Methods
Through discussions of Practice versus Process in “Visualizing Writing Activity as Knowledge Work: Challenges & Opportunities”, I find it interesting to note the connections between the problems faced in some of the research to the problems discussed last week on Quantitative versus Qualitative research methods. The description of the study by Prior and Shipka, where depictions were made to represent the writing process, is on a qualitative level like no other. Each writer would have an individualized collection of drawings illustrating their process, their emotions, and their developments. Without the proper symbols to communicate each of these ideas to an outside writer (one not in that writer’s head) it would be difficult to translate into something useful for someone else to use as a process.
What the researchers are striving for is this ability to translate these types of visual depictions of process. In order to be useful to other writers, there must be apparent certain patterns and similarities that can be studied and replicated. This struck me as an effort to take a more qualitative method and merge it with a quantitative one. By becoming more quantitative, these types of studies could be replicated more easily by others and provide more useful information for individual writers.
From how they seem to be approaching it, I think they are thinking about it in a very real way. One specification they include for how to approach the visualization is data driven; “depicting practice in a detailed and accurate way with enough regularity to permit the emergence of visible patterns that are meaningful for understanding and, in some cases, acting strategically to change these patterns for the better.” (75) If this was successful, there could be a way to standardize the visualizations and how they are perceived. The “emergence of visible patterns” would allow for these standards to be created and allow for a more standard key of labels and assumptions for these visualizations.
In establishing categories that are both explicit and flexible, they are reaching for a better way for these patterns to be clear to both the writers who created them, and those who want to replicate them. This ability to replicate ties in well with the idea of a more-quantitative qualitative method. Perhaps they are just reaching for a better qualitative method rather than merging the two (as I would hope so that this connection could be valid), however I still find these points interesting.
Works cited:
Hart-Davidson, William, Clay Spinuzzi, and Mark Zachry. “Visualizing Writing Activity as Knowledge Work: Challenges & Opportunities.” ACM SIGDOC. (2006): 70-77. PDF.