Hi everyone-- At our meeting last week in Bloomington, I agreed to organize a workshop on humanities methods for ISSOTL2010. Later that morning, I heard a presentation by two psychologists about a project they did "reading" students' postings in an online discussion and in a course blog. They used a computer program to perform a content analysis, counting words of different kinds as well as word count and such, and then doing various statistical calculations. I kept thinking about this as a perfect example of a social science project in which some humanities methodology might be helpful. So then I wondered about doing a workshop with them, in which we might work through two ways of reading the text -- a humanities-based close reading and a social-science based content analysis. In that way, we could show that both approaches yield useful information but provide different types of "proof." The downside is that a room full of social scientists could watch all of this and simply repeat the claim that without "hard data" no analysis is conclusive. Anyway, I wonder what others think. Does this seem like a useful model? Sherry Linkon |
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Thinking about a workshop on methods for 2010posted Oct 30, 2009 9:16 AM by Sherry Lee Linkon |
Hi, Sherry. That sounds great. Yes, and given the Going Public Strand's session about a survey of SoTL journal editors ("methods must be good science," among other similar comments from 12 unidentified journal editors), I think it might be less feasable to convince some folks that our methods are "valid" within their worldview and instead show our methods as another way of making meaning within a different worldview. Actually, that's probably what you're suggesting here. It's just heavy on my mind after that session and then some comments the next session with actual editors. (Sue Clegg was a wonderful alternative voice about what's good SoTL and publishable work.) But yes, I like your model here very much. I wonder if the key is making it not a competition or battle between the two and instead showing how they're complementary. I'm actually writing a piece on this issue right now. Not sure where I'll send it yet.
Nancy Chick
Hi Sherry & Nancy,
I really like this idea, too, and I wonder if I could expand on the suggestion. I think it's also important that we validate narrative as a coherent, appropriate and creative way to communicate the results of SoTL research. To follow Sherry's path, one could compare and contrast two ways of writing up and communicating the research, too?
Looking forward to talking more,
Lesley (Smith)
Hi, Lesley. I agree! As you can probably tell from my bit about SoTL posters, I'm interested in SoTL genres. I wonder if this might be a separate session: one on methods and another on genres/"going public."
I'd love to see us collect samples--not just our initial plan of collecting a few samples of "good humanities SoTL" but also some that direct our attention to genres, expanding the traditional models to include narrative forms as well. I'm also eager to have some of our poet-colleagues develop a way to bring a SoTL voice into their poetry.
Lesley, do you have any samples of narrative SoTL that might get us started?