Inquiry #10

What Are People Expected to Do?

A focus on shared meanings requires capturing the collective action that occurs in groups. Capturing the solitary activity of individual actors doesn’t make sense conceptually in nexus analysis where it’s important to see patterns of interaction among a group of people. Instead, location-based video provides a stable view of a group with a set of materials. Although people come and go, the group itself is in motion, continually gelling and breaking off into clumps and recombining, a lava lamp of activity

Revealing Historical Bodies

Location-Based Video Data Collection

Classroom observation and video recording routines of routine activities at a particular classroom location allows you to see frequent practices among group members and to study how these repeat or change on a daily basis. Multiple cameras on a single location can be synced to give a more complete view of a group's activity.

Reflective Journal

Whether writing fieldnotes or managing cameras for video collection, there is rarely enough time during a session to capture your insights and key takeaways. As soon as possible after the session, record your impressions and your sense of commonplace practices. As practical, confer with your participants, remembering that keeping a critical eye on nexus means considering participants’ discourse is also shaped by tacit expectations in the nexus.

Video Data Catalog

After each session, review the raw video footage you’ve collected and summarize the content in a video data catalog. Recording key information for each clip is helpful when synchronizing video clips from multiple cameras. For each video clip, create a row with fields to tag the location, the materials, participants in that location, and a short description of the highlights of the activity depicted in the clip. Using the count functions in spreadsheets, different kinds of literacy practices can be labeled and tallied.