Poetry in Motion goes to Paris (nope)
UPDATE: Paris in the summer is beyond this grad student's budget. Oh well, at least I got in. Maybe next time.
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I'll be presenting about my Poetry in Motion study at the 5th International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities in July 2007. You can read the abstract here.
Poetry in Motion is a study around kinetic typography and its use in poetry teaching. My pilot study showed a great deal of promise for animated text helping students get over their initial hesistance to engage with a poem, and I'll be running experiments in the next few weeks to test those preliminary results. Come to Paris next summer (or check back on the blog) for results!
memo about memo
Wrote a memo about the Poetry in Motion study last night; it seems that when you care about your work, it gets a lot harder. I'm frustrated by the secondary activities that are taking my energy, whether it's doing my dishes or writing a backup routine for my laptop. I don't normally have that "not enough time in the day" problem, but lately life's a bit overwhelming.
I still haven't figured out how to manage all my personal information, from class notes to research project data to personal email. One would think that a degree from the School of Info would indicate an ability to manage information, but I must have missed that. Or, maybe I got too much exposure to info management, and now I'm paralyzed by the number of options available. At any rate, I finally came around and got my external storage running properly. Now the data gathering can commence since I'm pretty sure I won't lose it.
Qual Methods Class Notes 1/31/06
Interviewing
context: in qualitative methods class, talking about our experiences piloting interviews
choosing recording, transcription, etc. should be methodological - can't really do qualitative coding on interviewing notes; best way for those is transcription from recording
question order - make sure you ask everyone a small set and whatever else you get to
audio recording and transcribing -
navigating community - think about how you present yourself to the interviewee; if you're part of their community, will they leave out some info assuming you already know it?
sensitivity - cultural, genderPoetry in Motion notes
thinking about what i'm trying to do with this study -
physicists - experts think in patterns, same with chess; novices think in surface features
is something analogous true in poetry? experts think in tone, voice, rhythm where novices think in words?
expertise = about levels of analysis, level of engagement, patterns of perception?
some literature on history educaton - critical thinking skills, analysis of evidence, perspective, voice; getting at more than comprehension
am I really asking if poetry readers become expert poetry readers?
K-12? expert readers; Ann Brown reciprocal teaching
from 701 - Bolter's language splits (pictoral, verbal); contrasts visual culture vs. verbal culture - Ekphrasis
unprounceable guy (chksmyhali something), research in 70's about art students' production (problem finders)
{ break }
participant observation
line btw PO and informal interviewing sort of blurred (from readings)
trouble note-taking after the informal interview
contant comparison
ala Glaser and Strauss - constantly comparing methods, results, protocols
For next week
skip transcriber instructions
memo - notes to yourself about future interviews
coded interview - Beth's going to post one coded in Word (probably using comment feature)
build up a code list, think about the coding process (let the data lead you)
Stuff I missed
Atlas TI
Research Design
Glaser and Strauss
Blank slate - how much literature should you know before starting your research project? How should lit review inform development of categories and properties?
Hypothesis proving - not really the activity here; goal is really to generate theory (explanation of categories and their relationships)
Theoretical sampling - discover categories and their properties in order to suggest interrelationships into a theory
Categories and properties definitions and examples
Ways to find definitions of categories and properties: previous research, emerge from your research (observations, informants), what they mean to you; make sure it's clear to you that you know where the definitions are coming from
Perspectives on these approaches - depends on your world view; i.e. phenomenologists would usually let them emerge from informants
Categories - concept(s) of the populations you're looking at; i.e. ways of figuring out the poem (affective, literal, etc.)
Note: in observing classes and interviewing, will categories of engagement surface? Can probably generate categories from behavior seen in pilot observations.
Properties - attributes of categories; i.e. how you assess understanding in those ways of figuring out the poem
Saturation - a category is saturated when you know all its properties
Writing up findings
How much detail you provide about categories and category development depends in part on where you'll publish
Memo-ing - write down what you're seeing happen; note: seems like you should keep track of everything so that you can write for different audiences later; need help figuring out how to organize that info later
Tying to previous knowledge - humanities more exhaustively list/examine previous work
Conceptual Frameworks
Idea: maybe the framework is a few boxes that represent categories with arrows to boxes that represent interpretation; question remains about how the poem itself acts within the network of categories and understanding
Diagram and revise is OK
Suchman and Trigg
Admit they think social's important
Video - helps you see where you're focusing versus what's happening; can show it to informants and ask them what's going on
Question: can you approximate those bias checks by going back to a situation more than once and requiring yourself to take notes on something else? Assumes some regularity
Bias vs. expertise - we have both; some expertise is having a sense of what's important, significant, interesting
Downsides of video - can get lulled into inattentive observation (assuming video's getting it all), still need a protocol (where you're going to focus, criteria for taping some stuff but not others)
Yong-mi: lots of video at School of Ed of classroom behavior; question: do they have any about poetry that I could reuse?
Sackmann
Issue focus and phenomenological focus; also add "critical incident" focus - trigger memory and start conversation in different ways
In PIM - talk about, interpret, an activity in one of the classes observed; "on Wednesday last week, you introduced the concept of X, talk about how and why you did that"
Props - bring the artifact to job someone's memory or to structure the discussion
Content-analysis vs. data-analysis - content analysis is on something you didn't generate, something that's already existing (analyzing interview responses is data analysis)
Seems defensive - and how does it happen that all her methods work the first time?
General methods discussion
Ethnography - implies some emergence within the situation that you're studying
Ethnographic methods - using methods to understand some aspects of culture
Ethnomethodology - more phenomenological, tries to get at how the society you're examining makes sense; described in Garfinkle's Good Organizational Reasons for Bad Clinic Records
New words
Armamentarium - collection of resources available for a certain purpose