Methodological Play
Introduction
In this book, we draw on methodologies of data visualization, thin description, media archaeology, and multimodal performance to ask questions of the English Journal archive at various levels of scale. Using methodologies of thin description and data visualization, we zoom out in chapter 3 to visualize trends across our corpus over time that were not easily perceptible via traditional practices of close reading. We quickly found, however, that these “thin descriptions” (Love 2013) often pointed our scholarly attention to intriguing moments in the corpus that called out for thicker description and deeper engagement. Drawing on methodologies of media archaeology and multimodal performance, then, chapters 4 through 7 present multimodal case studies of intriguing new media moments in the archive—exploring alternative ways of telling history by playing with multiple modalities and genres of composition.
Although we eventually foreground some tentative claims about the evolution of new media pedagogies in English studies throughout this book, we also consciously seek to resist the narrative certainty of conventional print history by engaging in a kind of heuristical play that reveals certain interested and selective elements of historiography. In other words, we employ a variety of digital, multimodal tools to craft a fluid, open text that ultimately raises more questions than it answers. Our goal is not to demonstrate the “historical truth” behind one particular approach at the expense of others, but rather to assemble a multivalent reading that productively complicates the “terministic screens” (Burke 1968) associated with each methodology. To this end, we have consciously drawn on quite diverse and even potentially contradictory methodological traditions in crafting this history. Our goal here has not been to pit methodologies against one another in order to choose a winner, but rather to demonstrate the value of a playful approach to research, one that views the recursive juxtaposition of methodological frameworks as a potential source of insight. Re-seeing an archive through multiple lenses can be one way for scholars to practice what Royster and Kirsch call “strategic contemplation”—a feminist research orientation that encourages scholars to slow down and “think multidirectionally” (Royster and Kirsch 2012, 86)—to aim “to take as much into account as possible but to withhold judgement for a time and resist coming to closure too soon in order to make time to invite creativity, wonder, and inspiration into the research process” (85). We greatly appreciate Royster and Kirsch’s emphasis on the value of slowing down, exploring multiple perspectives, and consciously resisting the will to achieve closure.
Although Royster and Kirsch don’t explicitly discuss methodologies for born-digital, multimodal scholarship, we find that their foregrounding of strategic contemplation as a research practice has some resonance with our own attempts to use digital tools to re-see an archive through diverse lenses. For example, Royster and Kirsch draw on the work of Geertz (1973) to argue for the value of recursive “tacking in” and “tacking out” of an archive at differing levels of scale. While “tacking in” involves conventional scholarly processes of close reading, the process of “tacking out” entails using “critical imagination to look back from a distance [. . .] in order to broaden our own viewpoints in anticipation of what might become more visible from a longer or broader view, where the scene may not be in fine detail” (72). This project seeks to demonstrate how thin description and data visualization (i.e., tacking out) can function as practices of “critical imagination” that can enable us to notice patterns in our archives that might not be perceptible through close reading alone; at the same time, we concur with Royster and Kirsch that scholars should recursively switch between the distant and the close view (or the thin and the thick description)—that the process of recursively attempting to re-see an archive at differing levels of scale can itself be a source of insight.
We also find resonance with Royster and Kirsch’s assertion of the dynamic, multisensory nature of archival research. Resisting the tendency of historians to privilege alphabetic ways of knowing, Royster and Kirsch call on feminist scholars to “recognize the senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, intuition) as sources of information in rhetorical performance and the analysis of rhetorical performance” (94). Although print histories certainly can attend to multisensory ways of knowing, we suggest that the medium of print tends to over-privilege alphabetic forms of evidence. In contrast, digital multimodal methodologies for engaging archives offer more affordances for showcasing how historians make meaning in multisensory ways.
As much as we see “strategic contemplation” as a guiding principle of our historical inquiry, we worry a bit that it calls up an image of scholarship that is perhaps a little too quiet and reverent to fully describe our collaborative inquiry process. As we seek to highlight the disruptive potential of methodological play, we also enact what Heather Branstetter describes as a “promiscuous” approach to historical methodology that is “performative, playful, and mischievous” (Branstetter 2018, 18). Resisting conventional norms of methodological “purity” within the academy, Branstetter’s theory of methodological promiscuity foregrounds instead “a radical orientation towards openness, trying on different ways of looking at the world and spreading that knowledge around” (Branstetter 2016, 20). We appreciate here how Branstetter highlights the disruptive pleasure that can be gained by mashing up methodological frameworks in unexpected ways. We also are inspired by Branstetter’s assertion that remixing methodologies in the field can be a way for scholars to “spread knowledge around” beyond the walls of the academy by exploring ways of composing research that might be more accessible and engaging to non-academic audiences. In this project, we’ve sought to “spread knowledge around” by composing a digital open-access book. And even within this book, we’ve created numerous works of stand-alone, “spreadable media” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013)—short videos, podcasts, and interactive quizzes—that we hope can circulate independent of the book and reach broader audiences interested in K-12 English education who might neither have the time nor inclination to read a more traditional academic monograph.
In this chapter, we begin by outlining the methodological frameworks of thin description and data visualization that have guided our attempts to visualize the evolution of new media pedagogies over time from a bird's eye view. We then turn to elucidating the methodology of media archaeology that has shaped the questions we have asked of the English Journal archive at differing levels of scale. Moving to the micro level of scale, we next articulate the methodology of multimodal performance that has shaped our composing of multimodal case studies in chapters 4 through 7. We finally conclude this chapter with a detailed explanation of our specific methods for gathering, coding, and analyzing the articles in our textual corpus.
