1.23 Part 3: Creating a data base

The list of data collection links posted to the right is a "draft" of the kinds of tools to collect "evidence" for how, whether or why teaching what "surrounds the page" is going to work.  We will use these tools to document our writing practices, to reflect on our assumptions about writing, and to discover connections between the ways we use language and what we believe about writing.  As we move through the course we may develop additional data collection instruments - but this is a place to start.

Data collection instruments.

Draft Oral History Protocol   This protocol is based on the interview protocols developed by Deborah Brandt (for literacy narratives) and by Hawiser & Selfe (for new literacy narratives).  It provides researchers with an oral history focused on the interview participant's relationship to writing.  It askes for detailed "stories" that we can use for the anlaysis of both form and content. 

Health history data (Pennebaker)   These are the baseline parameters that Pennebaker used to document the health of his participants.  His studies showed that after following the procedures set forward in the Pennebaker Prompt , participants' health (as measure by these markers) improved.   It improved to varying degrees which - as illustrated in later studies -correlated with features of the way they responded to the prompt.

Ontological assumptions related to wriring   This is a set of statements which you will mark as either agreeing with - or disagreeing with.  You will mark these statements at the beginning of the course - and again at the end.  This instrument is meant to measure any change in your assumptions about the way writing works.

Relationships to writing   This is another pre-post survey, though the answers are meant to be more story-based than the questions about assumptions. 


Plan for data collection.

Pennebaker writing, assumptions & relationships. For this week or as you have time, begin writing "answers" for the Pennebaker prompts, the assumptions, and the relationships questions, and save them as word documents.  We will discuss where/how we want to archive our data in class next week.   You should do the writing to the Pennebaker prompts BEFORE you read his essays/book. 

Oral history interview.  To get started on the oral history, read through the questions and let your mind run over some possible answers.  It is also OK to do the interview "cold" =  the interview protocol is designed so that you will certainly have plenty of opportunities for cycling back through your answers.

As I said in class, I will conduct the oral histories with each of you, but you will be responsible for recording and transcribing the interview.  You may use your transcript as data for your research project, and we may use it as data for working through some of the analytic methods we will study in Lock and Strong, and in Gurbium and Holstein. 

You may sign up for a date for your interview here.  If you have trouble accessing or editing the document let me know.