Mediated ethnographic data

Introduction= mini documentary w voiceover = tutorial on site/narration of community

For ethnography of ENG 4017

blog site screen shots
blog site screen shot in sequence with voice-over talking about the unfolding creation of the blog
videos of class with voice over to explain what is going on
video interviews with transcripts
screen shot of texts from class with voice over/transcript to narrate
mini-documentaries by students/student researchers
screen capture of composing for blogs?
links to teaching materials?

E-lit writing group
screen shots of interactions for online conversations
video + transcripts for real-space meetings ( how roles are negotiated)
screenshots of unfolding evolution of the texts being composed => video with voice over
option to move mouse + zoom in on details of text

GPOY
screen capture with zoom-in => to show how people actually interact with website
video of people actually interacting with their site (live) + interview
screen capture of them on Skype - on Tumblr
animated gifs
documentary - video voiceover to introduce site
archival analysis = screen captures

Fantasy Sports
screen shots of message board + twitter activity + manager notes
text message exchanges = screenshot phone
group pictures of league managers, team owners
draft for football = tailgate = realworld video
video = documentation of league managers writing posts
audio of inter = informal + forma *** with discussion of advantages/disadvantages of formal/informal data collection

NaNoWriMo
web site NaNo or Camp + forums + twitter= screenshots
video interviews with camp folks through Skype
mini-documentary

Fanfic feedback system
screen captures of archives + threads of comments that are analyzed
recording (audio or video)
chat transcripts
external links
write-back exchanges=> feedback sessions
something about how responses were coded = video with voice-over with a narrative of the process for analysis

6.14 questions to ask/what to notice in the analysis of multimodal texts

1. Discourses: what discourses are associated with this community that uses the text?
In Burn's analysis of Rebellion he identified expert gamer, horror, proto-critical, ludic, and proto-designer.

2. Design & production: describe representation + ludic elements of the text
-representation

• visual
• felt
• structural
• modal

-ludic

• what the text does
• what the user does
• what interactions do

3. Discussion of social-semiotic question (p 165 summary)
what has been designed? = what processes of signification are in play? what social meaning do the dsign & process convey?
what notion of creativity or rhetorical process is embodied in the text? what are the evaluative discourses + social processes for/structures embodying negotiating what is valuable & valued?
how does this text effect transformation of meanings (how signs are re-purposed/used) in terms of this community?

4. Describe the levels of interaction within the text?

5. describe the organization within the text? what are the routes of play?  what kinds of cohesion does it create  & how does it create them?
[In Burn's analysis he points out that games produce cohesion through reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion.
He further identifies
- ties between modes in terms of verbal signs, visual elements + player actions
-multimodal ties between segments (allusions to other levels)
-redundancy

6.14 methods/strategies for creating connective ethnographies

Notes on methods summarized by Leander
The following partial representation of Leander's overview of approaches to connective ethnography can serve as a quick list of how to frame data, and what in particular to notice about data.  I strongly collecting data through several of these perspectives as a way to arrive at a perspective that (eventually) will grow out of the nature of your questions and data.

Hine: Internet as culture AND as artifact; "Internet as socially constructed, indeterminate, and distributed
=>notice correlations among practices, representations, and circumstances of use
=>notice circulation practices

Wakeford: focus on material, symbolic, imagined, and performed spaces
=>attention to connections between technical & performed

Holloway & Valentine: framing of Internet practices/culture/etc so as not to bracket as "separate" from material world
=>notice factors shaping the realization of techno-literate status (how it is influenced by context, individual identity, etc)
=> discursive contstruction of "Internet"

Lam: cross-sectional analyses comparing practices across participants and contexts + attention to ethics (inclusion of non-voluntary participants)

Jones: relationship of online/offlione practices in time and space
=>notice language in context
=> larger, general "life" as feature of "hanging-out"
=>event complex surrounding computer + patterns of online/offline flow

Wilson: political activism
identifies networks, interviews participants, + participant observationof evens
=> notices people, information, $$$, media in terms of flows & circuits

Leander: literacy in relation to space-time + new methods for research
=> notices coordination of talk, bodies & materials
=> attention to labeling practices = by what they DO, characterized in terms of language & purpose

6.13 Plan for Friday 6.14

At our last meeting back in May we talked about moving forward with some readings on methods - and the following week we set up the google.sites readings (to the right, by invitation only so you have to be signed in to access the link).

Friday. I am hoping to finish at/before 3:00 (though if any of you want to set up some time to work one-on-one on your project, I could do up until about 5). The plan is to touch on the following:

Part I
1. Check in on what we see as the focus for the book (my post is drafty writing - I am still in process on this - but it puts forward some writing) and how your work will fit in.  I am thinking that it might also be an example of mediated ethnography - as well as an illustration of how a mediated ethnography can explore questions about online communities in new ways (where our question would be about ideologies/discourses that underlie/shape/are shaped by community practices).

2. Talk over what the computers and writing folks suggested in terms of working on our project.

3. As a follow-up on 1, look at the content-template, develop our list of how we want to use media in our ethnographic documentation, and maybe do some preliminary work on a media template.

Part 2
1. Talk about Leander's ideas about connective ethnography.  We will focus on figuring out + making lists of data collection methods/theories that allow you to do ethnography that does not a priori ghetto-ize online identities, practices, and communities from material world life. 

2. Use Burn's critical lenses to analyze a new media document (a course site with connected blogs for students).

• modification of Kress & Leeuwen's four strata: discourse, design, production, distribution + interpretation. 
• analysis of semiotic metafunctions: representations of the world; communications among producer, texts, and audiences; organization as a process of composition that ensures coherence
• modes of representation (+ what is represented) = how design/written/spoken language is use to impart information, give instruction, construct dialog, create coherence

3. Have some preliminary discussion of Livingstone (differences between the purposes, methods, and forms of research associated with media v information literacies research studies of new literacies).  Within this discussion, it is important to note Livingstone's observation that more attention (so far) has been paid to "questions of access, selection and understanding than . . . to the creation of content".  This was written in 2009, and there has been increased interest in production/participation - but our study is timely in its attention to a focus on the creation of new media materials and the role those creative processes play in "writers" lives.

4. Talk about what to think about in Kendall's essay on interviewing.

6.10 Rebellion

Just in case we don't have time for in-depth discussion of this essay on Friday, here is a kind of summary of what I was thinking we could use it for.

While the essay presents an in-depth analysis of a particular multimodal text (and the social structures that surround that text), for our purposes what is most important is Burn's review of theory, and his practices for applying that theory in his analysis. 

The essay emphasizes the usefulness of approaches rooted in social semiotics (cultural studies orientations) and attention to multimodality.  The introduction presents 3particular approaches (153-54):

•  Kress & Van Leeuwen's approach which attends to "four strata" ( discourse, design, production, distribution => which Burn supplements with interpretation);
• using semiotic metafunctions (ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions) - articulated by K &VL presentational, orientational, and organizational;
• and focus on the analysis of modes (both in the sense of the text's design AT the interface = multimodal, and in the sense of the hypertextual nature of the text, with multiple levels/modes for designer control see 161-62).

Burn use these all three of these approaches to describe what is going on in the composing process/product in his study.  Reading his application of these tools for analyzing/describing/interpreting multimodal texts can provide us with questions to ask about the communities we are studying.

As I read, I found myself reflecting several of his discussions. In particular I was interested in:

• his discussion of ideology.  Both the notion that the "static structures of ideology" are less mobile and more deterministic than the competing discourses that compose it; and the idea that "one can only be on the receiving end of an ideology.  While I can enter into definitions of ideology that make this true, I am interested in deconstructing the idea of ideology, much the way "academic discourse" has been taken apart - since after all, if everyone conceives of a concept/belief set differently => what exactly is the unifying principle that puts us on the receiving end?  I realize this is not fully worked out and would like to talk about it.  How are we going define ideology?  What do we want to do with it?  Who should we read to develop a more informed discussion?
• the definition of discourse he invoked = "knowledge of (some aspect of) reality" => which seems to place this study outside social constructionism in ways that we should take not of.
• what it means for texts to be multimodal (mentioned above)
• how meanings emerge through "connotation" 163
• discussion of the usefulness of semiotic analysis 165

I thought the identification of discourses associated with his participant's identities (expert-gamer, horror, proto-critical, ludic, and proto-designer) was particularly interesting, and felt that might be a useful way to think about some of our communities.

If you have questions - or anything you want to touch on re this essay, maybe post it as a comment here or on your blog so we can have some time to think about your ideas before we meet.

6.8 Design planning

In my talk with Chris Blair, Michele Sidler, and Paul Muhlhauser at the e-publishing workshop, about our project,

They suggested that we work on the following.

1. Finding an overall focus for the collection
=> in this discussion I put forward a focus on ideologies (the traditional ethnographic focus on identifying belief structures/systems as envisioned by the participants in that community) with an emphasis on looking at dynamic, contextual ideologies (the way they fragment & cohere) as in individuals (differentially) positions him/herself in material-world/mediated contexts.   In the back of my head, I am also thinking that we are going to want to document - though not necessarily in your chapters - our practices for "doing" connective, mediated ethnographies (e-texts).

2. Creating a content template.
List of points/moves each ethnography will hit and how it will connect back to the focus (see post 6.3 Overall shape of the book (writing so far)

3.  Creating a media template.
Menu of media representatios that should/could appear in each section for the content template.
We actually started working on this at our last meeting in terms of identifying the different approaches we will take to documenting our communities (see 5.27 post = mediated features).  I am hoping that at our next meeting we can have some more in-depth discussion of this list.  I got the following advice.

• take LOTS of screenshots (with methods/apps that have as high-resolution as possible) => they can be assembled as a kind of stop action video
• whenever possible = do video interviews
• check out  hootsuite  to archive tweets
• archive the sites you are documenting!  Link to the archive through your ethnography
• embed a livefeed so readers can look forward as well as back
• mediated data will need transcripts, alt tags etc

4. Creating a template for the file directories (consistent naming conventions, locations) + plan/share site maps

We should talk through processes for this planning = especially a it bears on data collection at our next meeting - what do you think?

6.6 Online publishing workshop

Publishers of digital texts who are here

Blackbird

Enculturation

Kairos

C&C online

Sweetland Digital Press

Harlot

General recommendations:

Think about design first

Compose in your design

Contact your editor early

Pay attention to directory structure + file naming conventions and extensions

Proofread your code

Technology expectations
depends on what you are trying to accomplish

technology expectations are often publication specific

Access to programs you need

Dreamweaver (or programs you want) may be on machines in some department on your campus) => look around your campus

Use free trials

Schools have computer labs + people who know how to use them

collaborations are good

Editors can help direct you to the right program =>e.g. video conversion tools => network! (because that knowledge is out there)

Coding

you can “work around” = use combination of html editor + looking at code

Take courses to learn code?
What about code academy?  OK=> but should use it with a project in mind

ruby?

Look at code checkers

Wave => can send your site through to check for accessibility issues

videos need transcripts

Check out standards published on journals (Kairos has standards for code)

Proofread your code

You need to have a basic literacy in code

Metadata is important (Cheryl)

Uses of images

For works that analyze images => high resolution photographs important = use of images

enculturation illustration = an ethnography of game design

screen capture of motion online  (of e-lit => in Blackbird)

videos need transcripts

images need rhet alt tags

Programs people use (or not):

imovie (not so good)  

photoshop

Dreamweaver

Wordpress Ok (not proprietary templates)

Don’t write something in word and click save as html

Don’t use Wix

Any system you use needs to be archivable

Journals need archivable copies for all elements in your essay

Sound quality is important FROM THE BEGINNING.  

Make sure you have the sound set at a level that will work (especially check sound for videos)

Ways to make sound better:

Blanket over your head in a closet

Sound studio

Ask a linguist

high-end recorder