Path-ing Reflection #2

Sources read:

George, Diana. "From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing." College Composition and Communication 54.1 (September 2002): 11-39.

Kress, Gunther. Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy. London: Routledge, 1997.

Kress, Gunther. "Design and Transformation: New Theories of Meaning." Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. Ed. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. London: Routledge, 2000. 153-61.

Kress, Gunther. "Multimodality." Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. Ed. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. London: Routledge, 2000. 182-202.

This week was Gunther Kress week, with a little Diana George thrown in to spice it up!  I know this is not what I was pointing towards at the end of my last post, but it is where I ended up going because ODU’s amazing ILL sent me two of Kress’s books.

Path-ing Reflection #1

Sources Read: 

• Faigley, Lester. "Material Literacy and Visual Design." Rhetorical Bodies. 1999. 171-201.
• Olson, David R. "From Utterance to Text: The Bias of Language in Speech and Writing." Harvard Educational Review 47.3 (1977): 257-81.
• Trimbur, John. "Delivering the Message: Typography and the Materiality of Writing." Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Handa, Carolyn. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004. 260-71.

My focus for this week’s reading has been to explore further into Trimbur’s chapter on the materiality of writing. This chapter from my Visual Rhet class this spring really fascinated me, particularly Trimbur’s views of the influence of the essayist movement on expectations for rhetoric today: “One of the main obstacles to seeing the materiality of writing has been the essayist tradition and its notion of a transparent text” (261).

Annotated Bib #3: Race and the Digital World

Nakamura, L. (2008). Cyberrace. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 123, 1673-1682.

I have been exploring theory behind my profile picture project, and Dr. Romberger directed me to theory of subjectivity. I have read a primer on subjectivity by Mansfield (2000) that offers a good definition of subjectivity as "theorising the subject, … asking how the idea of a self has been thought and represented" (p. v). I turn in this post to Nakamura (2008) for an application of subjectivity in digital spaces. 

Nakamura’s question is, “[I]f life online is real, are race and racism online real too?" (p. 1675). She explores this question through a literature review of cyberspace, her intentionally chosen term drawing on the nineties’ vocabulary. What she finds running through all of the literature is an empty idealism about the Internet solving the social problem of race.  For example, in its pre-graphic days, the Internet was seen as non-racial because the body could not be seen. However, researchers found that any racism that arose was therefore blamed on the target of the racism for having brought up race (p. 1676).

Annotated Bib #2: Facebook Profile Pics

Hum, N.J., Chamberlain, P.E., Hambright, B.L., Portwood, A.C., Schat, A.C., & Bevan, J.L. (2011). A picture is worth a thousand words: A content analysis of Facebook profile photographs. Computers in Human Behavior, 27, 1828-1833. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2011.04.003

"Perhaps one of the most telling pieces of self-disclosure or image construction is the profile photo, the single default photo by which Facebook users choose to identify themselves within the entire network" (p. 1828). The goal of this research study was to add to the literature of the relatively new phenomenon of the profile picture.  Noelle Hum and her research partners wanted to learn what types of images Facebook members are using for their profile pictures and how the content of the pictures differs by gender (p. 1828).

Annotated Bib #1: The Power of the Facial Turn

Churches O., Callahan R, Michalski D, Brewer N, Turner E, et al. (2012) How Academics Face the World: A Study of 5829 Homepage Pictures. PLoS ONE 7(7): e38940. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0038940.

Owen Churches and his fellow researchers set out to discover how “professional academics in the arts and sciences choose to display themselves to the world via their most visible public picture: their personal homepage portrait housed on their University’s website” (1-2).  Darwin was the first to show that the left side of the face is more expressive through increased muscle movement than the right side.  When applying this biological difference to the visual, Lindell and Savill (2010) showed that people interpret pictures of faces depending on which side of the face is turned towards the camera.  People with the right side facing the camera are seen as scientific, and those with the left side most visible are judged to be humanities-oriented (1). 

Style and Stance #8: Coding My Control Data Set

Warning: To those who want no more than a casual look at sociolinguistics, move on from this post.  Explore lighter posts like this one about design -- it's even colorful!  In the post you are currently reading, I am starting to dive into the coding of my two data sets, the submission guidelines for a traditional print journal and for a digital academic journal. Come back another day for my findings written in a more blog friendly (and maybe digitally academic) way!

Style and Stance #7: Pinning Down My Categories

I came a long way in my last post ... Let me quote myself:

• "For written texts, style has always been the main way to convey stance because we do not have the other options of voice inflection, dress, gestures, etc that are considered when we look for style in spoken language." 
• "Academic writing wants to show a certain stance so adopts a certain style in presenting a given content."   
  
• "My task now is to categorize this stance and define this style to see if journals are intentionally disaligning from this stance by making different style choices."
• "Rather than stance being the primitive that drives style, stance is the created by style." 

But I am left with somewhat the same question I had before: how does content fit in?  What is the role of all of the stuff we want to jam into our writing?

Style and Stance #6: Defining These Terms

Reading ahead to Kiesling’s  “Style as Stance” was really great advice from Dr. Anderson.  I have been trying to understand the relationship between style and stance, and Kiesling presents a new idea for me to consider: "any choice of linguistic form made by speakers is based ultimately on the interpersonal or epistemic stance they wish to take with their various interlocutors at a particular time, and … it is stances that become associated, through cultural models, with various identities" (172). In other words, stance is at the heart of what then drives style choices and style-shifting.

Style-Shifting

My Discussion

Style and Stance #5: Another Data Pairing

Having spent some of this past weekend prepping my discussion for Labov and the Decision Trees, I have started to think about whether I can apply the ideas of careful and casual speech to traditional and digital academic writing.  Now, again, I am applying a spoken framework to a study of writing, but I think it illuminates some interesting points.

Style and Stance #4: My First Data Examination

My goal tonight is to examine the submission guidelines for traditional academic journals to establish their style and stance then turn to digital academic journals' guidelines to see if I can find any contrasts.  Wish me luck on this first foray!

Style and Stance #3: Am I ready to start being a sociolinguist?

I am just about ready to start examining data sets ... just about.  Before I do, though, I want to use this week's post to encapsulate my understanding of style and stance and how a researcher applies these.  I also want to explore how these seem applicable to written texts in light of the majority of sociolinguistic work being done with speech.  If I am wrong about any of what I write below, tell me now!