Lesson for Week 7: Day 1
7:1
As you write your report on the discourse in your field, you are still in the process of "inventing" material or gathering data. We might call this part of the pre-writing stage, but you have already begun to write some portions of the report, like the literature review.
What I would like you to consider today is two different contexts of your work. On the one hand, you are working in the context of discovery; that is, you have read some theory so that you could build a literature review and so that you would have a lens to guide your research and discussion, you searched the web to find general background information and to build a portfolio of documents, you interviewed someone to get more specific information, and you will be doing a close analysis of one document. All these activities are helping you gather information, data.
Let's imagine that the research is like a cow (no offense intended) who is munching hay. The researcher gathers, chews briefly, and swallows the information he or she is gathering. Like a cow, the researcher needs to bring the material back up and chew it again and send it to another stomach, where more digestion can take place. Eventually the original structure of the hay is dissolved. In the same way, the researcher wants to so digest the material she has gathered that it looses its old structure. We can say this is the process of dissolving the old associations the data has so that it becomes, as much as possible, pure data no longer shaped by the context of discovery.
Once the research has been able to gather data and strip it of its old context, she is ready to look at it with fresh eyes. This process is still invention like, but it also has qualities of arrangement in it because the researcher is both creating new material by using fresh eyes and making a new pattern. No one can see things without some kind of predisposition, but at least she can break the old associations in order to incorporate the data into a new system, her own interpretation. This process is one of creating new associations, in which the researcher begins to put like things with other like things, regardless of where they came from originally. When enough of these like things are gathered together in separate groups, the first step of classification is complete.
To complete the classification process, the researcher then tries to come up with the appropriate superordinate term, a term that captures the common thread of all the items in the category. This is a naming process which creates the researcher's own interpretation of the data. What she comes up with is her own reality. When she writes her report, she will be inviting the reader to share her view of reality.
The classification process is particularly important in the Results and Discussion part of an empirical research report. Remember that your report is to be structured as follows.
It is in the Results and Discussion Section of the report that you are to present your findings and talk about their significance. You can do that separately, presenting all the findings first and then discussing the results, or you can take one set of findings first, present them, and discuss them, and then move on to the next, and so on.
In either case, you need to be able to look at all your data and to separate that material into different categories. This is the same process Professor Goreham went through when he and his colleagues created their results section (see his power point). In his talk, he explained that they had turned all of their interviews into transcripts by typing them. Then they read the transcripts several times until patterns began to emerge. They divided the responses they got into five piles or categories and then named each. Then they used one color of highlighter to mark passages that fell into one category and highlighters of other colors to mark passages that fell into other categories.
You need to go through something of the same process. You will be looking at all of your data (that collected from the web, from the interview, and from your textual analysis) in order to answer the research question, "What are the discourses practices of this field?" The most promising set of data for applying the process of classification is probably your portfolio of documents, but it may be that you will be able to apply it to all of the data you've collected, seeing categories emerge from different sources of data.
Classification is a process of dividing things based on some principle of division that is appropriate to whatever set of data you are working with. So, let's say you're analyzing your portfolio of documents. In this case, you might use the principle of "audience" to create two or three large categories, or you might use the principles of function or purpose, or you might divide discourse into oral practices and written practices. Although you can use more than one principle of division to classify data, you should be consistent and use only one category at each level. For example, if you divide documents according to audience, you might end up with two large categories: internal and external audiences. But these groups are so large, that you may then want to subdivide each by using another principle, say purpose. If you use purpose to divide internal documents into types, then you should use purpose to divide external documents into types as well.
It isn't enough to simply divide and classify. Eventually in your report, you will have paragraphs announcing your divisions and talking about each, one at time, describing the characteristics of each category, and referencing examples from your portfolio of documents.
1. Finish work on your interview transcript and send it to me as an email attachment.
2. Study your portfolio of documents; if you have been working hard to build it, you should have 15 to 20 samples in it by now. Make a list of all the documents in the portfolio and write a note behind each one to help you remember it. Once you have a list, decide what the list is showing you about document types. Select a principle of division and break the list into separate lists according to that classification principle. If you need to break those lists, then choose another principle of division, and break each of the lists according to that. You should end up with something like the outline below but with specific names instead of generic names like "category one":
Types of Documents in (name of field)
I. Category oneSend that classification list to me as an email attachment. If you don't have enough material in the portfolio to do this kind of classification, look at all of your data and try to come up with categories. In this case the results will be "types of discourse practices" rather than "types of documents." In either case, send me you classification list.
3. Read "outlining", pp. 384 ff., and "collaborative writing," pp. 80 ff.,in HTW
4. Read
We'll use these later.