutions—is guided by an ideological thrust toward free expression and equality. I feel like I would laugh at anyone else writing this—such quaint ideas freedom and equality! My ideology, based somewhere between Marxism and the calls for justice I hear rattling around behind Foucault and Derrida (“You’re trapped,” the theorists say. “Break free!” rattles something somewhere…), asks for global equality when it comes to working conditions, environmental responsibility, gender relations, and the ability to assign meaning.

Because my work is so grounded in my ideological project, my methods are those which make my ideology the more rhetorically appealing. I will triangulate between qualitative, quantitative, and textual analysis, doing all I can before I fall short of my own ethical strictures by limiting or exploiting any of my respondents.

Questions for Kris Blair and Cheryl Ball...

1.  Without asking too much of your prophetic gifts, do you fear the encroachment of institutions and institutional limitations on a technological space that seems to be, at least for the moment, free and chaotic?  Are the potentials for more democratic participation and ownership of knowledge and subject positions in danger?

2.  How do you feel about MLA 7th edition changes?  Do these changes reflect a legitimate shift in the field in terms of valuing multimodal compositions?

3.  Do multimodal and/or online spaces automatically subvert raced, gendered, and classed identities?  How do you see the spaces as reinforcing cultural norms while they offer so much potential to undermine them?

games lab post...

Computer mediated research is any activity which seeks to produce knowledge through the mediation of computers or digital spaces.  I realize the breadth of this definition includes everything written on a computer, but I still think it holds up.  So many of the features of digital landscapes are those features irl that go unnoticed.  That's confusing.  What I mean to say is that thinking about traditionally researched topics in traditional spheres of inquiry can be radically changed and made more complicated with computers.  I don't know why I'm having so much trouble saying this.  Work with computers makes things visible that aren't quite visible in real life.  That said (finally), the visibility of certain features of digital landscapes changes the ethical responsibilities of the researcher.  Researchers need to be especially sensitive and wary of fields of ethical concern that may be novel or under represented in traditional research.  But they're still there.  Which is the point I keep trying to make...

The IRB form seemed pretty straightforward.  I appreciated the tone of the document, and that there seems to be an active attempt at making the rights of the children known to them.  In other words, there isn't a lot of tricky language.  At the same time, I wonder if the concepts of the form are still too subtle for an eighth grade mind.  I also wonder about money and why it doesn't appear in the form.

seth thinks about computer-assisted and -mediated research

The complexity of composition is static.  I make this assertion not to downplay that complexity, but to introduce the fact that all that has been written about spoken words, written words, genre, media, and modality all bear on each other.  In addition, adding the researched "subject" to the equation increases the complexity by the order of one whole human consciousness, which is a great increase indeed.  Research in computer mediated spaces can bring many of the issues assumed to be simple and answered in other spaces to light, in addition to bringing up brand spanking new issues and complexities.  We should remember, when doing research in computer mediated spaces, that:

• people create themselves with and from and inside of texts
• these texts are then as much people as they are the materiality of the light on the screen
• interfering with these texts changes them and thus changes the perceptions (of audience and author) of the people involved
• computers are a commodity
• commodities are by definition a limited and limiting resource in terms of access and usage
• computer mediated spaces presuppose and create social situations that are not readily visible on the screen
• the researcher may not be the expert for a given technology
• and on and on and on

Of course there is great value to "virtual" research.  As I wrote above, digital spaces, I think, provide little terrain that is perfectly novel.  They are new media but subject to all the old theories of language and power and rhetoric.  In this way, virtual research is like a new window on an old back yard--everything is the same out there, but looked at from this angle, you can see things that you couldn't before.  In addition, people use virtual spaces and it's always good to investigate with academic rigor the things that people use.  There are differences, obviously, between different media, and it's important to begin to value all media equally.  The privilege of print text, of those moldy old books in the corners of libraries is nothing more than the enactment of certain types of power and privilege.  There are disadvantages to computer mediated research as well.  Computers, while fascinating for the speed at which they change and evolve, provide a fleeting subject matter for just those reasons.  The body of work on MOO's, for example, while less than twenty years old is becoming hilariously obsolete.  Also, it is difficult to obtain genuine empirical observation in a landscape that is created by the people you're trying to study.  SecondLife research, as an example, needs to take into consideration that many of the people with whom the researcher interacts could be role-played, or advertising robots, or griefers or who or whatever.  Ultimately these disadvantages are dangers we can avoid or embrace, dangers which may very well lead to very interesting findings.

Students look to teachers and institutions to label and create the official value of texts.  This is an ideological function in the sense that the value of books in a library is created by a hierarchical power structure that makes access--to their materiality and their meaning--the central criteria for validity.  Online spaces, while they may pretend at wider access, will surely (and eventually, if they don't already) come to bear under the weight of institutional practices.  Even though anyone can Google the work of important critical theorists, access to their full text articles is regulated by academic databases, libraries, and the fullness of their discursive locations.  I understood Thurlow and McKay's work as creating a space to account for the huge human complexity of communication in another media.  In other words, computers assist and mediate human beings in the huge complex of their relationships, and it is impossible or at least invalid to presume or posit that computers somehow simplify and make more generalizable our practices.

second life mini-ethnography

The first thing that strikes me about my tiny attempt at performing an ethnography in SL is how hard it is to navigate the world and take notes at the same time.  I greatly admire what Boellstroff was able to accomplish, not only within the incredible complexity of this space, but just in terms of data collection.  SecondLife, while it may not be as rich as the real world, is still a vibrant and changing space with a lot going on.

Another difficulty I encountered was simply not being able to find people.  I was frustrated by this, but now I'm thinking that the same kinds of frustrations might easily apply to any outsider. I can imagine a tourist looking for action in downtown New York City, knowing full well that there are a million things happening but not being able to find them.

The last difficulty I'll mention is the fact that the two people I did encounter were doing other things.  One was in a 'grid wide fishing contest' which she graciously invited me to join, and the other was simply waiting for his friends.  I felt like I was bothering both of them, regardless of the mode in which I was doing it.

This ties in with what I see as some of the difficulties in performing ethnography anywhere.  I think Barnard makes many of my points for me--but what I can add is that I think his critiques of f2f ethnography apply to SL as well.  

I think the biggest problems with my ability to manipulate the different features of my persona in SL also parallel those problems in f2f research.  I'm sure donning my role as "researcher" is not very much different to taking on my tall, flying elf persona.  In either case, I am interacting with a world that is interacting with me.  

One of the consistent shortcomings of ethnography in some of the works we've read, is interestingly one of its strong points in others:  the lack of objectivity.  I think it's interesting that we are so concerned with ethnographic subjectivity, but less so with the subjectivity we've seen as happening in surveys or focus groups or whatever.  I think that the question always forms the answer, no matter what the will of the inquisitor.  This is true across the board, regardless of how openly or sneakily the researcher posits herself.

Research Proposal--first first ideas

I don't know what I'm doing.  It's funny how often I write that...all I mean to say is that the following is a mash up of half formed ideas, assumptions, and attitudes.

Anyway.

What I'm most certain of is that I want to do a multiple method case study.  I want to do an ethnography, resplendent with focus groups, open ended survey questions, interviews, textual analysis, and collaborative storytelling.  At this point, I don't have much more than a methodological approach because I like to think abstractly, and I can think of a lot of things when it comes to the validity, both in terms of research and ethics, of research methodologies.  I also want to do a case study as a possible lead in to some Action Research.  In other words, I'd like my work to result in some actionable items the community itself wants put into place.

I also know that I will want to look at composition.  And more specifically I want to look at the relationships between institutions and students, between institutional goals and student goals from the perspectives of the people involved.  I could do this with a class here at NMSU, but I think it might be interesting to do this kind of research in a different cultural setting.  While it isn't so exotic, I read an article about Canadian Composition and its reliance on the teaching of literature.  I think taking my research outside of my own context might yield significant data that could respond to the relationships between institutions and students here.  At the very least, it would get me out of town.

To me the most important feature of this project will be the conscious application of rigorous ethical guidelines.  In many ways, I'm more concerned about the validity of the methodology, and that is what I want to change and affect with my research.

There's more.  I hope...

Survey as problematic methodology

It surprises me how problematic surveys are.  Of course, I have a hard time in accepting the objectivity of any description of so-called universal truths.  I think that a researcher can do everything she can to randomize samples and still not end up with an untainted, laboratory situation.  I think it's impossible to do much more than generalize the thoughts of an individual and that it is an ethical imperative to note and explore the vagaries of producing research texts. I have trouble accepting that any essay does more than provide me with an opportunity to create an author.  Of course, then, I'm going to have trouble with surveys.  

I'm not saying, however--or at least trying not to--that surveys aren't valuable.  I do think that a conscientiously crafted and disseminated survey can lead to some interesting observations.  However, like I said above, human beings have a complex relationship with text and a survey is no different.

In more specific response to Jen's prompt, I think that the above is one of my pet ideas that I would have to take into account were I to try for positivistic survey research.  In essence, my belief in the ultimate subjective relativity of all meaning means that I can make survey responses say whatever I want them to say.  However, I think I might combat this with a more qualitative approach to surveying--giving the respondents more space and voice in the results of the survey.

I don't know if this makes any sense at all.  I think my biggest shortcoming with a survey is that I probably won't ever conduct one.

Focus Groups

I understand people's hesitance toward focus groups.  Their biggest problem, I think, is with the ungeneralizability of this method.  Somehow, focus groups don't feel like research because the "results" can't be measured and provide a priori truth.  Even case studies, though the results aren't generalizable, have a more legitimate feeling than focus groups.  The difference between these different types of specificity is, I think, a rhetorical one.  We as students and researchers have developed a pathos for logos; in other words, we like things that seem logically true more than we like things that seem momentarily so.  That said, if we can get over the Enlightenment hump, focus groups can provide truth and knowledge that we never imagined.  For me, the focus group functions much like a group brainstorm with the discussion and conversation of the group providing and creating new ideas.

I would certainly use focus groups to determine research questions/problems in an action research type scenario.  Any situation that I would research where I wouldn't necessarily know the subtleties of the situation would be a good opportunity for a focus group.  Even in my 111 class, I think it would be interesting to see what the students say (in a classic, no stakes focus group) about what helps and hinders them most in the study of writing.  Ideally, I'd get students from multiple classes and group them in terms of their own, broad social categories:  emo boys, jock girls, etc.  My results would be new ideas, hopefully, and even if they weren't, they'd be the jumping off point for further research.

Case Studies

I don't know if I would call a case study a research method.  I mentioned this in class, but in doing more reading for focus groups, and thinking about ethnography and more experimental studies, I think calling something a case study has more to do with scope than method.  I think that the reading for today, Hawthorne's study of tenth graders, could certainly be labelled a case study.  His was a small sample, and he triangulated matching the qualitative aspects of his focus group with a quantitative content analysis. 

Because case studies are small, it is difficult to generalize their findings.  A case study cannot make claims to universal human behavior simply because the field is too small and the behaviors noted may be unique to the group of subjects.  If I were to study my class, for instance, I couldn't generalize my results for students in rural Louisiana or New York City, or Athens, Greece, because the number and quality of variables that would change in the different situations.

I think that case studies are most valuable for their heurism.  Simply because a study does not result in generalizable knowledge, does not mean that that knowledge isn't valuable.  The specific knowledge from a case study can and should be used to inspire and inform further research, perhaps research whose results can make a claim for universality.  Case studies are heuristic in that they open spaces for new knowledge, sidestepping the assumptions of the researcher and possibly the literature.

Ultimately, I doubt the generalizability of any knowledge.  I think that all knowledge takes its meaning as much from its specific context and situation as it does from itself in the abstract.  There are many tools--statistical and rhetorical--that suggest that some knowledge can be objectively, positively true, but I think that all knowledge is simply a stepping stone to other knowledge...in other words a heuristic.

My research paradigms...

I like words.  

In fact, I believe (though not without hesitation, contradiction, and hypocrisy) that there is nothing in the world except words.  I believe that there may in fact be pure phenomenological experience out there somewhere, but that we can never have that experience, because in order for phenomena to register as experience they must be mediated by language.  

I also believe that language is fundamentally and inescapably social.  I believe that meaning happens in the readers' (listeners' viewers' ponderers') minds and is imposed onto text in an extremely complicated relationship with social and historical situation.  

I certainly believe in the linguistic and social construction of meaning and experience, if not the material reality we think we live in.  I also certainly believe that quantitative measures signify reductively; I think that words, with apparently fuzzier boundaries than numbers, do a better job of signifying our fuzzy reality.  This puts me pretty firmly in the qualitative camp.

But I also, desperately, want research to be practical.  Or at least my work.  I try to remember every day that though my work may seem disconnected from the "real world" it is my world and is as real as anything ever will be.  To that end, I locate myself with the pragmatists, and would not hesitate to research quantitatively if the rhetorical situation asked for it. 

So--I barely believe in positive reality, but I want to affect that reality through words.  The world is language, in other words, so what better than language to re-create the world.

My Blog

Here's the link to my blog: http://atexasbender.blogspot.com/

Rachel's Research Reflections

Here is the link to my blog: http://rachelresearchreflections.blogspot.com/

Matt's Research Blog

Here's the link to my research blog!

http://www.compandcircumstance.wordpress.com

I'm getting great research done!

I'm in!

Huzzah.

Thanks for setting up the blog, Seth!