Next research phase: interviews!
Jun. 17th, 2010 11:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tishaturkI am happy to report that the University of Minnesota IRB Human Subjects Committee has approved my plans to interview vidders and vidwatchers! So, beginning this summer, I will be conducting interviews (in person when possible, but also by email or phone).
I'm interested in interviewing anybody who's willing to talk to me, including people who feel, or have felt in the past, that they don't (yet) know enough about vids to talk about them, who want to be able to leave substantive feedback about vids but sometimes have trouble doing so, etc. That is, I am not specifically looking for "expert opinions" on vids; I just want to talk to fans about their experiences making and/or watching vids, and especially about how they learned to make and/or watch vids.
My goal is to use these interviews to think about vidding and vidwatching as literacy practices. I'll be posting more about this idea in the next few weeks, but here's the short version:
Increasingly, scholars who study literacy point out that print literacy, although still indispensable, is not the only kind of literacy that educators need to be thinking about; we need to be teaching multimedia literacies (sometimes called new media literacies or multiliteracies), not just print literacy.
When I think "multimedia literacy," I think of vids. A lot of the mental work that we do when we watch or make vids is similar to the work that we do when we read or write print texts, in the sense that both sets of activities require us to make sense out of signs or symbols, to draw upon what we already know and connect it to what we're reading and watching, to process and interpret information, and this is the sense in which vidding and vidwatching are literacy practices. But of course making and watching multimedia texts (like vids) are also different from writing and reading print text. For one thing, vids require us to handle more different kinds of information at once: words, images, audio. So fandom has a long history of people learning to make and to watch complex multimedia texts that have lots of different rhetorical purposes and effects.
One of the things that composition studies scholars have done over the last thirty years is to study how experienced writers write in order to figure out what they know or do that inexperienced (student) writers don't know or do; scholars then use that information to figure out what teachers need to teach and how they might go about teaching it. Substitute "vidders and vidwatchers" for "experienced writers," and you get a sense of what I'm trying to do. We make and watch vids voluntarily, on our own time, because we enjoy it. It seems to me that educators who want to know how best to teach multimedia literacy could learn a lot from looking at people who already do multimedia literacy.
One of the assumptions that I am making, based on my own experiences as a fan, is that making and watching vids involves a lot of cognitive and rhetorical work (even if we’re not always conscious of that work as we’re doing it). So what I want to know is: Why do we do this work? What helps us learn to do this work? What makes doing this work worthwhile (creatively, intellectually, emotionally, socially)? More specifically: How do people get interested in vids? How do we learn to make sense of vids? How do vidders learn to vid? What do vidders actually do when they vid? What draws us to vids, and what keeps us interested? Obviously there's not going to be a single clear answer to any of these questions; fans are nothing if not various and idiosyncratic. What I'm hoping is that somewhere in the inevitable variety of responses there will be interesting patterns for me to think about and report on—both to the academic community and to the vidding community.
Please note: I am not yet formally asking for interview volunteers; I will do that in a separate post. But I welcome any and all comments, and I am happy to answer any questions either about my interview plans or about this research more generally.
ETA: I've now posted a call for interview volunteers.
I'm interested in interviewing anybody who's willing to talk to me, including people who feel, or have felt in the past, that they don't (yet) know enough about vids to talk about them, who want to be able to leave substantive feedback about vids but sometimes have trouble doing so, etc. That is, I am not specifically looking for "expert opinions" on vids; I just want to talk to fans about their experiences making and/or watching vids, and especially about how they learned to make and/or watch vids.
My goal is to use these interviews to think about vidding and vidwatching as literacy practices. I'll be posting more about this idea in the next few weeks, but here's the short version:
Increasingly, scholars who study literacy point out that print literacy, although still indispensable, is not the only kind of literacy that educators need to be thinking about; we need to be teaching multimedia literacies (sometimes called new media literacies or multiliteracies), not just print literacy.
When I think "multimedia literacy," I think of vids. A lot of the mental work that we do when we watch or make vids is similar to the work that we do when we read or write print texts, in the sense that both sets of activities require us to make sense out of signs or symbols, to draw upon what we already know and connect it to what we're reading and watching, to process and interpret information, and this is the sense in which vidding and vidwatching are literacy practices. But of course making and watching multimedia texts (like vids) are also different from writing and reading print text. For one thing, vids require us to handle more different kinds of information at once: words, images, audio. So fandom has a long history of people learning to make and to watch complex multimedia texts that have lots of different rhetorical purposes and effects.
One of the things that composition studies scholars have done over the last thirty years is to study how experienced writers write in order to figure out what they know or do that inexperienced (student) writers don't know or do; scholars then use that information to figure out what teachers need to teach and how they might go about teaching it. Substitute "vidders and vidwatchers" for "experienced writers," and you get a sense of what I'm trying to do. We make and watch vids voluntarily, on our own time, because we enjoy it. It seems to me that educators who want to know how best to teach multimedia literacy could learn a lot from looking at people who already do multimedia literacy.
One of the assumptions that I am making, based on my own experiences as a fan, is that making and watching vids involves a lot of cognitive and rhetorical work (even if we’re not always conscious of that work as we’re doing it). So what I want to know is: Why do we do this work? What helps us learn to do this work? What makes doing this work worthwhile (creatively, intellectually, emotionally, socially)? More specifically: How do people get interested in vids? How do we learn to make sense of vids? How do vidders learn to vid? What do vidders actually do when they vid? What draws us to vids, and what keeps us interested? Obviously there's not going to be a single clear answer to any of these questions; fans are nothing if not various and idiosyncratic. What I'm hoping is that somewhere in the inevitable variety of responses there will be interesting patterns for me to think about and report on—both to the academic community and to the vidding community.
Please note: I am not yet formally asking for interview volunteers; I will do that in a separate post. But I welcome any and all comments, and I am happy to answer any questions either about my interview plans or about this research more generally.
ETA: I've now posted a call for interview volunteers.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-18 09:18 pm (UTC)ROFL, I am with you on the whole "paralyzing terror" aspect. Sometimes vidding is one of the few activities where it's better to disengage the brain first. *g*