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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!

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.

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 -

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