Pender Hill, Parker Palmer, Mark Johnson, and Dewey!

Image via WikipediaRecently I attended a wonderful wedding of two young friends that happened to be next door to the Quaker Retreat Center, Pender Hill, outside of Philadelphia.  While I was unfamiliar with that name...I was familiar with the name Parker Palmer, who had spent many years there as student, teacher, and Dean.

Since the encounter with Pender Hill, I have been thinking more about Parker Palmer's work, which has always resonated with me. 

I have also been reading a marvelous book by Mark Johnson--The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding--in which he comes back to Dewey's notion of the body-mind in fruitful and provocative ways.  

So this morning Parker Palmer had and out of body experience with Mark Johnson and John Dewey--in my mind as I thought about the struggle individuals and groups have with interactions.  Struggle is the problematic (a la Dewey).  We always have situations that are unbalanced, poorly understood, present an issue that needs to be explored, inquired about--that's what Dewey's notion of situation has embedded in it.  I was thinking about the issues of interactions as issues of power.  This led me to the notion of balance (of power...power with) vs power that is out of balance (power over or power under; victimizer vs victimized).  When one seeks power with, you are working from a position of confidence and capacity...you are power-ful.  When one seeks power over or under, you are working from a position of fear.  Power-ful is balanced, integrated, connected, calm.  Power-less is unbalanced, disintegrating, dis-connected and fearful.

This brought me back to Mark Johnson and Dewey as I thought about the ways these stances are embodied and how our feelings or reactions provide us with important information about the ways others around us are engaged in negotiating power.  I am so likely to think that I should discount physical information about how I am reacting or how I FEEL others are reacting, and yet this information is critical to understanding the structure and meaning of the power issues in an interaction. 



I've set myself the personal task of learning more about Parker Palmer's Circles of Caring work as it applies to higher education.  This seems like such a good fit with the notion of diversity in the workplace...in the largest sense of that term.

Thank you to all my distant teachers!  

Book Review

Image by williamcho via FlickrI have just gotten word about a new review of the diGregorio & Davidson text:  Qualitative Research Design for Software Users.  The review was written by Dale Frick and published in Qualitative Social Work.  My thanks to Dale Frick (whom I haven't met before) for such a thoughtful review. 

You can access the review at:  http:qsw.sage.pub.com/content/9/2/287.citation

Anthologize

Image by MatthiasHeil via Flickr

Something very exciting has just happened in the world of academia and technology.  Thanks to Dan Cohen and his NEH funded group for developing a really interesting tool.  Take a look at: 

Anthologize

You can read more about the development of this project on Dan's Blog:

Dan Cohen on Anthologize

I think there is great potential for academic use here--turning blogs into articles and publications, providing students with new ways to write.  This was a tool that was waiting to happen.  Thanks to everyone who worked on it.  I look forward to trying it out. 

The Journal Project Marches Forward

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I haven't posted for awhile, but that doesn't mean I have been inactive. Indeed, the Journal Project is marching forward. I've completed all the preliminary analysis and have been working on drafting a book outline and filling in parts of the chapters as that is possible.

Here is my tentative title (and this is one I've settled on among what seems like hundreds that I have generated):

Interior Conversations:  Technology, Aesthetics, and Qualitative Research

How is that for a pithy label for the work?! 

I've actually been having many good conversations with colleagues about the tentative outline and this has been extremely generative.  In addition to pointing out new ways of understanding the concepts, they have directed me to processes that have helped me to develop the materials in new ways ("That's interesting.  Write a memo about it!").  I have also been directed to some very good books.  Mark Johnson's The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding arrived from Amazon.com this last week. 

Questions I am skating around include:  What is a technology?  How is a technology a thing?  How do things (and technologies) compose practice?  How are aesthetics part of understanding, designing, and practicing with things (and technologies)?  How are aesthetics part of motor activity or embodied?  How is technology/things embodied? 

A rich area for me has been thinking about the ways qualitative researchers react to and avoid use of qualitative research software and related technologies.  I am beginning to see how these reactions are also embedded within streams of thought in sociology and other disciplines.  It appears that reaction to technology is often a confused response to industrialization and its ills.

Finally writing about family, provides me with new insight into the ways in which I am a living example of the tension between aesthetic and technical views as they were simplified and magnified in my family of origin.  Back to thinking! 

Bresler on Aesthetics...2

This is a follow-up blog on Liora Bresler's work.  (See Bresler to the right...It is amazing what you can find on Google Images!)

First, some information on where you can find these materials.

Bresler, L. (2006). Embodied Narrative Inquiry: A Methodology of Connection. Research Studies in Music Education, 27, 21-43.

The piece titled "Experiential pedagogies in research education: Drawing on engagement with artworks" will be a chapter in a book edited by Candace Stout which will be released in late 2010.  

This morning I realized that I needed to take more account of what Liora was saying about the differences between textual/visual and auditory/oral.  (Her piece on Embodied Narrative is where she speaks most strongly to this.] This has great importance to what I have been thinking about in terms of "artful computing".  Manufacturing text from interviews and observations is, in and of itself, a process of reducation and visualization.  Visualization has been at the heart of what Qualitative Data Analysis Software is doing.  Even with the new capacities for audio and video, the emphasis in QDAS is still on reduction towards text.  

Bresler draws upon the works of music educator Wayne Bowman and cultural historian Walter Ong in thinking about the nature of sound to illustrate how sound is a uniquely embodied experience, and one that exists in process and change as opposed to the visual which exists in a state of constancy outside of our bodies.  

Why do I say that text is reduction?  Well, it is the beginning of the process of shrinking, leaving out,  condensing, and reduction that makes it possible to transform experience into new sets of symbols and combinations of symbolic meanings that is necessary in qualitative research.  You turn it into text--reduction begins.  You code the text--reduction again.  You play with the codes and create tables or statements or models--reduction again...and juxtaposition.  

Well, there is much good to think with here.  Thanks again.  

Bresler on Aesthetics

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My Journal Project is really percolating along and the outline and ideas are falling into place.  I've contacted several friends to ask for resources and feedback.  Liora Bresler from the University of Illinois sent me three great articles:

"Experiential pedagogies in research education: Drawing on engagement with art works"

"Embodied narrative inquiry: A methodology of connection", and

"Toward connectedness: Aesthetically based research" (this one was published in Studies in Art Education, September 2006). 

What a treat!  And wow were they helpful.

Here is what I am taking away with me:

• Connectedness is something that aesthetics and the arts can lend to qualitative research.  Connectedness in the arts offers a means for us to make sense of our relationship with participants AND the scholarly community.  Connectedness provides a means to fulfill qualitative research's desire for empathic understanding (verstehen) with which we have long struggled.  
• Embodied Narrative Inquiry...by drawing upon arts-based understanding of embodiment to inform qualitative research's use of narrative inquiry we will have access to a much richer conceptualization as researchers.  Embodied Narrative Inquiry allows us to make sense of silence/voice; musical/visual; self/other in new ways that can enlarge qualitative research.  Considering the nature of sound.. the possibilities of musical improvisation...and the characteristics or qualities of musical presentation--all of these offer ways to flesh out the notion of embodied narrative inquiry.  
•  Qualitative Research Instruction:  In "Experiential pedagogies..." Liora shares a wonderful assignment from her qualitative research course.  Students do sustained observations of paintings--one they like and one they dislike.  She shares a large number of the comments made in students' journals or papers and discusses the issues in qualitative research that are raised through this exercise.  I want to do it in my class!  It's a winner.

Thank you Liora...now to integrate all of this good stuff into my arguments. 

Jer Thorp at IBM Cambridge

Image by johnnybelmont via Flickr

Yesterday I had the pleasure of hearing (and seeing) Jer Thorp, a kind of computer Renaissance man, who presented his work at the IBM Cambridge offices.  He is a scientist, computer programmer, and artist rolled into one.  His art, as he describes it, are the software that he creates to work with visualizations of data. 

He showed a range of examples of his work.  He has been exploring the NY Times archives using their API (Application Programming Interface...it allows one piece of software to speak to another).  He explained that where Open Source was once the center of computer interest, that interest has now shifted to Open Data.  

With hundreds of thousands of data items from the NY Times--the articles--he demonstrated how small, simple programs can illustrate different aspects of the information.  One that caught my eye, was a comparison of the word strength and connections within two articles.  This is like IBM's "Many Eyes", but that tool is still related to a single piece of text.  It is not comparative in the way that Thorp's was. 

Of particular interest to me were the "facets".  The NY Times has been tagging their articles since the 1800's (using real live human indexers).  Facets are "parent nodes" in NVivo speak that relate to categories like description, geography, person, etc.  Within the facets there are "child nodes".

He demonstrated another interesting piece of work tracking people who say "Good Morning" on Twitter.  In this piece he turned to Magna Carta, a Google tool, that gives the Latitude and Longitude for a text.  As the globe turned and colors popped out at us, reflecting the time zones coming on as risers tweeted "Good Morning" to the world, he made the point that "huge amounts of data are trailing behind us".

His blog blprnt@blprnt.com provides more information on his work. 


Oh--he also introduced me to an unusual off-beat artist Mark Lombardi, whose art consisted of graphs or node networks related to conspiracies he tracked.  These are truly like what one develops in Qualitative Data Analysis Software.  He, and his friends, considered them art.  Here's what Wikipedia said about it:

 Lombardi called his diagrams Narrative Structures ^[2] and they are structurally similar to sociograms – a type of graph drawing used in the field of social network analysis, and to a lesser degree to earlier artists like Hans Haacke – but in Lombardi's historical diagrams, each node or connection was drawn from news stories from reputable media organizations. The aesthetic impact is unique – the schematics are elaborate and delicate, yet precise and factual spiderwebs of illustrations depicting alleged networks of criminal conspiracies.

This talk gave me hope in regard to the ideas I've been playing around with regarding artful computing.

The talk was sponsored by the Center for Social Software at IBM.  Their new application, SAND, is looking a lot like QDAS.  I'm looking forward to learning more about it.