Saturday, May 27, 2006
Closing the gap
I decided to micro-managed myself. Instead of setting myself to do a specific task and worrying about not being able to complete it, I decided to write down the times I spend working only on the dissertation. Checking email, looking for things, reading and interacting with others in blogs, writing in my blog, and organizing myself will not count as dissertation time; but reading and writing, organizing and analyzing data, and writing reflections about my data will - these are things that I think will really move me forward in this process. With this I hope I can close the gap between what I want to do and what I really do. I also hope to feel good about the work I do. In this way,what could seem a little or a lot will not be the main foucs, instead quality will be.
I started working on the dissertation on Monday, as I had planned before. Throughout the week I read, summarized, reflected, and tied ideas in the different sections of the book while reflecting on how it could relate to my dissertation. This week has been good. I dedicated quality time to re-reading and summarizing J. P. Gee’s (2005) An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Practice (2nd ed.). I read the first edition a few years ago, and have read this one a chapter at a time, one section here and there, or an important paragraph that dealt with a specific topic at one time or another. Reading it from front to cover gave me a lot more, not only background information but also the whole picture. Gee presented his method throughout the book using many different examples that complement and sometimes supplement what he has said before (he even tells us this). Also, the appendix has much to add to the overall strategies of Gee’s discourse analysis.
For example, in Chapter Three, James P. Gee wrote about Tools of inquiry. In this chapter, he only presented four of the six tools he discussed in this book. These are social languages, Discourses, intertextuality, and Conversations. The other two, to which he dedicated more than two chapters are the following, social meaning and Discourse models. I thought it was a little deceiving to list the first four in Chapter Three without even mentioning how important and fundamental the other two are. Yes, it is true; Gee indicated in the Introduction (Chapter One), “Each of Chapters 2-6 discusses … specific tools of inquiry that are part of the overall method and strategies for using them” (p. 8). But the thing is that by giving such title to Chapter Three, Tools of inquiry, it seemed he would present tools here and strategies elsewhere. This is not the case at all, and what follows is as important -- one could even say it is fundamental. In a further edition I would suggest that all the tools be listed and introduced in the same chapter. This would give the reader the whole picture of the method from the beginning.
According to Gee, the discourse analyst searches for Discourse models that come from the themes identified in the data. Transcribing is a lot more than just putting words in a paper. Transcribing is a two-step process that starts with the raw transcription. This one is then used to start “theorizing” with the data. To find the themes, discourse analysts use the building tasks (seven) and tools of inquiry (4-6). The process is recursive, going back and forth with the data, asking questions (26 questions from the building tasks) and reflecting about it (4-6 inquiry tools) until Discourse models can be written and then tested with the data itself (convergence, coverage, linguistic) and with other discourse analysts and citations (agreement).
This is what I am set do.
Next steps: Continue reading about discourse analysis from Gee and other authors in order to improve Chapter three of my dissertation.
Inquiry tools:
Building tasks:
Validity:
Process - possible steps:
I started working on the dissertation on Monday, as I had planned before. Throughout the week I read, summarized, reflected, and tied ideas in the different sections of the book while reflecting on how it could relate to my dissertation. This week has been good. I dedicated quality time to re-reading and summarizing J. P. Gee’s (2005) An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Practice (2nd ed.). I read the first edition a few years ago, and have read this one a chapter at a time, one section here and there, or an important paragraph that dealt with a specific topic at one time or another. Reading it from front to cover gave me a lot more, not only background information but also the whole picture. Gee presented his method throughout the book using many different examples that complement and sometimes supplement what he has said before (he even tells us this). Also, the appendix has much to add to the overall strategies of Gee’s discourse analysis.
For example, in Chapter Three, James P. Gee wrote about Tools of inquiry. In this chapter, he only presented four of the six tools he discussed in this book. These are social languages, Discourses, intertextuality, and Conversations. The other two, to which he dedicated more than two chapters are the following, social meaning and Discourse models. I thought it was a little deceiving to list the first four in Chapter Three without even mentioning how important and fundamental the other two are. Yes, it is true; Gee indicated in the Introduction (Chapter One), “Each of Chapters 2-6 discusses … specific tools of inquiry that are part of the overall method and strategies for using them” (p. 8). But the thing is that by giving such title to Chapter Three, Tools of inquiry, it seemed he would present tools here and strategies elsewhere. This is not the case at all, and what follows is as important -- one could even say it is fundamental. In a further edition I would suggest that all the tools be listed and introduced in the same chapter. This would give the reader the whole picture of the method from the beginning.
According to Gee, the discourse analyst searches for Discourse models that come from the themes identified in the data. Transcribing is a lot more than just putting words in a paper. Transcribing is a two-step process that starts with the raw transcription. This one is then used to start “theorizing” with the data. To find the themes, discourse analysts use the building tasks (seven) and tools of inquiry (4-6). The process is recursive, going back and forth with the data, asking questions (26 questions from the building tasks) and reflecting about it (4-6 inquiry tools) until Discourse models can be written and then tested with the data itself (convergence, coverage, linguistic) and with other discourse analysts and citations (agreement).
This is what I am set do.
Next steps: Continue reading about discourse analysis from Gee and other authors in order to improve Chapter three of my dissertation.
Discourse Analysis
Inquiry tools:
- social languages
- Discourses
- inter-textuality
- Conversations
- social meaning
- Discourse models
Building tasks:
- politics
- activities
- connections
- sign systems and knowledge
- identities
- relationships
- significance
Validity:
- agreement
- with other discourse analysts
- with citations from literature
- covergence
- coverage
- linguistic
Process - possible steps:
- raw transcript – to – theorized transcript – stanzas, lines, micro and macro-units, stories and body parts
- use inquiry tools and building tasks to identify themes
- develop a Discourse model
- test with data
- validate
Using Discourse Analysis, as stated by James Paul Gee, and writing a Discourse Model – a hypothesis, a theory that comes from the data - is a recursive process. Yet what has been presented here is not a tight process, a step by step procedure that needs to be followed to the letter of the ???. Ideal discourses will use many of these tools and building tasks, but not necessarily all of them!
