Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Research Methods and Digital Writing


Few (if any) would be willing to deny that digital technologies are changing writing and writing studies research persistently and significantly. Because of this, we cannot ignore the consequences for research methods and methodologies. (Citing Patricia Sullivan and James Porter, Stuart Blythe describes methods as “procedures, techniques” and methodologies as more epistemological viewpoints [205], a distinction I will maintain here.) Addressing these consequences is precisely the focus of Digital Writing Research: Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues, edited by Heidi A. McKee and Danielle Nicole DeVoss. What this text emphasizes throughout its chapters are ways by which researchers might build upon and adapt more traditional research methods to work more effectively with digital technologies and sites.

Underwriting much of the chapters by various authors in this text is a general sense of research methods tradition. Given the more humanistic/social sciences approaches discussed throughout, the emphasis here is certainly on qualitative methods. John Creswell describes qualitative research as that which “involves emerging questions and procedures, data typically in the participant’s setting, data analysis inductively building from particulars to general themes, and the researcher making interpretations of the meaning of the data” (4). These methods are at the fore throughout the majority of the articles here, as many authors discuss the importance of engaging in research in the particular context in which text production or interactions occur (e.g., Sapienza 90; Smith 134). In addition, many of the scholars in Digital Writing Research talk discuss their research in digital spaces and on digital texts in terms of traditional qualitative research practices. Perhaps one of the more common practices discussed in the text is ethnography. As Janice Lauer and William Asher explain, “ethnographers observe many facets of writers in their writing environments over long periods of time in order to identify, operationally define, and interrelate variables of the writing act in its context” (39). Beatrice Smith’s chapter, for example, seeks to bring ethnographic practices into a hybrid workplace (where work occurs at a physical office as well as an online space). This chapter, and indeed all of the others, raises the key questions of the text. Rebecca Rickly puts these questions perhaps most succinctly: “Are traditional research methods sufficient to capture the complexity when studying writing/writing scenarios? What happens when we add technology to the mix? Are traditional methods (or our understanding and/or application of them) enough, or do we need new ones” (381)?

The short version is that many of the authors represented here feel that some of the traditional methods as often taught and some of the rigidity prescribed (or implied) in their traditional manifestations indeed are not adequately meeting the needed of researchers exploring digital technologies and writing. In nearly every chapter, the author or authors point to the complexities digital technologies and spaces create relative to traditional methods. In their introduction to the anthology, McKee and DeVoss note the vast changes that have occurred in what constitutes “writing,” how writers and audiences interact, and how collaboration takes place (9-10). As a consequence, researchers must approach traditional practices more critically and reflexively.

One area that requires more careful attention is in ethical considerations. Working in digital spaces creates a number of complications related to treating participants ethically. First, Will Banks and Michelle Eble remind us that though these spaces are virtual, we are still dealing with human participants, and we must consider how our interactions with these participants can have ramifications for them not typical of research conducted in physical environments, especially since online interactions always leave permanent digital traces (31-32, 39). Furthermore, online and digital environments make distinguishing between “published discourse and private discourse” all the more difficult (Sidler 78), and we must wonder if the digital spaces we examine are texts (or products) or sites where people interact (DePew 55). In other words, how we treat the texts we are examining and how we treat the people who produce those texts take on new complications in digital research contexts. The new digital modes of text production also raise ethical concerns in terms of copyright and intellectual property rights. Because of the ease of access to what researchers produce, we must consider ownership in new ways (McIntire-Strasburg 288). Copyright has multiple layers of complexity, and what constitutes fair use and altering to the point of significant difference becomes especially fuzzy (294, 296).

Another area of complexity created by digital technologies and environments is how to address the mercurial nature of these technologies and spaces. As anyone who has saved a link and tried to use it months later or who has relied on a particular tool for something only to have that tool mysteriously go offline can attest, things on the Web change rapidly. Because the technologies are malleable, our methods need to be flexible to adapt to those changes (Rickly 379). Often, this requires a greater commitment to applying multiple methods in our research. Kevin DePew advocates a strategy of triangulation of both the types of data we rely on and the types of methods we employ in our research, which can help researchers avoid the “god trick,” or a biased, one-sided view of the data (53, 54).

In response to such complexities, a number of scholars here suggest the explicit use of theory to guide and frame the work researchers do. Certainly, this is not unique to research in digital writing. Creswell notes that certain worldviews or philosophies guide research (5-10), and Lauer and Asher note that research often uses theory to validate or produce new theories (5). What is most compelling in the discussions of theory in Digital Writing Research is the breadth of the theories employed and their unabashed political nature (which I think is a good thing). Digital technologies are often touted as the great equalizers of knowledge. This has not proven to be the case, and researchers are right to bring critical frameworks to their work, be that the ecofeminism proposed by Julia Romberger, the use of articulation theory that allows critical analysis and re-articulation of digital technologies as discussed by Amy Kimme Hea, or the use of visual and aesthetic theory to analyze digitally produced visuals advocated by Susan Hilligoss and Sean Williams.

These uses and adaptations of some of the traditional methodologies and approaches to the complexities generated by research in digital writing point to a recognition of the value of traditional methods—but that recognition is not an unquestioning devotion. Instead, the chapters in this text point to a discipline that is theory-driven, deeply concerned with ethical considerations (especially as they pertain to the research participants), flexible in response to ever-changing digital technologies, and comfortable with certain levels of indeterminacy. Such an epistemology seems to me well suited to move research methods and methodologies well into the twenty-first century.

Works Cited
Banks, Will, and Michelle Eble. “Digital Spaces, Online Environments, and Human Participant Research: Interfacing with Institutional Review Boards.” McKee and DeVoss 27-47. Print.

Blythe, Stuart. “Coding Digital Texts and Multimedia.” McKee and DeVoss 203-27. Print.

Creswell, John W. Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. 3rd ed. Los Angeles: Sage, 2009. Print.

DePew, Kevin Eric. “Through the Eyes of Researchers, Rhetors, and Audiences: Triangulating Data from the Digital Writing Situation.” McKee and DeVoss 49-69. Print.

Hilligoss, Susan, and Sean Williams. “Composition Meets Visual Communication: New Research Questions.” McKee and DeVoss 229-47. Print.

Kimme Hea, Amy. “Riding the Wave: Articulating a Critical Methodology for Web Research Practices.” McKee and DeVoss 269-86. Print.

Lauer, Janice M., and J. William Asher. Composition Research: Empirical Designs. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Print.

McIntire-Strasburg, Janice. “Multimedia Research: Difficult Questions with Indefinite Answers.” McKee and DeVoss 287-300. Print.

McKee, Heidi A., and Danielle Nicole DeVoss, eds. Digital Writing Research: Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues. New Dimensions in Computers and Composition. Ed. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe. Creskill: Hampton, 2007. Print.

McKee, Heidi A., and Danielle Nicole DeVoss. Introduction. McKee and DeVoss 1-24. Print.

Rickly, Rebecca. “Messy Contexts: Research as a Rhetorical Situation.” McKee and DeVoss 377-97. Print.

Romberger, Julia E. “An Ecofeminist Methodology: Studying the Ecological Dimensions of the Digital Environment.”

Sapienza, Fil. “Ethos and Researcher Positionality in Studies of Virtual Communities.” McKee and DeVoss 89-106. Print.

Sidler, Michelle. “Playing Scavenger and Gazer with Scientific Discourse: Opportunities and Ethics for Online Research.” McKee and DeVoss 71-86. Print.

Smith, Beatrice. “Researching Hybrid Literacies: Methodological Explorations of ‘Ethnography’ and the Practices of the Cybertariat.” McKee and DeVoss 127-49. Print.

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