Visualizing Composition: Understanding Composing Processes as a Coordination of Technological and Cultural Activities

Bill Hart-Davidson, Julie Lindquist, Jeff Grabill
The Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center
Rhetoric and Writing Program
Michigan State University

The goal of our project is to uncover where, when, and by what cultural and technological means composing happens in the lived experience of student writers. We understand composing to consist of not just one, but a series of “communication events”—moments of conversation, of drafting or sketching, of reading or re-reading, and so on.

Research Questions:

1. How does the day-to-day activity of composing unfold in the social and technological scenes that constitute emerging literacies?
2. What strategies for coordinating socio-technical resources reveal themselves to be important, particularly effective, and/or persistent literacy practices?

Our project has two phases. The first phase of our project is synthetic and historical—to explore in detail the research literature within and outside rhetoric and composition concerned with understanding composing as the coordination of elements such as writing in multiples spaces, with multiple actors (people and technologies), and utilizing multiple sign systems. We anticipate that this review will be useful on its own, but we also anticipate that it will shape the second, empirical phase of this project. This second phase addresses the problem that few studies have examined: how writers coordinate these elements. We are currently in phase two and working with ten undergraduate students in first year writing classes.

Methods: Diary Study, Interviews, and Follow-up Observations
By utilizing a diary study, we will employ a method used with considerable success to study a variety of different types of literate activity that is either too distributed in time and space or too minutely complex for conventional observational methods. For this project, each participant will be asked to keep a communication event diary in which they will record all of the oral and written communication that takes place relevant to a writing project that they have been assigned for a writing course. We will also ask participants to save copies of all of the written documents.

Each log entry will include the following information about a communication event: time and date of the event, medium and genre of the event, audiences or interlocutors involved, and purpose of the event. Using the data from the diaries, the researchers will prepare visualizations—Communication Event Models (CEM’s)—of the writer’s writing project in order to stimulate recall about the composing process during an in-depth interview. Participants will be interviewed once during the project and once after they have finished the project for which they are keeping a diary.

As interesting accounts of the composing process emerge from the diaries and interviews, we will identify opportunities to observe individuals composing. Because we will be able to base our selection on a record of their project, we will be more likely to choose events to observe that are both relevant to our research questions and more realistically situated in time and space within the participants’ own writing habits. For example, we may discover that a writer with a busy schedule tends to develop initial drafts of a paper by e-mailing or text-messaging herself whenever a new idea strikes her throughout the day. Then, when she has a few hours to devote exclusively to the project, she assembles the draft from these electronic bits and pieces. We might want to focus one of our observations on the synthesis work this writer does, so we would ask her to invite us to watch the next time she has a few hours scheduled to draft in this way.

We expanded the literature review (phase one) by looking at studies like ours (methodologically), not just studies of composing within composition studies. And we begin the data collection for phase two at the end of March.  Therefore, we do not yet have preliminary findings. We expect data collection for the project to be completed in May of 2005 with results to follow. Information about the project can be obtained from Jeff Grabill, Bill Hart-Davidson, or Julie Lindquist at Michigan State University.

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