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October 19, 2006
how T.H. finds out what writing does and how it does it
what is it good for?
bazerman, from Introduction (distracting/irritating overuse of boldfacing removed): "For researchers, discourse analysis provides a means of examining communicative practice so as to uncover signs of social identities, institutions, and norms as well as the means by which these social formations are established, negotiated, enacted, and changed through communicative practice. For teachers of writing in colleges and schools, discourse analysis provides ways of going beyond the simple and perhaps confusing terminology of our everyday language for texts and writing" (3).
following directions
T.H. says "content analysis...involves a synergistic blending of quantitative data gathering and qualitative analysis....Some [studies] may start with a proposition and use data-gathering in a deductive manner to confirm or disconfirm the proposition, whereas others may be more exploratory, using qualitative analysis in an inductive, flexible manner" (16), but in general they should all follow his 6-step (recursive, cyclical, rarely-this-linear) process:
1. Pose a Research Question
2. Define the Appropriate Construct(s)
3. Select an Appropriate Text or Body of Texts as the Study Corpus
4. Determine Appropriate Units of Analysis (Text Features), Using Multiple Raters if Possible
5. Gather Data
6. Interpret the Findings
elaborations
on "construct(s)": "...a researcher who hypothesizes that more mature students tend to be more rhetorically sensitive than less mature students is implicitly working with two constructs, 'student maturity' and 'rhetorical sensitivity.' these constructs will have to be defined, however, in a way that can be converted into measurable units. for example, 'student maturity' might be defined in terms of age, years living on one's own, or some other variable; 'rhetorical sensitivity' might be defined in terms of attention to purpose, attention to audience, and/or other parameters" (17). (so i guess i shouldn't ask how, exactly, "attention to purpose" is "measurable"?)
on coding: make it up as you (start to) go along, using your first few samples of material to find/make categories that can be applied to later samples.
limitation #1 as reason #1 for arguing that the project shouldn't stop here: "coding in quantitative analysis is too surface-based and thereby lacks validity...[as it] is said to valorize the textual artifact in unreflective fashion, ignoring the reader's or writer's engagement with the text (anderson 1973). as van dikj (1997b) put it, content analysis is 'a method which in fact has less to do with meaning than with the more observable aspects--mostly words--of discourse' (p. 9)" (26). <--why we have to also ask the writers.
Posted by ttobryan at 12:28 PM | Comments (0)
bibliographic & ironical
books i checked out about this branch of methodological possibility that are not useful at all:
Dijk, T. A. van. Text and Context: Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse. New York: Longman, 1977.
de Beaugrande, Robert-Alain and Wolfgang Ulrich Dressler. Introduction to Text Linguistics. Longman Linguistics Library. Ser. New York: Longman, 1981.
books i checked out that had at least a few notes & glimmerings of language i might someday have use for to offer:
Pickering, Wilbur. A Framework for Discourse Analysis. Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics. Ser. 64. U of Texas at Arlington: Summer Institute of Linguistics Inc., 1978.
Stillar, Glenn F. Analyzing Everyday Texts: Discourse, Rhetoric, and Social Perspectives. Rhetoric & Society. Ser. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998.
essay from book already on bibliography that RMH suggests i use for heavy methodological guidance (& i, being one w/the smart, was able to show her when she made that suggestion that my copy of the essay was already thoroughly dog-eared):
Huckin, Thomas. "Content Analysis: What Texts Talk About." What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. Ed. Charles Bazerman and Paul A. Prior. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003. 13-32.
not-quite-like-alanis juxtaposition of carrying that book around, dog-eared & marked as Highly Relevant while listening to 2 colleagues over lunch & coffee describing the above author as a loudmouth & bit-of-a-nut-job re: some recent activity on the RFP listseve?
priceless.
Posted by ttobryan at 12:00 PM | Comments (0)
notes about textual analysis
from Stillar's Analyzing Everyday Texts
p. 14: the overarching framework of "discoursal practice" has 3 key elements; it is "systemic," "functional," & "social." he defines systems as "organized sets of linguistic structures: the arrays of 'what can be done' in terms or selections and combinations of linguistic units" & textual function as "the organization of the language system & the interpretation of its possible structures," and explains that both are "social phenomena...in terms of their origins, contexts, and effects."
p. 15 from Halliday:
Text represents choice. A text is 'what is meant,' selected from the total set of options that constitute what can be meant. In other words, text can be defined as actualized meaning potential. (109)
basically, what text = is choice (15); what texts do is "represent" (18)--"institutional context, social experiences, temporal selection & perspectival conditions"; studying text involves studying the roles & reasons/circumstances its authors' words convey--representations of authors as authorities (28)--alongside the representations of their motivations (29).
& the stuff itself, in overview/definition: "discourse analysis interprets instances of text in relation to systems of meaning-making resources" (179)
from Pickering's A Framework for Discourse Analysis
p. 3 he establishes a "framework" rather than a "method" because methods are too rigid & depend too much on replicable situations for their application.
p. 57: style as an expression of the social; p. 59: register as an expression of the context of the situation (how are those separable?)
-->food for thought: we never treat citation practices & text-mingling/intertextuality as matters of style and/or register, but they are; they're about community membership in very specific contexts.
& the WOrld WIde WUb (or at least Daniel Chandler) says the term "intertextuality" (at least as he's using it?) is from kristeva's 1980 Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (Semiotics for Beginners)
keyword "explicitness"; do i need to hang somebody's name on that?
Posted by ttobryan at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)
October 17, 2006
the drawing board
i (like most people, i think) have always visualized this metaphor relating to art; the "drawing board" was a chalkboard, whiteboard, schoolhouse slate, flip-pad of trace-through-ably thin architectural paper, & going "back to" it meant erasing the old drawing, flipping to a new page, washing the board down, & starting over from scratch.
i met a girl named katie this summer who was making metal jewelry by braiding strands of thin, somewhat-malleable silver wire, & pulling the finished braids through holes in a board sized appropriately for how crushed into shape she wanted the loose braids to become. according to katie, most of us visualize the metaphor entirely incorrectly; the board full of different-sized holes is the "drawing board," "drawing" the braids through the board explains the verb in question, & going "back to the drawing board" means noticing an inconsistency in the finalized weave of a piece of braid & re-bending, then re-drawing it through to compress it more fittingly. there's no eraser in this version; the work done on the art remains, & the return to the drawing board is a way of correcting minor flaws, not scrapping entire concepts to begin anew.
wikipedia has no idea what i'm talking about, and i can't find any online support for this board as an object (she had one in her hands, but it was the type of craft-item that, in its context, was more likely to have been made by/for her than purchased anyway), but i still like katie's version better. and after sufficient googling, i did find this sentence, from an assessment of the relative value of new car designs, which stood alone in a sea of "back to the..." metaphorical uses, & which leads me to believe she's not wholly alone in this conception: "Instead, Chevy produced a work-in-progress in need of another pass through the drawing board."
Posted by ttobryan at 07:35 PM | Comments (0)