Lucy's Research Design Model 2.0

I have revised my initial presentation on the application of Joseph Maxwell's interactive model of research design. It was especially helpful for me to go through Trevor Owen's blog post again, coming to the information with a more nuanced perspective of not only the field of DH, but also a more concise framework regarding my research project. The second time through reading Owen's blog, I found that I paid more attention to his anecdotal information rather than the "scholarly" discussion of the research design. For me, it was easier to conceptualize the model to fit my specific project by considering the information that Owen's put in the parenthesis in each step of the model. For example, rather than focusing on the "goal" I paid more attention to Owen's advice to think "the reason why you're doing the research". I felt as though reading Owen's post a second time allocated me to view the information as more of a conversation, as though it was a friend giving me advice on a previously confusing subject.

Lucy's Original Research Design Model 

You'll notice the deviations I've taken from my initial presentation in component of the research model. After our presentations in class, I feel as though I have narrowed down my project to a more specific focus and approach. In addition, the literature I've chosen to focus on is now gathered from not only composition and rhetoric, but also the digital humanities and its discussions concerning race, pedagogy, and curriculum considerations. Much of my current literature review is focused on literacies because I think for me right now it's important to understand my theoretical framework for why my goals matter to me in this project. As someone who hopes to specialize in multimodal composition in life after graduate school, this work and attention to composing in ways beyond written discourse really matters to me. It helps for me to contextualize the conversations concerning this pedagogy and to situate myself and this project within the conversation. From there I move towards looking to historical uses of visual rhetoric and how it has been traditionally marginalized alongside alphabetic literacy. I have also included sources that pertain to race and issues of access as they are especially pertinent to my focus on how this pedagogy can be beneficial to the CLASP population at WSU. As I situate myself within the conversations pertaining to race, access, and literacy within both the world of composition and rhetoric and the digital humanities, my aim is to begin fleshing out more of my methods section and begin playing with Viewshare and R to get a feel for how my data can be manipulated visually and also navigated in ways that make sense to not only me, but also my students.
Thank you so much and I hope you enjoy the 2.0 version of my presentation

Lucy's Research Design Model 2.0

Bamboo DiRT Site: Exploration of DH tools to make and present

Greetings!

To begin, I am so excited to learn of this platform and these resources. I got kind of lost in playing and had to remember what I was doing for my blog because some of these resources are seriously cool. It was hard to pick two.

I thought about the presenting resource first. I wanted to think visually about how I wanted my project to look in regards to my topic. I'll be looking at visual rhetoric and composing in SMS spaces by first generation students as well as students of minorities. In framing this population, Mark had a wonderful idea of focusing on the CLASP students at WSU, and this is the population I've decided to analyze for my project for this course. In thinking critically about my project, I wanted to choose a resource that stayed consistent in my focus on the visual. I didn't want a bunch of numbers on my screen as I discussed my findings, I wanting the information to be clean and simple. While looking for the right source, I wanted to be mindful of the types of questions I would be addressing in SMS platforms themselves. This refers to issues of access and that these SMS spaces require access to technology. With that being said, I wanted to choose a resource that was free to access, and one that also was compatible with the technology I did have, which is a Macbook Air.

After choosing my search parameters, my results began to filter into a much more manageable lens to begin viewing the platforms. Rather than 10+ pages of resources, my search was narrowed to 2 pages,  which made it easier to select my tool: Viewshare. Due to its emphasis on cultural representations of data and the focus of simplicity in presentation, it really seemed the most pragmatic. According to the site, the description is as follows:

"Viewshare is a free web application for creating interfaces and visualizations of cultural heritage collections. It can create interactive maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds, histograms, and image galleries. The intended users of Viewshare are individuals managing and creating access to digital collections of cultural heritage materials."

The description of the tool interested me primarily in the passages that I've bolded. Since I'm looking at the ways in which different cultures use visual rhetoric in emojis, stickers, and other visual composing tools, it's important to me to mirror that framework in my representation of my results. In addition, my main focus is to bring these findings into the composition classroom, helping to ground rhetorical analysis in cultural practice while also highlighting the different conceptions of literacy and composing in the 21st century. 

Upon reviewing the resource, I found that you needed to request a free account in order to have full access. I have requested one and already heard back within the hour, which was very convenient. I really like the visual representation of data, while also providing a textual key indicating what the data means numerically. In addition, I think the organization of the information is well done, with the visual display of data not only being the largest component, but also the component with the most prominent color display. I believe that this tool will allow me to categorize my project in regard to both SMS platform, and also participants in a way that is cohesive and organized. Navigating this tool has pushed me to think more about access, and how I am going to consider access in the SMS platforms I choose to utilize. It was important to me to find a free resource for composing, and platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are SMS platforms that are free and allow for a visual composing through their (newly) added features of stickers and emoticons. This tool is also highly framed around the notion of embedded and sharing, which to me really resonates a true DH tool of collaboration and inclusivity. I would encourage everyone to play around with this resource. 

In order to find the perfect tool for the "doing" part of my project, I framed my search around the data collection category. Again I revised my search parameters to be both free and compatible with a Macbook Air. Once refining my search I was left with simply one page and 14 choices. After playing around a bit, I came to the conclusion of choosing "R" which is described as the following:

R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. R can be run from the command line, or using any of the many graphical user interfaces available on a variety of platforms; these are listed as separate tools.

In looking more closely at R, I was able to see that it not only computes data numerically, but also does so in a way that offers a visual representation of that data. As someone who learns visually, it's important for me to have a tool that displays data in diverse ways. In considering the presentation of my data, the user was not in the forefront of my mind, it was the audience. However, in the actual "doing" of my project I'm considered how this information needs to be presented to me, in order to make sense of it all. In surveying my participants, I'll be collecting numeric data based on several facets: race, access, platform, first-gen, etc. I like that R allows you to create different tools based on the type of data you're analyzing. Navigating this tool has allowed me to see that my project will be so much more then just surveying students, but also surveying teachers to see how they integrate these SMS platforms into their composition classroom. We not only need to see that there are in fact different cultural interpretations of visual rhetoric, but also that they have some place in the composition classroom, which plays into what teachers are doing with the information (and whether or not they're doing it well/correctly). I've learned that this project is going to be much more invested then I had initially thought. But this is a project that I'm considered for my dissertation, so big questions are a good thing at this point. 

So you can see, R has different visual representations of data, which I think considering that there's different components to my project, is a wonderful feature for my topic specifically. I'm not a number person, and turning numbers into visual representations that I can actually see is incredibly valuable. R also breaks things down in a way that is easy to make sense of in regards to beginning to plug in numbers and work with the tool itself. 

It was hard to choose from so many awesome resources. I'll definitely be exploring this platform more as my scholarship continues in both DH and Rhet/Comp. 

DH presentation post critique

I really enjoyed the opportunity to do critique with Lacy and Mark. Both were exceptionally professional in their feedback and I feel as though they had valuable suggestions and criticisms regarding my initial presentation. Lacy liked that I had a humanist focus throughout my presentation, continually referring to the question of what does it mean to be human, and personalizing it with my research project of defining 21st century literacies. Lacy also asked how I might include digital humanities scholars in that conversation, which I thought was very helpful (my project is very comp/rhet focused, so I think that's an excellent addition to discuss how this weaves into conversations we see in DH). Lacy also really appreciated that I referred to technology as "assistive" and not dominant. She also asked me "how would incorporating the language of digital technology affect the academic language?" Which I thought was an excellent question. Considering that my project deals with SMS platforms and how such vernacular might have validity in composition classrooms, especially for first-generation and minority students, it's important to discuss the rhetorical implications for those two groups of people. Mark agreed with this focus as well and it is probably the biggest revision I will have in moving forward with this presentation.

Mark's comments were also very valuable in both praise and suggestion. Like Lacy, Mark liked that I continually made references to my own project throughout my conversation, embedding definitions of DH and what may be at stake with personalization as it pertains to my own project. He thought I had a really sound definition of what DH is, noting that my continual referral to keeping it "human centered" mirrored nicely with placing the word "human" on the top of the slide as well as bolding it so it stood out compared to the other key words. Mark asked a very important question, "why first-generation and minority students alongside one another?" While I don't have an answer at this point, I think it's an important notion to consider. This project started out as a seminar paper for Kristin's course where she recommended I look at how SMS platforms may help to "bridge the gap"  in literacies in and outside of the composition classroom for first-generation and minority students. To address this, I will return to Kathleen Blake Yancey's article "Made not only in Words: Composition in a New Key" during my presentation to help frame why bridging the gap between these notions of rhetoric and access are important. I think they have sound ties to DH in that students are accessing these platforms outside of the classroom, making and creating digital ways of communicating. This speaks to the concept that there is no longer just "researchers making things for other researchers". In understanding that what it means to compose in the 21st century is largely expanded to address visual, auditory, and other ways of making meaning, I return to rhetoric and different means of discourse. I'll talk about it more Monday, but I'm really really glad Mark brought this to my attention. Mark also noted that he liked the natural pauses I was taking between sections of my presentation. Although they weren't deliberate, Mark noted that they allowed the audience to have a nice transition between important ideas, giving emphasis to transition and also focus of important concepts. Mark also liked my discussion of design features and keep things human central (as it refers to SMS spaces and also universal access and end-users). In addition, Mark also asked how my project would be sensitive to regional differences, which is something I hope to work out as I fine-comb my methods portion of my project as I move forward.

As far as the visual presentation on my prezi, I didn't make any text changes because 1) we were only allowed to work with six words so I felt as though the words I had currently chosen couldn't be replaced 2) Most of the feedback was on the explanations not the prezi slides themselves. The changes I did make were largely influenced by Mark's presentation and how he considered visual representations of content. I chose to include an image with each slide as an additional point that I could reference during my presentation. I subbed a picture out, and then added images where I felt I could expand upon particular ideas. Here are the revised slides:

Presentation: DH Defined

Hello! Here is my initial draft of my presentation for Monday. I found it so hard to only put six words on my prezi slides! I'll update later once critique has been conducted with Lacy and Mark. Enjoy!

Vectors Journal: Perception

I chose to write about my experiences within the Perception issue of the Vectors Journal. Upon reading the opening page of the Vector's journal, I saw the emphasis on "the whole idea of place as a target". Pertaining to my chosen project within the issue that I'd like to discuss, "Unmarked Planes and Hidden Geographies" by Trevor Palgen speaks to this notion of our perception of place as a markable, identifiable location. More specifically, Palgen pays attention to how we leave traces, even when we meant to be "invisible" in our patterns and locations through our communication, data, and other visual evidence.

The beginning statement to the Perception issue of the Vector's journal pays special attention to the notion of whether or not "cultural, ethical, and ideological stakes of what, and how we perceive". Upon reading this, I set this as my framework for entering Palgen's presentation.

Upon initial navigation of Palgen's work, I found it a little confusing. I had to continuously refer to the first interactive image of flight patterns, hovering over certain dots, dashes, and other symbols represented on the key. However, upon further review of the text, I was able to make sense of the image and how it was meant to represent those invisible flight patterns of the Janet flights. In approaching this presentation from a critical lens and considering notions of universal access, I might have flipped the image and the text, making it so that naturally the progression of the page in the eyes of the reader forces you to read before you start playing around with the image. Therefore, you establish a foreground of what you're looking at before you begin to play.

I also found that there wasn't a clear distinction between main pages and subpages and you began to navigate the project. Upon clicking big tabs such as "The Planes" and "The Bases" I initially thought they were only one page. The sub headings are directly under the big headings, only a slightly smaller font. If your eye wasn't initially returning to the big tabs, those little tabs, which each contain their own specific information as it pertains to bigger concepts (Ex: Planes has two smaller tabs of "737s" and "Beechcrafts"). I might have made them a different color, indicating that they were an interactive component to the project that you needed to view in order to have a holistic understanding of the entire category. Or perhaps made the buttons at the bottom of the text, rather than on the top by the main tabs.

I interacted with the project in a very linear way. I moved between the main tabs and read it much like a story. I think that's the way Palgen intended. Each major category kind of fed off of the other. I was particularly interested in this project due to the nature of its topic. I have always been interested in the Groom Lake/Area 51 conspiracy, so it was fun for me to pair my knowledge with new information from Palgen. I learned a lot about the systemic ways in which our flights are tracked, coded, and maintained. In addition I learned about the different types of intentions of military aviation bases (white vs. black flights). I still want to know more about Area 51, and I wish that they would have gone into more detail about the controversy surrounding extra terrestrial life and aviation. I also wish that the project would have been more interactive then just the initial image with the flight patterns. Aside from that image, the rest were just regular images that you couldn't manipulate or play with in a way that encouraged making meaning of content or a kinesthetic understanding of these flights and their patterns/destinations.

Viewing project's like Palgen's has helped me to understand issues that pertain to design and universal access. I began to think of ways in which this project could be accessed by someone who might be hearing disabled, or perhaps someone who had disabilities pertaining to reading and writing (some of the pages were very text heavy and the font was very small). As I continue to revise and adapt my project of 21st century literacies and specifically SMS platforms and how they might aid first generation/minority students, I think about the ways in which projects can be more dialogic, in that there is conversation between author and audience.