Research
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Re: the framing of knitting as “an activity often dismissed as dull busywork for elderly women.” Maciel first noticed the phenomenon of Tucson knitters (which, due to Tucson’s climate, seemed like a counterintuitive phenomenon - and I grant him that) in 2011. This was 8 years after the publication of Debbie Stoller’s book Stitch ‘N Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook and 6 years after the publication of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter. Kim Werker founded the online magazine Crochet Me in 2004 because the world was full of cool stuff for knitters and not for crocheters. The website Craftster was founded in 2000. The Internet Archive has snapshots of the forum get crafty dating back to 1999. CROQzine began publication in 2005. Faythe Levine’s companion book and documentary, both titled Handmade Nation, came out in 2008 and 2009, respectively. Researcher Andre F. Maciel “learned that millions of women have taken up the hobby during the past two decades,” but a lot of this news piece frames it as if he’s discovered something wildly new. (The fact that part of his data collection included reviewing “640 articles about knitting found in large-circulation newspapers and magazines such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and the New Yorker” makes it clear that this was not a novel phenomenon in 2011 and still is not in 2021.) Again, I haven’t read the journal article; perhaps it does not treat the new domesticity as a hidden secret that only he and his colleague discovered in the past 10 years.
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“Martha Stewart and others led a New Cult of Domesticity that embraced household endeavors such as cooking, baking, fiber crafts and home decorating.” This is the first time I’ve heard of the new domesticity referred to as the New Cult of Domesticity. Also, while Martha Stewart definitely was a big part of the most mainstream stuff happening here, she doesn’t exhibit the punk rock ethos that I associate with the new domesticity.
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“They are contesting this cultural inequality, the stereotypes of knitting. Itβs not in a radical way β they are not joining social movements as hard-core activists; they are not breaking social ties. They are not radical feminists; they are not abandoning their traditional roles. They want to reclaim the value of womenβs culture.β I expect this kind of generalization is the natural outcome of a newsy piece as opposed to a scholarly piece; presumably Maciel and Wallendorf address the limitations of their study in the journal article. For example, their survey found that “Of the 110 knitters who responded to Macielβs survey, 87% held a college degree and two-thirds lived in households with earnings of about $90,000. Most of them were white, most held conventional middle-class jobs, and most lived in committed relationships. About half had children living at home.” But it’s worth noting that when it comes to surveys " …women are more likely to participate than men (Curtin et al., 2000; Moore & Tarnai, 2002; Singer et al., 2000), younger people are more likely to participate than older people (Goyder, 1986; Moore & Tarnai, 2002), and white people are more likely to participate than non-white people (Curtin et al., 2000; Groves et al., 2000; Voigt et al., 2003).” (G. Smith, 2008) (PDF) So there may be a disparity between who knits and who responded to the survey. There is work out there specifically on craftivists. While perhaps the participants and respondents in this study were not radical, that’s not to say that crafters in general aren’t. (Don’t even get me started on the terminology of “make” vs. “craft,” that’s a conversation for another post.)
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This is clearly affinity space research. When conducting research on an affinity space, there are plenty of potential challenges to doing ethical research. Taking this sort of traditional anthropological outsider view is out-of-step with the best affinity space research I’ve seen. This study is billed as an ethnography and I’m curious to see how the journal article frames it and how it addresses research ethics.
- the literalization of the saying “high school is hell”
- the deliberate disruption of horror film tropes
- the manifestation of what I call “Spiderman moments,” when Buffy faces and must resolve a conflict between her responsibilities and desires as a teenager and her responsibilities and desires as a Vampire Slayer
- FAN STUDIES NETWORK NORTH AMERICA
- Start Here
- Check-in Desk
- Announcements
- Help Desk
- Self-introductions
- IMPORTANT
- Code of conduct
- Safety
- Meeting etiquette
- Twitter policy
- Tech resources and info
- Schedule of events
- MAIN
- The lobby
- The hallway
- Coffee tea and sad cookies
- The bar
- Safer spaces
- There were a number of spaces for people to go based on their own identity to decompress. For example, I was in a space for people with mental illness. You signed up for these spaces by clicking a specific emoji, then the organizers would add you to the relevant channel. You could not see any of the channels that you had not been admitted to.
- POSTERS
- Each poster had its own channel. Posters were uploaded as the first message in the channel.
- SPECIAL EVENTS
- Each event had its own channel.
- WORKSHOPS
- Each workshop had its own channel.
- SALONS
- Each salon had its own channel.
- RECORDINGS
- There was a channel here for each session of any type with a link to the recording on Vimeo.
- PARTICIPATING PUBLISHERS
- Each publisher had their own channel where they could share discounts and answer questions.
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- In this section, the organizers offered thanks to a bunch of people and organizations.
- Before grad school?
- During grad school?
- After grad school?
- Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn’t?
- Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?
Response to "Knittingβs resurgence reflects womenβs desire to confront inequality": things that have been things for a while, affinity space research, and punk rock new domesticity
I may receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post.
I’m writing up a response to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Nebraska Today article, Knittingβs resurgence reflects womenβs desire to confront inequality. This is a super off-the-cuff response that I hope to shape in the future into a proper essay but I need to get ideas out now or I may never bother.
I’m probably going to do this as sort of a list of thoughts.
Please note: I have not read the study referenced here, which according to its abstract looks like it focuses on consumers' use of space (hence the focus on yarn shops, stitch & pitch, etc) to “contest… cultural devaluation.” What the abstract describes and what the news piece talks about overlap, but certainly don’t appear to be identical. I hope to read the article soon.
As I said, this is a gut response. This piece and especially the journal article it references deserve more attention.
I’ve made my Conceptual Synthesis Spreadsheet Notion template available via Gumroad. It’s pay-what-you-can/want. This spreadsheet is based on Raul Pacheco-Vega’s Article-Introduction-Conclusion/Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump method.
Personal reflections after (but not really on) #FanLIS
My head is swimming after attending the #FanLIS symposium today. At this moment when I’m taking a few weeks off before launching consulting, occasionally doing job interviews, and mostly resting, I’m in the middle of an existential crisis about what I want to do and who I want to be.
I’m in a position where, if I can bring in a fair amount of freelance work, I could use some of my time as an independent scholar and I think that’s what I want to do. I’m not interested in academia-as-institutionalized-in-higher-ed but I love scholarship. I don’t want to not be a scholar.
I’ve been reviewing my notes from Katie Rose Guest Pryal’s Book The Freelance Academic and this quote is standing out to me today:
Our tracks are, by necessity, only limited by our own creativity. They literally are what we make them. (p. 49 in the Kindle edition)
So this is my track today. Freelance academic/independent scholar-librarian.
Tomorrow: Digging into Raul Pacheco-Vega’s blog for help setting up my workflows moving forward.
Most of my tweets from #FanLIS
I’m planning to return and clean up formatting and add links to videos once they’re online, but for now, here’s a collection of everything I tweeted from the presentations at #FanLIS, handily compiled and tweeted for me by Noter Live.
introducing #FanLIS - fans are information workers par excellence
Leisure interests are important to study because they are what we choose to do and are no less important than any other aspect of our lives: work, health, etc.
Fan information work is a subset of fun information work.
How can we harness the passion fans have for solving the problems of LIS? Can we?
#FanLIS seeks to explore the liminal space where fandom, fan studies, and LIS interact and can hopefully learn from each other. What do we know? Where should we go next as a field of research?
They examined methods reported in Journal of Fandom Studies & Transformative Works and Cultures. Used computational analysis to scrape all keywords for both journals & inductively analyzed sample of 50 abstracts. Compared with a similar study in journalism.
20 most often occurring keywords tended to focus on research setting, media or media type, phenomenon investigated
Top theory keywords include gender, ethics, participatory culture, cultural theories, feminism, CRT, queer theory, and more. Significant overlap between theory keywords in fan studies & journalism but not in overall keywords.
Wide variety of methods employed in fan studies. Of those named specifically, ethnography is most frequent, then terms referring to specific methodological techniques (interviews, content analysis, etc). Only methodological perspective present aside from ethnography & its subtypes is case study
Dominant perspectives are sociology, culture, economics, language, history, technology
Most studies don't cite a specific theoretical perspective but many theories are used in the ones that do.
Abstract often lacked reference to specific research methodological approach. Ethnography & case studies. Discourse analysis & textual analysis dominant as well.
Conclusion: explicitly naming theoretical & methodological approaches in keywords & abstracts makes fan studies more visible to other disciplines. We should tag our research as carefully as we tag our fanfic.
Using IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) format for abstract increases likelihood of paper being read.
discussing project to explore possiblity of taking data generated by enthusiast communities and creating knowledge graph for researchers to use
Examples of visual media enthusiast data repositories include Visual Novel Database, AnimeClick, Anime Characters Database
Enthusiasts had positive response to project, wanted to cooperate to make data available with an intermediary who can bridge expertise between enthusiasts and researchers.
Used RDF format of Entity - Property - Value.
Each community has its own data model. Goal is to examine all of these, which vary according to domain (manga vs anime vs visual novel, etc) and create data model that can be used across domains.
Custom web front end allows researcher to retrieve data. Human-readable labels appear instead of actual data which makes exploration easy.
Can identify identical entities mentioned in multiple enthusiast data sources. Goal is to combine them into single entity.
All data is linked to original enthusiast source, enabling researchers to verify info and even interact with enthusiasts.
Want to maintain specific source ontologies rather than trying to impose a particular perspective on enthusiast data.
Share Alike requirement in CC licenses present a challenge. (I'd love to hear more about this. Would applying a CC license to the knowledge graph handle this?)
Project website: https://jvmg.iuk.hdm-stuttgart.de/
Using lenses from fan studies and platform studies to look at the rise and fall? and preservation of Twitch Plays Pokemon.
Twitch Plays Pokemon is a crowd-sourced set of commands being sent to control Pokemon Red. Fans created a narrative/meta-text around the game on other platforms.
Twitch Plays Pokemon moved on to other games after Pokemon Red and inspired Twitch Plays Street Fighter and Twitch Plays Dark Souls. Big decrease in participation for Twitch Plays Pokemon over time.
RQs: What are the affordances that allowed the TPP community to emerge? How did the fans act as archivists?
Qual research including looking at user-generated content, observation of stream and chat, and interview with anonymous streamer who established TPP.
Brum's affordances of produser communities present in TPP: open participation, unfinished, meritocracy & heterarchy, communal property. (Did I miss one? Regardless, this reminds me a LOT of Gee's affinity spaces.)
argues that lack of holding to accepted Twitch standards and choosing to improvise contributed to decrease of participation.
Fans served as volunteer curators, while official channel administrators mostly focus on technical content and don't engage much with metanarrative.
Conclusions - this is a hungry culture, not originally designed for expansion, small passionate group of fans remains, visiting past gameplay & nostalgia factor brings community together/revitalizes.
What if we used fannish platforms to publish scholarship?
Brainstorming doc at https://docs.google.com/document/d/19PbNM8WwUVR8J4PDkm2w0Y9cLHa6sVoRt02ivgGdj9A/edit#heading=h.ihz2vfxozzxq
The open access workflow and results are v. similar to for-profit workflow and results. "We recreate a mirror image of for-profit scholarly publishing."
We're constantly trying to prove that open access can be high quality. (What if we actually reimagine scholarly publishing? What if we make something so different it doesn't invite comparison?)
Fan publishing and academic publishing have enough in common that fan publishing can help us reimagine scholarly publishing.
Talking about affect and its centrality to fanfiction. (Making me think of my #NSFEITM work with @marijel_melo and @theartofmarch and I'm wondering how widely affect is present in LIS research in general.)
talking about fanfiction and info seeking behaviors of young adult readers
suggests that methods for fanfiction info seeking can illuminate creation of library services & support
RQs: How do YA find fanfic to read? How do they find fiction to read? How do those methods differ between each other? Are there differences between experienced fanfic readers and new fanfic readers?
Pilot study with YA ages 18 - 23. Semistructured interviews. 90% of participants began engaging with fanfic & online fandom in high school.
50% found fanfic via serendipity (Tumblr, Google, etc) and 40% via friends. (This connects with the importance of friends in my research on cosplay information literacy.)
AO3 is clear winner for fanfic reading among participants. Apparently podfic has migrated to YouTube?
None of participants went to librarians for book recs. (Oh my heart is breaking!)
On Adventure Time: "As you can see, the show makes total sense." AHAHAHAHAHAHA
Using analytic autoethnography. Sometimes gets flack from others who perceive autoethnography as not being rigorous.
importance of roles and hierarchies in determining how to include/cite sources in wiki articles; how to
Talking about individual as library & librarian and individual as archive & archivist
In a time of collapse (like now), we need to think about how people will preserve media and visual culture. The people doing this work are more likely to be pirates than institutional actors.
Critics & legal opponents of archives are not framed as individuals, but are instead described as communities, collectives, and corporations.
Oof the rhetoric of using libraries as stealing if you're not too poor to buy books. Yikes.
Individuals feel responsibility for cultural preservation and distrust institutions to do it; systematic disinvestment in public preservation institutions fuels this.
Academic libraries should learn from pirates' and fans' examples. Reject exploitative pricing models.
Fans should take their fandom and love really seriously and think about whether they can be archivists or want to be archivists.
You can now watch my dissertation defense presentation! I’ve stopped the video before the Q&A to protect my committee and guests' privacy, but if you want to see the version with questions included, DM or email me and I’ll send you the link.
Submitted my dissertation to the university. Ordered Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s The Dark Fantastic from Rofhiwa BookcafΓ© to celebrate. π ππ
So I’m reading my dissertation and I think it’s… Good? Like it was written by somebody who knows what they’re talking about? I take this as evidence that I know what I’m talking about. π
About to start reading and marking up this thing in preparation for next week’s defense, at which I will boldly go where (to my knowledge) no Hirsh has gone before. π
I have now met all my pre-defense scholarly obligations (paper draft & guest lecture) so I guess it’s time to prepare for my defense. googles makeup tutorials π
True story, my dissertation includes the statement, “I was wrong.” π
SAVE THE DATE! My dissertation defense is set for April 14th from 1 - 3 pm. It will be held via Zoom. SILS dissertation defenses are open. Please get in touch with me if you’d like the Zoom details. π
Dissertation Draft Finished + Pandemic Parenting and My Body
I sent off the introduction chapter for my dissertation to my advisor a few minutes ago. I also decided to do a total page and word count for the whole thing. And while I was doing that I made the mistake of reading the comments on the methods chapter. Which are good and helpful comments and not that dramatic, but IMPOSTOR SYNDROME, am I right?
Mostly what I’m dealing with is that both of the committee members who have looked at that chapter were like “This theoretical framework part needs it’s own chapter.” It won’t actually be creating a whole chapter from scratch, but it does feel a little like it will. And so my jerk brain is like, “Why didn’t you write that? Why haven’t you done that already? Why didn’t that occur to you? UGH. Your dissertation is frivolous, thin, unimportant, has nothing to contribute, and is basically just you dicking around. You’ll graduate probably because you have a kind committee but what subpar work.”
My brain doesn’t seem to know we’re in a pandemic.
Before I go on, here are the stats: in its current iteration, my dissertation is 155 pages and 31,084 words. I started data collection in April. I went from initiating data collection to a finished draft in 6 months, working on it for half-days, while caring for my child in the morning and writing in the afternoons.
This is no small achievement, regardless of the contribution my research makes to the field.
And I simultaneously worked on my assistantship, which involved designing a semistructured interview protocol, conducting 3 interviews, and coding 14 interviews.
I had planned to start my data collection earlier. I had planned to be writing close to full-time hours, because I had expected to get a dissertation fellowship, making this a non-service year. Things have gone very differently than I planned, and I have a first draft of my dissertation to show anyway.
I may kick off my revisions with a dissertation bootcamp Jan 11 - 15. We’ll see.
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Something that only occurred to me yesterday, although of course it’s been going on the whole time I’ve been a mother, is that I hold my child’s emotions in my body. So when my kid sobs three or four times in one morning and throws a couple of tantrums, I can’t just hand him off to my mother-in-law and then sit down to work. My body just won’t allow it.
Giving myself permission to recognize the impact my kid’s emotions have on my body is something I sorely needed, and I really hope it will help me moving forward.
Okay. Gonna have lunch and then maybe go to Bean Traders to get some curbside pickup “I did it!” treats.
I'm having trouble with my dissertation discussion.
My goal for November’s #AcWriMo was to write the discussion chapter for my dissertation. After finishing that chapter, all that would be left would be a couple of pieces of my introduction that should go quickly.
I’m revising my plan, in light of Pat Thomson’s post about rebooting #AcWriMo2020 goals.
This chapter has been a beast. I had no idea where to begin. I looked at advice. I looked at other people’s discussion sections. I pondered while putting my kid to bed and came up with good ideas. I’ve been snatching odd moments here and there to jot down notes when something occurs to me. But figuring out how to put it all together? That has been a beast.
Today I Googled “dissertation discussion chapter stuck.” This brought me the gift of a couple of posts from The Thesis Whisperer. “The Difficult Discussion Chapter” helped me understand that my problem is common, that it is likely attributable to exactly what I thought it was (the difficulty in turning my data, which is easy to describe, into a set of knowledge claims, which requires more creativity).
“How do I start my discussion chapter?” gave me permission to reconsider my dissertation structure. In it, Dr. Mewburn says,
Before you worry about the discussion chapter too much, consider whether you need to treat the discussion as a separate section at all.
This confirmed a gut feeling I started having yesterday as I was plugging away at the five pages I did manage to get written. It felt so weird trying to talk about my data’s meaning pages and pages away from where I represented the data itself. The similar studies I looked at had integrated their discussion sections with their findings sections. I felt like I needed to do the same thing. So trying that is my next step.
I emailed my advisor to let her know that I would be integrating the discussion into the findings chapter, and that the conclusion chapter would be shorter and focus on implications, limitations, and recommendations for future research and practice. I also told her that this change, plus the fact that I lost two weeks of November to election anxiety and a multiday migraine, meant that I was pushing my self-imposed deadline out from November 30 to December 4. (It will probably be December 6, now that I think about it. I get a good chunk of quiet writing time on Sundays.) I then plan to take one week to finish the introduction, and then will take from December 14 - January 18 off before launching into a month of revisions before sending the dissertation to my committee to review ahead of my defense.
I don’t know if this is going to make things easier. I hope it will. I’ll let you know how it goes. (I also totally will write up my data analysis process eventually, I promise.)
I did what I wanted during my PhD and I regret nothing.
Six months ago today, Inger Mewburn published the post, Where I call bullshit on the way we do the PhD. From where I sit, things are not better or different six months later. In the post, Mewburn encourages PhD researchers to shift their focus from traditional markers of academic success such as publishing in peer-reviewed journals to other activities that might be more helpful in a career beyond academia. I thought I’d write about how I’ve done this over the course of my PhD and the kinds of things I learned.
Performance Production
In my first year and a half of the PhD program, I produced improv comedy. I produced an independent improv team as well as a monthly show that invited other independent teams to play. I got no publications out of this (though I did build relationships that supported four class assignments during that time). I did, however, learn about managing groups of people’s schedules, keeping in contact with performers, and keeping people motivated when stuff was not going well. These are skills that I could use in any event management capacity, especially one that involves speakers or performers.
Podcasting
I started a podcast about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This podcast is not at all about my research or my data. It does, however, require the technical skills of recording and editing, the social skills of recruiting and managing guests, and the analytical skills of viewing the episode and determining topics of conversation. I created what is essentially a theoretical framework of BtVS that rests on three pillars:
This will work for Seasons 1 - 3. If I keep the podcast going, the framework will probably need revision from Season 4 on.
Blogging and Web Development
In the spring of my second year, I first learned about the IndieWeb and have since then been working to build my website as a true home for me on the web and expand my blogging practice. It led to my first keynote invitation and allowed me to share my experiences with dissertating and PhD work. My blog post, “A Start-to-Finish Literature Review Workflow,” is by far my most viewed post. I don’t know where I would publish something like this but it’s definitely not my disciplinary journals. It helped so many more people than I would have helped publishing an article about school library leadership or something in a journal that school librarians don’t even have access to.
Developing Self-Employment Ideas
I’ve been engaging with resources like Katie Linder and Sara Langworthy’s podcast, Make Your Way, and Jen Polk’s Self-Employed PhD strategy sessions. These have helped me learn so much and make connections that have led to potential freelance gigs.
Going to Conferences that Sound Interesting
If I were looking to be really tenure-track ready in my field, I would be going to ALISE or ASIS&T, and I may go to those someday. But left to my own devices, I recently chose to present at the Fan Studies Network North America conference. Not only did I have an awesome time and meet great people, I also connected with an editor at an academic press who expressed interest in receiving a book proposal from me based on my dissertation research. If I focused on disciplinary expertise, I wouldn’t have attended this conference.
Identifying Models of the Kind of Scholarship I’d Like to Do
Dr. Mewburn discusses the importance of current scholars modeling behavior for future scholars. I’ve been following the work of Casey Fiesler since encountering her via the Fansplaining podcast. Dr. Fiesler does a great job modeling a variety of ways to engage as a scholar, including public writing and experimenting with TikTok.
The Moral of the Story
Get to PhDone, but as much as possible, spend time doing the things you want to do, because they will give you marketable skills, build your network, and lead you to more of what you want to be doing. If you focus on what people steeped in the old ways of academia tell you, not only will you still have a hard time finding a job, you also won’t have any fun.
The burnout is real.
From September 8 to October 2, I attended a virtual dissertation writing boot camp.
I have childcare each day from 1 pm to 6 pm. I have standing meetings on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 2. The Bootcamp ran from 2 - 5 each day that week, so my Tuesday and Wednesday meetings were moved back to 1. I had no time between my mother-in-law’s arrival and my meetings to do any getting set up. On the other days, I spent that first hour transitioning my kid and getting everything I needed together for the boot camp.
Every day that week at 5 I was too exhausted to take advantage of that last hour of childcare for anything but rest.
I wrote an entire chapter of my dissertation that week; it was probably about 25 pages by the time I was done.
At the end of the boot camp, we talked about what we were going to do to carry our momentum forward. I blathered about my little routines to help me settle in at the beginning of my workday.
I took a week off from dissertating after the boot camp. I did none of my routines.
The following week, I spent most of the week at the Fan Studies Network North America conference, which was amazing. But the schedule was such that, again, I didn’t really do any of my routines.
The week after that, I filled in the remaining gaps in the three dissertation chapters I had written. This was not heavy work, and it’s a good thing.
I told myself I was going to write my discussion chapter as part of NaNoWriMo, but as we all know, the US election was on November 3 (not just presidential; I was concerned about down-ballot races too, esp. NC senate). And then there were days of waiting. Who could get work done during that time?
Not me. Not on my dissertation, anyway. (Throughout all of this I have continued doing work for my assistantship.)
Over the weekend I thought to myself, “Monday will be the day. Monday will be the day that I get back into my routines.”
Reader, I did not get back into my routines Monday.
I didn’t on Tuesday, either.
Only today did I move in that direction: I meditated for 3 minutes with Headspace. I wrote a couple of “morning” pages (but not a full 3). I did a Tarot card pull.
I got The Star. It was the right card for today.
I started generating ideas for a process for creating my discussion chapter.
It feels silly to say. But that’s where I am.
Image is a detail of the 10 of Wands from the product image for the Wayhome Tarot at the Everyday Magic website. It’s a great deck. I highly recommend it.
Current status: counting “figuring out which book will tell me how to write my discussion chapter” as my dissertation activity for the day. (It’s Making Sense of Qualitative Data by Amanda Coffey & Paul Atkinson.)
I just uploaded my #FSNNA20 poster, “Where’d You Get Those Nightcrawler Hands? The Information Literacy Practices of Cosplayers” [PDF] to my website. Please take a look!
I went to #FSNNA20 and it was awesome.
I “went” to the Fan Studies Network North America conference last week. It was awesome. It was invigorating. I feel energized coming out of it.
I am not going to do a round-up of relevant content right now. I’ll be unpacking that over the next week or so, trying to consolidate some notes and ideas. I “met” a bunch of cool people. But for now, I want to talk about the structure and process.
The conference used five tools: Discord for conference-only chat and posters, Conline as a general conference platform, Zoom for live sessions, Vimeo for archived sessions, and Twitter for sharing ideas with the public.
The Discord space and the Zoom chat were the highlights of the event for me, and I want to write briefly about them and some possibilities I think they offer for future conferences.
Ideas for the layout of the Discord space were borrowed from CON.TXT 2020. I love physical spatial metaphors for digital spaces, so this was a delight to me. Here’s what the structure looks like:
The MAIN section was especially valuable because it made me feel like I was at an actual conference. And because it was a chat and not real life, I could jump in on conversations without feeling too awkward and share resources whenever I saw a place where one might be valuable. The posters, events, workshops, and salons sections were vital, too, because they allowed conversation to continue after the session. You know how you want to talk to the presenter but you have to clear the room for the next session? No worries here! Just take it to Discord!
The chat channels in Zoom were where a ton of awesome activity took place. There was a lot of backchanneling with varying degrees of on-topicness, but also lots of sharing of ideas and asking of questions.
One of the things Discord made possible was the creation of new channels on the fly, so the organizers were able to be responsive to topics that came up in Zoom chats and create new channels for things like fan tattoos, people sharing animal photos, job-listings, a space just for graduate students, ethics and resource methods, sharing syllabi, and sharing fanfiction recommendations. This was a brilliant way to keep conversation going and make the whole conference extra congenial.
I hope other virtual conferences can learn from the wonderful organization of this one, but more than that, I think this provides an opportunity for both conferences and conventions to leverage virtual tools to enrich the experience of attending.
I’ve been big into backchanneling since I started library school in 2009. If implemented wisely, it has the potential to add vibrancy to an event. It works best with someone to moderate or observe the chat, an enforcable code of conduct, and time for processing the chat. #FSNNA20 had all of this.
I see no reason why face-to-face conferences couldn’t have it as well. Obviously, the difficulty of the task depends on the size of the conference. But for smaller conferences especially, I hope people will continue using these sorts of tools once they go face-to-face again.
I also hope over time to find ways to incorporate wikifying into the process, because so many resources are shared and fly by so quickly. I kind of would love to be an official conference librarian, grabbing all the resources everyone mentions, capturing and organizing them, and putting them in a place where other people could add their impressions and ideas. This is basically how the IndieWeb wiki works - chat in IRC, documentation in a wiki - and more and more I like it as a way of operating. (The IndieWeb wiki can be overwhelming. I don’t know if a conference wiki would be or not.)
I’m so impressed with the work the organizers put in, the way that attendees used the space and tools, and the promise this has for the future.
I need to re-write my dissertation proposal, for myself.
I’ve been a bit stuck with my dissertation, and only partly due to parenting and chronic illness. I wasn’t quite sure what had me stuck before. I thought it was a need to develop a solid workflow. John Martin told me about a really cool writing tool called Gingko. It overwhelmed me at first because I could stand to see all those columns on screens at once, but once I found the keyboard shortcut for writing in fullscreen, I decided I would try using it to write my dissertation.
I started to get a new “tree” ready, and looked at another dissertation to help me model my structure.
But as I did that I realized…
Usually, a person’s dissertation proposal can become a significant chunk of the dissertation itself, with some expansion.
My dissertation proposal as originally written does not represent my dissertation as executed anymore.
I need to re-write my proposal, but for me.
π Redefining my professional identity: From research assistant to doctoral researcher
For the first few years of my doctoral program, I defined myself as a “doctoral student” and “research assistant.” This seemed like an appropriate designation, despite my experience as an education and information professional, because I was taking classes. I kept calling myself that as I was working on my comprehensive literature review, because there didn’t seem to be anything better to call myself than that. It was very exciting when I got to change my email signature to “Doctoral Candidate” in December, because now I was someone who had met all the requirements for a doctoral degree except for the dissertation. But I kept the designation of “research assistant.”
This summer, though, I started thinking about how that designation doesn’t really communicate much to anyone not steeped in academia. And also that it doesn’t say anything about what I do. So as of this school year, I started referring to myself as a “doctoral researcher.” This fits much better. I am doing what researchers do: I am running my own study as PI (my dissertation study) and I work in a lab with two other researchers, designing interview protocols, collecting and analyzing data, and writing reports based on the data. There is no part of my work that is really the work of a student. While I am technically assisting the PI of a research lab, the work I do is not so much assistive as collaborative. So.
I am a doctoral researcher.
For more thoughts on the distinction between a doctoral student and a doctoral researcher, see Pat Thomson’s blog post, “what’s with the name doctoral student?”
Image by Dariusz Sankowski from Pixabay.
π Semi-structured interviews: Stick to only a few big questions, but leave room for follow-ups
One of my responsibilities in the Equity in the Making lab is to create an interview guide that will help us learn what makerspace leaders in the UNC system consider to be defining features of a makerspace. I originally thought this was going to be a survey, so I came up with a list of about ten questions and then in conversation with my colleagues on the project, added four more. I realized in that conversation, however, that it was an interview guide for a semi-structured interview, not a survey. I told my colleagues I’d take our list of questions and hone it so that it was “more interviewy, less survey-y.” What did that look like?
Each question was getting at a larger issue of the spatial arrangement of a makerspace, especially as it would relate to one of the five senses. The next phase of the project involves using VR to build an imagined “definitive” makerspace, so we want to capture the kinds of things that should be included in that VR environment; this is why I focused on sensory input specifically. The questions were designed to draw out specifics that participants might not think of as falling into these categories; for example, we might be hoping they’d talk about equipment and they would instead talk about the mood or vibe of a space.
I learned from Dr. George Noblit, who taught my advanced qualitative methods class, that if you’re doing an interview for about an hour, you probably should stick with a few big questions. He once gave us an assignment to interview another grad student using only these three questions:
I interviewed a friend and indeed, just those three questions took an hour for us to talk through. For my dissertation, I had 6 major questions, and that usually took 30 minutes to an hour depending on the participant. Dr. Melo said she wanted these interviews to run about 45 minutes, so I stuck with five questions.
I collapsed the original 14 questions into 5, but I then detailed potential follow up questions. This is, in my experience, the best way to be sure you get the kind of detail your hoping for if you’ve got a reticent participant. You start with the big question and see what they say. Then you can dig deeper if something they say is really promising, or bring in one of the prepared follow-up questions if they answer you quickly and you need more detail.
To see what this looks like, you can look at the interview guide for my dissertation. I’m setting up the EITM questions in a similar format.
In addition to the five questions I developed for this interview guide, I also added two more that I learned about in my qual classes, though I can’t remember if it was with Dr. Noblit or with Dr. Sherick Hughes:
These are some of the richest questions you can ask, so I highly recommend including them as the last two questions before the demographics questions in any semistructured interview. In the case of my dissertation interviews, my second participant answered that first one by asking if I’d like to know the specifics of which resources she uses, and of course I wanted to know that and then I incorporated that into every interview afterward. When I was doing a coursework project and interviewing someone about a project they were working on, they answered these questions with “Don’t you want to know why I’m doing this?” and “Wouldn’t you like to hear my plans for [the term of the project]?” and of course the answer to both was yes, and that probably added another 30 minutes to an hour to our interview. (This won’t always be the case. Some participants are more forthcoming than others.)
I hope this has been helpful. If you’re working on a semistructured interview project, how is it going?
Current professional goals: 1. Be a qualitative researcher. (I am now, but I think I would like to continue after I graduate.) 2. Talk with people about books. (Another thing I do now and want to continue doing.) π
I did more #motherscholar-ing this morning, saying things like “I would do a visual analysis of photos of the makerspaces” and also “No honey, Maggie can’t see the TV, she doesn’t know what George is doing. Yes, he IS using a microphone with a fishing rod! So funny!” π
Anybody know of somebody doing research on makerspaces specifically located in schools of education? NCSU, UNCG & UNCP each have one and I’m curious about them. π
Did some very strong #motherscholar-ing this morning, simultaneously joining a meeting on branding for the Equity in the Making project & helping my kid strap on his guitar, go to the bathroom, & get his Captain America on. π