6.18 Draft outline for chapters

Check out the new title for my blog. 

As usual - when I started work on this project I had no idea what I was doing.  As I continued to work on the prospectus for the book = I kept trying on and digging into different ideas for how to pull our various projects together. 

In some ways I haven't 'thrown away' the idea we started out with - which was to take a look at the discourses/identities/writing practices in a set of communities associated with mediated writing, and see how they might look when placed next to the D/I/WPs often associated with academic contexts => and then think about:

• what D/I/WPs might be evoked in what kinds of classroom contexts
• what writing/feelings/classroom participation might look like when cast through those D/I/WPs
• how/whether teachers can benefit from a heads up in terms of what kinds of D/I/WPs come into their classrooms from different writing communities
• and so on

So that is one conceptual focus for our book.  As I have been writing into this and thinking I have come up with a second focus - which is methodological.  That focus is on ethnography - and how both the products and the practices of ethnography are transformed by the new ideas and practices for "writing" engendered by the internet.  Back in the 1980s there was a paradigm changing collection edited by Clifford and Marcus which articulated ethnography as "writing culture".  It defined ethnography as  inextricably bound to the perspectives, practices, and processes of the writing process.  New technologies have radically transformed what it means to "write" = and I am going to use our ebook to examine not only how creating e-ethnographies "changes" what ethnography is and can be =but how the perspective, practices (including collaboration), and processes associated with mediated composing have changed ethnographic practice.  The opening sections will be a theoretical examination of some of those change - along with a discussion of what those changes imply for mediated ethnographic studies.

So here is the first, messy, not finished draft for the chapters of the book.

Title:  First-person ethnography, small research, and the study of discourses surrounding the screen

 

Introduction:

Discuss the book’s focus, audience, & purpose, + how to read it  & provide an overview of the chapters

 I.     Small ethnography and the study of digital culture

1.       Being there in a digital age

·         The idea of perspective in ethnography => watching +writing as central to ethnography (Clifford & Marcus)

·         idea of studying “cutures” (conceiving the object of study as separate from the culture that examines them= move to connective ethnograhy)

·         changing conceptions of writing accompanying mediated world

·         new methods for collecting, analyzing and representing data

·         move toward collaborative composing/multiple perspectives=invisible collaborators behind the page=> whose perspective? (can be a move back toward the god-trick)

·         Ethnography, ethics + intentional, transparent choices about representation (as re-defined by mediated composing practices + representations)

 

2.       First-person ethnography, small research, and the value of local perspectives (methods)

·         Collaborative nature of mediated projects

·         concepts of auto-ethnographies, seen through the eyes of a single researcher v collaborative projects

·          Value of seeing a community through the eyes of a single observer (triangualtion=> observers life/perspective is part of what makes the data readable)- use example =Dibbell’s work(representing a community);  Gee’s book on video games (representing his own work;

·         discussion of a sampling methods (local participants=local community; local participants=dispersed communities; dispersed participants=local community; dispersed participants/researchers=dispersed communities

·         models for using clusters of ethnographies to examine ideas (as in Selfe, Hawisher +Berry)=> (compare difference in presentation between Transnational lives , Bober & Livinstone, and Geeking out) + discuss the differences

·         translation of small research to mediated presentations

3.        Using local clusters of first-person ethnographies to examine ideas: an example 

·         Our questions about discursuve flow-back in mediated participation

·         How we worked together

II.    Discourses surrounding the screen

4.       Fantasy Sports  local-local

5.       Writing group for e-lit  local-local

6.       GPOY local-dispersed

7.       I F love science  local-dispersed

8.       Fandom Wing  dispersed-dispersed (transformed to local)

9.       Fanfiction=dispersed-dispersed

10.   NaNoWriMo  dispersed=dispersed

11.   Putting the personal on the page: Classroom blogs in a creative writing class local (? Coming into being)-local(not sure – because classmates + teacher are felt as dispersed/other)

III.   I haven't thought of a title yet

some chapters that pull together our methodological observations + findings with respect to our focus

 

So now I am going to go back to reading some of the books I am going to have to write about to describe how our book fits in.