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.]

Two dissertation-related things I’ve been working on simultaneously: my final chapter of comps, which I’m writing about affinity space ethnography/connective ethnography, and engaging more systematically with cosplayers. I went to Greensboro Comicon this weekend and actually interacted with cosplayers a little more than I have in the past, and now I’m exploring all the different ways cosplayers find each other.

(I’ve been a casual/closet cosplayer for many years, but never really connected with other cosplayers before.)

When I started my comps I wasn’t sure what data sources I would use to explore how cosplayers exhibit collective intelligence online, but now I’m realizing that Twitch & Discord may be where it’s at. As far as online research goes I think looking at those is fairly cutting edge stuff, and I think they’re great examples of what Lammers, Curwood, and Magnifico talk about when they say that researchers need to engage on multiple platforms if they’re going to understand the way practices move across an affinity space.

My brain’s awhirl with questions about the ethics of research on Twitch and Discord, now. Also, I’m feeling a bit reinvigorated with respect to my work, and that’s great.

At last, my leaning into the librarian stereotype is paying off!

Whoever is going around SILS convincing people who’ve never met me that I’m awesome, thanks.

The scholarly endeavor is an inherently creative endeavor. And I’m going to explore the relationship between creativity and scholarship more on my blog moving forward. Stay tuned.

The kid just told me he wants his third birthday party to have a Buffy theme, so I guess I’ve achieved all my parenting goals?

Months ago now, Margy Thomas of ScholarShape released a 7-day email course called Deep Why. I tucked all the messages away in my Gmail archives and am just getting to them now. I’ll post my responses to some of them here on my blog.

The first prompt is to reflect on your manifesto:

 In writing a manifesto, we let ourselves imagine the positive change that we can create through the knowledge we're building.

I’m writing one here. This isn’t a manifesto for life; it’s a manifesto specifically for my dissertation research. You can see the draft prospectus for that research here. Feel free to annotate it.

In the video that accompanied the prompt, Margy suggested that a manifesto articulates two things: VALUES and VISION. So that’s how I’m organizing this manifesto.

Values

My research takes an asset-based approach to information literacy. It’s easy to find doomy proclamations that kids don’t know how to find, evaluate, or use information. But they do it all the time, in pursuing their passions. Young people have information literacy: it just isn’t necessarily aligned with the way educators are attempting to teach and assess their information literacy. My research sees information literacy instruction and assessment as related to culturally sustaining pedagogy: just as young people’s heritage and community cultural practices are resources to honor, explore, and extend, so are their information literacy practices.

(So much credit is due to Dr. Crystle Martin, upon whose dissertation my work is building, for articulating this asset-based view of information literacy before me, and to Dr. Django Paris, for introducing the concept of culturally sustaining pedagogy, as well, of course, to Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, for introducing culturally relevant pedagogy before that.)

Vision

In my research, I seek to apply Dr. Martin’s model of information literacy, which takes this asset-based approach, to a new context: the cosplay affinity space. I also hope to find ways to extend or enhance her model, as new pieces of the interest-driven information literacy picture emerge from my findings. The ultimate vision is to create an accessible, asset-based model of information literacy and then share it widely with librarians and educators, along with ideas for how they might teach and assess information literacy in ways that are aligned with young people’s individual and collective information literacy practices. Or, more colloquially:

I want librarians and educators to stop treating kids like they don’t already know how to deal with information, and instead to start looking for ways kids can transfer the skills they use to deal with information in their own interest-driven pursuits across contexts, to address their academic, professional, and everyday problems.