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My grad lecture is anticipated to be during week 2 of Spring semester. I know, I wanted it done by the end of this semester too…bureaucracy, you know…
Here are my two brainstormed projects, two options to study our 726 class:
1) The first project would study the classroom dynamics in the course. The goal of the study would be to discover the patterns of interaction between students and the teacher and among students in order to find out how dynamics influence classroom success. Data for the study could be previous research in classroom dynamics, the class notes written each week for 726, transcripts from classroom discussions, the seating arrangement, student self-reflections and teacher reflections, and observations from an independent observer (MacNealy 244). I think case study would be the most effective, possibly in conjunction with feminist method. Initial assumptions would be that dynamics would directly indicate success or failure of the class, just from past experience as a student. Of course, our biases would need to be acknowledged, as all of us are participants as well as researchers. That’s why I suggest the use of the independent observer to triangulate data.
2) The second project I considered would study transfer in a methods class. The main research question this project would try to answer would be, “to what extent does the content of the readings and discussions during class impact a student’s individual research?” I would look at the relationship between the class activities and the final projects, to see if what was talked about in class was actually applied by the student. Data used could include the course syllabus, handouts, class notes, final projects, and student self-reflections (possibly student journals, if we asked everyone to keep a journal throughout the course). I would initially assume that transfer is a highly complex concept, which may or may not be able to be measured to make any conclusions, but at least this study would look at the relationships between the syllabus and the content of the final projects. Methods would include discourse analysis, case study, and probably most likely grounded theory. This study might be impossible to implement for our class, as the bias would skew the results to such an extent. It might be better for outside researchers to do this study on us, or not develop the study until the course was almost over (and our final projects decided upon!). If we planned this study at the beginning of the course, we might be too influenced by the study when we’re thinking about our final projects, even if we don’t realize it. So this might be the best kind of thing to do after final projects are handed in. Of course, this is also a limitation, as the course would be over by the time research would be beginning. We’d need to know what data we wanted, because once we begin, no new data can be collected.
So I’ve been busy writing my prospectus and putting together my HSRB stuff recently; I haven’t gotten to blog much about my dissertation project. What I really think the blog has helped me to do is to think through my ideas, but not necessarily help during drafting. In fact, I don’t know how much more I’ll be blogging my project from now on, unless I have issues or blocks in my project. But it’s not going to be anywhere near daily–I found that when I had to write daily, I kept going around in circles. I find that taking a step back and holding off on writing more for a few days helps. (of course I know that in drafting, writing a bit every day is useful. But as for articulating thesis ideas, writing every day is sort of overkill.)
So where am I now? I’ve handed in my prospectus to my chair, and sent a draft to my internal committee members to start looking through, and I’m within a day of handing in my HSRB requirements (you know, it’s not as hard as it looks. Really). Hopefully within a short time I’ll be scheduling my grad lecture!! I’ll let everyone know when that is.
–ejfleitz
1) What kind of quality differences might there be doing research through digital collections rather than “live” research in physical archives or spaces?
2) How can we “live the research” in any research project, not just historical?
3) How does Rohan implement feminist methods in her research?
Annotated Bibliography: Beyond the Proposal
Note: This bibliography constitutes my current research, done after writing the prospectus. While many of these sources are not cited in my proposal, all of them will continue to aid and inform my research.
Bishop, Wendy. Ethnographic Writing Research: Writing it Down, Writing it Up, and Reading It. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1999.
Wendy Bishop’s book is a good introduction to doing ethnographic research. She begins with an overview of writing research and how ethnography has recently become a larger part of the field, thus proving the motivation for this kind of book. Since it is a newer mode of inquiry, Bishop writes this book as an introduction to the method. In each chapter, Bishop walks the reader through step-by-step how to do effective ethnographic writing research. While this information is useful to any type of ethnographic research, Bishop tailors it specifically to composition researchers. At the end of the book she includes examples of how to write a prospectus and several examples of mini-ethnographies, which are very helpful to see ethnography in practice. I plan to use this book to help inform my ethnographic work in my project.
Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. 2nd ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001.
Bolter’s updated text explores the trend of electronic, or hypertext writing, and its effect on print culture. Bolter argues that hypertext does not eliminate print, but blends it together with other writing techniques of the past. Hypertext, because of its dynamic nature, enables the reader to take an active, participatory role in the text, as they have the ability to move through the text in any order or method they wish—unlike traditional print texts, which impart a specific (linear) method of reading, and thus have control over the reader. Bolter’s argument furthers Kress’s discussion of multimodal texts, in that both assume that space (in this case, cyberspace) affects cultural assumptions of knowledge and literacy. A new kind of space (hypertext) presumes we must develop a new way to think in order to comprehend it. I plan to use this book to further develop my understanding of print and multimodal text.
Duke, Nell K. and Marla H. Mallette, eds. Literacy Research Methodologies. New York: Guilford P, 2004.
This anthology is similar to other methodology handbooks in that it devotes one chapter to each relevant mode of inquiry. The common ones are included, like case study, discourse analysis, ethnography, experiments and quasi-experiments, and historical research. However, as this anthology is tailored to literacy research specifically, it also includes chapters on meta-analysis, neuroimaging, and verbal protocols. It also includes separate chapters on issues specific to literacy studies, and provides advice on how to create useful instruments to measure data. The authors also note that while these methodologies listed are not exhaustive, they do represent the most common methodologies being used in the field today. In each chapter, the authors provide specific examples from successful literacy research works. I plan to use this to help focus my methodology choice and understand more about it in terms of literacy research.
Edmunds, Holly. The Focus Group Research Handbook. Chicago: NTC, 1999.
Similar to the other books in this annotated bibliography on focus group research, Edmunds’s work is very straightforward and easy to follow. She writes in a concise, simple style which makes it easy to skim to find information. Her use of subject headings and boldface words helps as well. Edmunds shows the reader step-by-step how to plan, design, implement, and evaluate a focus group study. She also devotes an entire chapter to specific focus group situations, such as focus groups with children, teens, or senior citizens, or what to do if the recording equipment breaks down. She also includes a couple of pages on ethics. I plan to use this book to help design the focus group part of my study.
Gere, Anne Ruggles. Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U.S. Women’s Clubs, 1880-1920. Chicago: U of IP, 1997.
Gere’s book narrates a history of women’s organizations at the turn of the century, at the point this type of women’s culture exploded in popularity. Rather than merely providing a historical account of these women’s clubs, Gere digs deeper into their social structure, arguing that the clubs used a wide variety of literacy practices (such as pamphlets, essays, meeting minutes, bylaws, memorials, poems and sketches), shared with other women in other clubs, to construct their intimate culture. At the point in which America was expanding greatly in size, Gere argues that these women used literacy practices to unify themselves and the U.S. as well, during this time of change. I plan to use this book to help inform my work with women’s groups and the rhetoric produced within them.
Heath, Shirley Brice. Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms.” New York: Cambridge UP, 2006.
Heath’s work is somewhat similar to that of Radway’s Reading the Romance, as Heath also does an ethnographic study of literacy practices, although not using feminist method. Set up much the same way, Heath’s text begins by setting the scene of the two communities she studies: “Roadville” and “Trackton.” Heath explores the cultural and linguistic differences between these two nearby communities, and does this through studying children’s language learning. While she does not identify as part of New Literacy, Heath’s conclusions on the social practice of literacy seem to support the beliefs of that research area. Heath brings her linguistic background to the study, and approaches the data from a more scientific standpoint than Radway’s exclusively feminist ethnographic work does. I plan to use this work to help inform my research design, as it is a landmark text in literacy studies.
Hesse-Biber, Sharlene Nagy, ed. Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Praxis. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2007.
This enormous anthology attempts to be a comprehensive handbook of current feminist research methodologies and issues within the field. As the concept of feminist research is very broad, the book attempts to be as well by providing a wide variety of perspectives on method and research. Instead of the usual organization format, Hesse-Biber’s handbook divides the chapters not by methods but by general topics such as “Perspectives on Knowledge Building” and “Perspectives on the Research Process.” The varying perspectives and methods give an accurate picture of feminist research as a complex field with many possibilities. I plan to use this book to help inform my use of feminist research methods.
Krueger, Richard A. Analyzing and Reporting Focus Group Results. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1998.
This book, volume six in a series about focus groups, specializes in what the researcher can do with their data. As there is so much potential data to be analyzed from a focus group session, Krueger expertly breaks down the process of organizing and analyzing it. Krueger presents a variety of potential approaches to the data, offering the reader choices for their analysis. He gives advice both for new scholars and seasoned professionals, and discusses issues present in dealing with data. It works as an effective companion to his Focus Groups text. Written in an easy-to-read, straightforward way, this text is useful for practical issues of focus group research. I plan to use this text when I have to begin working with my data after I hold my focus group(s).
Krueger, Richard A., and Mary Anne Casey. Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for Applied Research. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2000.
This book is a helpful and comprehensive guide to organizing, implementing, moderating, and analyzing the results for focus group research. Krueger and Casey have updated their work in this volume to include a comparison of focus group research styles (market research, academic, public, participatory). This guide is organized well and is easy to skim to find relevant information. It is also geared towards any discipline, and can easily be used for research in social sciences and business as well as the humanities. It includes sections on planning the study, how to write questions, how to choose participants, how to moderate, and how to analyze the results. I plan to use this book as a guide to helping me set up my focus group.
Lankshear, Colin, and Peter L. McLaren, Eds. Critical Literacy: Politics, Praxis, and the Postmodern. Albany: SUNY P, 1993.
This anthology attempts to identify literacy in the present age—a “post” age, where the present is identified in relation to past events. Lankshear and McLaren gather fourteen essays on what they identify as critical literacy, which analyzes knowledge-making as discursive production. Set in this framework, the authors and editors of this volume explore the ways in which literacies transform ways of thinking into ways of acting, a central belief of the New Literacy Studies (NLS). I plan to use the introduction by Lankshear and McLaren as a way into the concept of literacy in the present age. I also plan to use Giroux’s and Gee’s articles on literacy as social practice, as they go further into exploring literacy as describing and informing relationships.
Naples, Nancy A. Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and Activist Research. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Naples’s text clearly explains the variety of research methods useful to feminist scholars. Written for the social science field, Naples’s work is also useful for my research as well. She takes current issues in the field of women’s studies (such as sexual abuse, welfare reform, and economic development) and demonstrates how feminist research methods can be used. She also includes helpful resources for further study. Meant to be a practical and useful text, Naples provides advice and suggestions for useful methods and practices. She also discusses the many issues that are present in feminist research, such as objectivity, the problems with standpoint, and challenges of being a feminist and activist researcher. I plan to use this book to help inform my methodology as I plan out my research design. I also plan to use this book as a guide for writing ethnographic scholarship.
Pahl, Kate, and Jennifer Rowsell. Travel Notes from the New Literacy Studies: Instances of Practice. Buffalo: Multilingual Matters, 2006.
This anthology on current work in literacy studies is the first and most prominent work of its kind, in its attempt to identify New Literacy Studies. Editors Pahl and Rowsell explain the purpose of this anthology is to bring together scholarship on multimodality and New Literacy studies. As scholarship in NLS has shown, literacy is a social practice. In studies of multimodality, the concept of literacy is expanded to include not only textual but also aural, spoken, gestural, and other modes as working together in a text. The authors and editors in this work attempt to make both areas of study “speak to each other” (vii), as they both encompass current research in literacy scholarship. Pahl and Rowsell explain their purpose for the volume: “What we, as editors, value is the bringing together of the ethnographic with a focus on literacy as a social practice and multimodality with its emphasis on the variety of communicative practices. In other words, we see identity and social practice in the materiality of texts” (2). I plan to use this anthology to learn more about the ways in which NLS and multimodality can work together, and the various methods used to study each. I also plan to use this work to explore the issue of materiality of the text and how that affects literacy practices.
Pearce, Lynne. Feminism and the Politics of Reading. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997.
This work attempts to theorize the female reader, arguing that she is implicated in the act of interpretation. Analyzing the text-reader relationship, Pearce notes that while a reader may or may not read as a feminist, depending on the context, a reader is always reading as gendered and as part of a specific social class. In this way, it is less of a direct, balanced reader-text relationship and more a reader-interpretive act relationship. In past reader-response theory, the author explains that “the reader” is assumed to be an upper-class, well-educated male. For this reason, reader-response theorists assume the reader always looks to understand a text. Pearce challenges this assumption, and names the reader as a lover of the text, as reading not necessarily to understand but to enjoy. I plan to use this book to further inform my understanding of feminist reader theory.
Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. 1984. Chapel Hill, UNC P, 1991.
This book represents one of the first and most influential feminist research on reception. Radway’s work, in conjunction with other feminist scholars of the time, effectively created the field of feminist reader theory. Radway did an ethnographic study of a women’s romance reading group in a small town. Through this research, Radway argues for the value of romance novels and other “women’s” texts. She explodes the assumptions surrounding these texts, and challenges those (often demeaning) myths. Through her reception study (which consisted of questionnaires, one-on-one interviews, and focus group research), Radway is able to explain why women are drawn to romance novels—it is a text they can escape with and also be empowered by. By allowing the women readers their voices, Radway’s ethnographic approach enables her to explore the discourse created by the community of women as strong and empowering. I plan to use this study as a model for my own reception research. I plan to look at her methodology explanation as well as looking at her questions asked, and the ways in which she presented and analyzed the data, to inform my research design.
Williams, Bronwyn T. Tuned In: Television and the Teaching of Writing. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 2002.
Williams’s book, a study that came out of his dissertation research, argues that students have literacy skills—ones that the academy does not value. Even if students themselves don’t realize it, they are highly literate in televisual texts. Students are able to parse the complex storylines, analyze the situations, predict what will happen, and evaluate the results—all things they are not as familiar with in printed texts. Williams brings together interviews from a sample of college composition students on their television watching habits, and from this empirical study begins to form an argument for including and valuing visual literacy in the composition classroom. I plan to use this book for Williams’s methodology to get ideas for my own study.
1) How could the NLG’s concept of literacy as “design” be used for activist ends?
2) As I was reading Wysocki’s article, I remember that Jay David Bolter explains, in his book Writing Space, that we are living in “the late age of print.” Wysocki more or less supports this statement, especially towards the end of her article. How does this fact about our society impact future research practices? Research methods?
3) How could McKee and Blair’s findings be applicable to other demographic populations?
1) In Cushman’s “Critical Literacy…”, she waits to identify her subject positioning until nearly halfway into the document (252). Is this a significant issue, especially considering her ethnographic method? Why might she have chosen to wait to identify her positioning?
2) Cushman explains her triangulation as (1) observation, (2) getting feedback on her observation from outsiders to the project who are familiar with that kind of situation, and (3) getting feedback on her observation from those being observed (254). What other methods could be used to triangulate just as effectively?
3) In “Rhetorician…”, how well does Cushman position herself? How does she convince us (or does she convince us) that we should listen to a graduate student (especially one who talks with the confidence and experience of a seasoned veteran in the field)? What kind of evidence does she provide to persuade us of her authority? Or is her positioning unimportant to her argument?
Everyone loves food. We love talking about food, reading about food, eating food, and maybe even cooking food. And no wonder: we are a nation of food lovers, as demonstrated by our interest in cooking shows, cookbooks, websites, food blogs, and magazines. We call ourselves “foodies,” or food enthusiasts, and like to learn about culinary traditions from far and near. Our interest isn’t limited to the practical requirements of nutrition, either. We love our “foodatainment,” as Joanne Finkelstein explains the marriage of information and entertainment in contemporary cooking programs (de Solier 468). The new media revolution has served the industry well, as it has led to the creation of a multimedia food experience. Now we can have our cake and eat it—and read about it on a website, talk about it on a podcast, see it made on television, blog it on our weblog . . . the list goes on.
The act of cooking itself has become a commodity, not just the product it creates. In fact, the product itself—the food object—is largely forgotten, replaced by the spectacle of the act. This leads to my main point: the effects of new media upon cookery texts have enabled these texts to demonstrate their multimodal features: features which I will argue are inherent in the text, not produced as a result of the influx of new media. The act of reading a recipe—whether it is a print recipe, hypertext, or television show—requires a specific kind of literacy, a literacy which up until now has lacked vocabulary to explain. Gunther Kress, in his work Literacy in the New Media Age, calls for a new kind of literacy to be able to interpret texts produced through electronic means. This literacy, which Kress and other scholars name as multimodal literacy, can be an effective way to explain how we read and interpret recipes. While recipes clearly are not part of “new media,” their particular focus on rhetorical elements and on the physical act of cooking make them suitable to study in the same fashion as new media texts.
In our culture, food is now a multimedia experience, encompassing all media and all modes of communication. However, this is not a recent development. My argument is grounded in the belief that any cookery text—from websites and blogs to handwritten recipes and cookbooks—is inherently multimodal. While the medium of transmission may have changed over the years, recipes (whether online, print or manuscript) utilize a variety of modes to communicate their message. Any single recipe uses both writing and visuals to tell its story. Even in a recipe without a picture, the printed or handwritten structure of the language is a rhetorical move, constructing both the written and visual modes into an “imagetext,” or blending of modes. Through my argument, I plan to not only broaden the definition of multimodality by including cookbooks, but I also plan to make a case for the value of cookbooks to be studied.
Julia, Emeril, Iron Chef, Rachael Ray, Jacques Pepin, and countless other chefs and programs have transformed the business of cooking into a multimedia experience. While the cooking culture’s origins are rooted in oral tradition, much has changed in the past decades to remediate cooking into a wide variety of new media. What was once a handwritten recipe on an index card has now become a fully interactive website complete with images, video, blogs, podcasting, chat, and asynchronous discussions. What was once an oral narrative is now an entertaining performance in front of a live studio audience, complete with companion book and DVD. While this remediation has been significant, these changes have not altered the ways to read them. Even though recipes may look different today, they are and have always been multimodal. I ground my work in that of Gunther Kress and the New London Group to explore multimodal literacy as it applies to cookbooks. In conjunction with new media theory, I also consider reader-response theory and feminist reader theory to explore the role of the reader in the reader/text relationship. Finally, I argue that analyzing the material is vital to considerations of multimodality, and explore the performative as an integral element to any cookery text. Through this study I plan to argue for the cookery text as rhetorical and valuable for further scholarship.
Since the objective of my study is to explore multimodal ways of reading which cookbooks engender, my questions are focused on the relationship the reader has with the cookery text. My main research questions are as follows:
- What do we do when presented with a cookery text?
- How can we describe the reading/interpretive process of a recipe?
- Do these processes change when presented with a cookery text of a different medium (such as a change from printed recipe to a television cooking show)?
- How might new media theory aid in expressing the process of reading a recipe?
- How might feminist criticism aid in analyzing the reading process?
- In what ways do our recipe reading processes change and what motivates those changes?
- How do considerations of inscription or materiality affect the process?
- What does a recipe do?
- How does it do it?
As I have grounded my study in reader-response and feminist reader theory, I want to design and implement a pilot study of how we read cookery texts. I believe in order to argue my point on the multimodal literacy of cookbooks, a reception study is logical and necessary. In fact, both cookbook studies and new media studies need empirical scholarship. No study thus far has explored the ways in which we read cookbooks, and there has been little empirical work (though much theorizing) on how one reads a new media text.
My study will utilize rhetorical and historical methods, as I use them to supplement and ground my empirical study. The goal of this study is not to focus on the empirical aspect, but to use the pilot or case study to further illustrate and prove my hypotheses. My proposed design will include a sample size of about 15-20 individuals, ideally people who (upon self-assessment) have average to above average cooking skills. After completion of an initial questionnaire which asks for their past experience and interest in cooking, I plan to interview them about their cooking and recipe reading habits. One component of the empirical study will be to ask the subject to rewrite a given recipe, and explain why they chose the process they did. This remediation may happen for two different media, such as a print recipe and a television cooking show. This data will then give me much to work with to further explore the ways in which we read and interact with recipe texts.
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