Kimberly Hirsh

Threw off my anxiety just long enough to ask my doctor for anxiety meds. (Reader, she prescribed them.)

On my commute this morning I was pondering further whether I’m a Ravenclaw or Slytherin. Since we know the Sorting Hat takes wishes into account, I thought, “Well, which would I tell the Sorting Hat to put me in?” Then I thought, “I don’t want to be in the same house as people like Crabbe and Goyle, so, Ravenclaw.” Then I thought, “Yes, Ravenclaw people will be more fun to spend time with at Hogwarts.” Then I thought, “But what will knowing Ravenclaw people get me after I leave Hogwarts?” And the fact that I asked that question, well… BETTER BE SLYTHERIN.

Wizarding World app just sorted me into Slytherin, just as Pottermore did many years ago, so I guess maybe it’s time to accept that it, and not Ravenclaw, is my true house?

When we see a finished piece of writing, we rarely see all the mess that went into creating it. As Annette M. Markham and Nancy K. Baym point out in their book, Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method,

Research reports are carefully edited retrospectives, selected among different story lines and options, depending on one's audience and goals. Within these reports, research designs are generally presented as a series of logical and chronologically ordered steps. Seasoned scholars know there's a complex backstage story line and have experienced such complexities themselves. But for novice scholars, it is easy to imagine that the researcher's route was successfully mapped out in advance and that interpretive findings simply emerged from the ground or fell conveniently into the path. Qualitative research requires a tolerance for chaos, ambiguity, and inductive thinking, yet its written accomplishments—particularly those published in chapters and articles rather than monographs—rarely display the researchers' inductive pathways or the decisions that led them down those routes.

Two of my voice values are transparency and helpfulness, and I want to share some of the messier bits of my writing process. I have hopes of showing off some beautiful, colorful pen-marked-up copies of memos and notes to you in the future, but today, I’m just offering a few thoughts on freewriting.

I often hit a point where I’ve thought and thought and thought about something, ideas are all kind of swirly in my head, I’ve made notes, I’ve mapped concepts, and I’m still not ready to do formal writing for an audience that’s not me. I might be in a good place to talk to somebody, but honestly, I’m rarely around people who actually want to hear about things like affinity space ethnography (now I’m trying to imagine explaining ethnography to my 3 year old). When I’m in that place, eventually, I realize I need to…

FREEWRITE.

So I open up a new document and type out what I’ve got in my head, with notes to myself but also with citations. I know I’m not inventing anything new here, but this is part of the writing process that I think it’s easy for academics to forget.

Here’s what I freewrote today:

Ethnographic methods are appropriate for studying information literacy practices that are social and occur in an affinity space, as this looks at a sociocultural phenomenon, in a naturalistic setting. These methods cannot produce a full ethnography, but rather must be partial (Hine 2000). (BUT WHY? LIKE, THERE ARE REASONS, LEARN TO ARTICULATE THEM.)

Online spaces, however, present challenges to traditional ethnographic methods. Primary among these is the problem of location-based research; using spatial metaphors to define ethnographic research sites is limiting, because: Practices travel across various online “spaces.” Boundaries of online spaces are porous. And, more and more, boundaries between online and offline activity are also porous.

(Hine, 2000; Leander & McKim, 2003; Wargo 2015, 2017)

Ethnography has some key features.

1. The selection of a “field site.”
2. Observation or participant observation.
3. Interviews.
4. Artifact analysis.

There are ways to approximate these features online. The field site is the trickiest bit. It’s possible to select one environment (for example, fanfiction.net) and consider its boundaries to be the boundaries of the field site, but this lends an incomplete picture.

Now, this is not a useful introduction to ethnography for anyone. It’s incomplete, it privileges data collection over more conceptual issues. But it’s helping me move forward in my writing.

Art by Paperhand artists.

Current life goals: 1. Finish this gd comps chapter 2. Catch up on @_alexrowland’s & @MaryRobinette’s novels. (Sff authors with knowledge of historical fashion just make me happy, ‘kay?)

I love this. My friend Alana & I used to hear some Eisley lyrics as “rose-and-mermaid-entwined shrubbery” and it felt so magical. The real lyrics are “rows of mermaid-entwined shrubbery.” Still magical, but less so.

Another misheard Eisley lyric: I thought it was “Ca-Ca-Ca-Cassandra you’ve grown up really crazy. Have I been too denying of you?” which as a Classicist, felt perfect, but it’s actually “Golly, Sandra.” Less fitting.

I’ve been feeling moderately not okay lately. Nothing truly devastating, but a sense of doom. A sense of never being able to finish anything, of everything moving slower than I’d like while somehow also moving faster than I’d like. Of not being able to get out from under life.

I still feel that way, but I’m doing a little better today, for a couple of reasons.

1. To appease my child, after returning some books to the university library today I went and visited with my advisor and one of my committee members, who is also a dear friend. I talked to them about my slow progress, my frustration, the stage of the work I'm in, the sense that this part is a slog. They affirmed that it's normal to feel this way and that I'm still within my timeline for a May 2021 graduation, and I'm going to be okay. So, next time I feel this way, I should probably remember: talk to Sandra and Casey, because it always makes me feel better.
2. A few weeks ago, I read Danielle Laporte's The Desire Map, which focuses on living according to your core desired feelings. My core desired feelings are ease, flow, creativity, and connection. I have not been doing things in alignment with bringing about these feelings, but I know that I have the power to switch things up so that I do live in that alignment, and remembering that I can do that has me feeling a lot better.

So, I’m still not okay, but now I believe I will be okay, later.

My blog post, A Start-to-Finish Literature Review Workflow, is probably the most viewed thing on my website. It’s a great overview, especially for people new to writing lit reviews. I’m pretty proud of it.

But it’s incomplete.

I’ve had plans for a long time now to write a more advanced lit review tips post, as well as one with some variations and modifications on that workflow.

But today I need to talk about what’s on my mind right now, which is that theoretical and methodological lit reviews are really different from lit reviews that describe a body of research on a particular topic.

The general workflow still works for these kinds of lit reviews, but once you get to that concept mapping stage, things get a little different. So here are a few things you might consider for these types of lit reviews.

Theoretical Lit Reviews

• Trace the development of the theory. Who first articulated it? How has it changed over time? Who refined it? Who expanded it? What did they add?
• Synthesize the development of the theory. As people refined and expanded it, how did those refinements and expansions interact with the theory as originally proposed? Can you pull it all together into a new statement that incorporates all those different things?
• Discuss application of the theory. (This might be beyond the scope of your literature review, but it might not.) Who has applied the theory? How did they apply it? Did their application of the theory lead them to reconsider anything about the theory?

Methodological Lit Reviews

• Identify the origins of the methodology. What type of thing was it created to study? What problem was it trying to solve?
• Declare key characteristics of the methodology as it has been implemented over time. Not only what it was created to study, but how writing about it has contributed to our understanding of what the methodology is. For example, Hine (2000) discusses ethnography as involving travel (whether physical or experiential), participation, observation, the ethnographer as someone with the authority to describe the "field" where the ethnography has been undertaken, the participant/informant as a member of the culture being studied, and the reader of the ethnography as someone who has neither the participant nor ethnographer's experience and thus is gaining understanding of the culture through the ethnographer's account.
• Describe methodological challenges that have arisen as people have implemented the methodology, and, where possible, how people have navigated those challenges.

I’m working on a literature review about affinity space ethnography/connective ethnography right now, and as I try to organize my thoughts, thinking about these things is helping me make sense of the tons of writing there is on ethnography more broadly.

References

Hine, C. (2000). Virtual Ethnography. SAGE.

I haven’t listened, only skimmed the transcript, but @flourish & @elizabethminkel point out that public humanities & social sciences are behind natural sciences when it comes to science communication & hi, I’m Kimberly & if you want to hire someone to fix this, I’m interested.

[This note led to a really rich discussion on Twitter that I’m hoping will be successfully backfed into the comments here, so please be sure to take a look at the comments! I’m also working on collecting links directly to all the different offshoots on Twitter and will post those here when I can.]