Insignificant Wranglings

Today’s Plan (Note: this might be the final class notes of the semester):

• Rest of Year Calendar
• Signing Up for Conferences
• Academic Paper Arrangement Overview
• Writing a Lit Review
• Reading Academic Research
• Homework

Rest of Year Calendar

Here’s how I see the rest of our semester:

• Week 11 [Nov 1-5]: Writing Your Lit Review
  • Deliverable: Due Sunday, add Research Synthesis to Proposal Document
• Week 12 [Nov 8-12]: Conducting Primary Research / Playing Your Game / Moar Research:
  • Deliverable: Work Log Entries
• Week 13 [Nov 15-19]: Drafting Your Paper
  • Deliverable: Conference Progress Check [Submit paper to Canvas midnight before your conference]
• Week 14 [Nov 22-25]: Thanksgiving [Drafting Your Paper]
  • Submit Drafts by Tuesday Nov 23rd
• Week 15 [Nov 29-Dec 3]: Revising Your Paper / Research Presentations
  • Deliverable: Submit Google Slides and give lightning talk
• Week 16: Submit Final Paper by Wednesday Dec 8th

Week 11 & 12: Research Synthesis and Work Logs
For the next two weeks, you will add work material to your proposal document. This week, you should grind through whatever Future Research you listed in your proposal, following the annotation guidelines that I develop below. This weekend, you should synthesize your research into a “literature review,” which I discuss further below. You can write up the lit review in your proposal document, I will be scanning through them on Monday morning (Nov 8th).

What you do next week will vary depending on your project. Let’s call it “get shit done week.” Some of you will have more research articles to read and add to your synthesis. Some of you have a video game to play and log. Some of you have a survey to finish, or a focus group to conduct. Whatever you have to do to write your paper, do that week 12 (Nov 8-12). Do it. DO IT.

Week 13: Signing Up For Conferences
We will not be meeting face-to-face for class during Week 13 (the week before Thanksgiving) or Week 14 (Thanksgiving week). In place of class, I will be meeting with you 1 on 1 to check in on your paper progress.

There is a sign-up sheet with potential meeting times.

You will submit a copy of your draft prior to our conference (Week 13: Paper Draft for Conference). You should come to the conference with a specific question / idea of what you’d like to work on. At this point, here’s what I’ll be looking for:

• You have a lit review
• You have collected all your “data” / played your game
• You have drafted your discussion section(s)

NOTE: I’m not going to look at your introduction yet! I want to see that you’re doing the intellectual labor you need to do.

Week 14: Thanksgiving

You will submit a complete-not-a-mess-this-deserves-to-be-graded draft of the paper on Tuesday Nov 23rd. Early submissions are welcome. I will comment on these papers over the Thanksgiving break.

Week 15: Final Papers and Research Presentations

On Monday, November 29th, I will go over writing introductions for your final papers and review APA format and what have you (whatever common issues come up in the drafts). We’ll do some grade norming in class, looking at past papers. You will all do a 5 minute presentation of your final research materials (Lightning Talk) as well.

You will have this week to revise your papers; final submission is due Wednesday December 8th.

Academic Paper Arrangement Overview

As we move from secondary research (reading articles) to primary research (playing your game), I wanted to review the overall paper structure. My goal today is to give you a clearer sense of how to outline your paper, and how/where the research you’ve already done might fit into that outline.

Of course, there is no one way to organize a paper. But there are some basic principles I can lay out that will work in most situations (genre here also matters, there’s a big difference between a research report and an argumentative essay–the former is more formal and suggests the structure I lay out below, the latter is more informal and allows for more creative play).

The standard science or social science outline looks like this:

• Introduction: Articulates the problem that generated the research question(s). Poses the research questions clearly. Lays out the thesis: which is the answers to the research questions.
• Literature Review: This reviews previous research on your topic. As I’ll show below, there’s a lot of ways to “group” this research; you should organize this section around ideas, not around individual articles: that is, make sure your paragraphs open with a strong topic sentence that makes a claim about what/how researchers/scholars are discussing (something). Then group and discuss which scholars are doing that work (and how they are doing it–brief descriptions of methods, findings, and discussion, concise synthesis of your research annotations). See below for more information.
• Methodology: This section generally needs to do 3-4 things (in our case, most of you will only do two of them). I will go over these below.
• Data / Findings / Discussion: Sometimes you will see these sections separated–especially in the hard sciences where your data can be presented as numbers, graphs, and tables. Some of you are working on papers that involve this kind of research (Jade, Ainsley, Chris). In these papers, you will see one section for Data (or Findings) and another section for Discussion, in which you compare your findings to previous studies in the literature review (noting what agrees and what disagrees with previous findings), you highlight and explain unexpected findings, and you suggest the impact of these findings (what they mean for the field, or what changes they suggest are necessary to our world–note that sometimes this happens in the conclusion).
• Conclusion: I think conclusions are quite hard to write; they have to summarize the entire paper (which, REMEMBER, the introduction should do) and either end emphasizing a change (if you did not do this in the discussion), a hope, a direction for future studies (say, what you would do next or what you would have done differently if you could start over or had more time).

Many of you are not writing a social science, experiment or quasi-experimental paper (that is, you aren’t developing a survey, measuring something, counting anything, etc etc). You are doing a more humanities-focused approach, one in which you interpret a “text” to discover hidden meaning, social/personal significance, cultural reflection, etc etc. But–and I hope you already see this–your papers, like our Sicart papers, are following something pretty close to this approach.

These papers still use a literature review, one in which we survey previous interpretations of that text (or, in our case, game). Some of them might be more relevant to our study than others. These papers often also include a methodology, even if we do not label it that. That is where we lay out a way of thinking about texts–we construct a “critical lens.”

For instance, in our Sicart papers, we explicated three criteria that he identifies as essential to developing meaningful ethical game play: player complicity, wicked problems, and forced reflection. Your papers then turned to examine scenes from video games and assessed how well they executed these elements. Some papers argued that games created powerful, meaningful ethical experiences without using these criteria.

I am currently working on a paper comparing Walking Dead to The Last of Us, arguing that the particular form of engaged witnessing Last of Us evokes engenders powerful and empathetic moral reflection, even if we (as players) do not feel complicit in the choices “our” protagonist makes. So, I establish Sicart and use his theory to read Walking Dead and explicate its effectiveness, but they use A Last of Us to illustrate how games can leverage our genre expectations (making difficult choices) to amplify moral experiences (by taking the choice away, making us live through the choices made by another). In my literature review, I talk about the power of books and film to also make us witness and experience, but argue that the interactivity/engagement of games, and the emergence, development, and popularity of the “ethical choice” game amplifies the power here (games are special!). My point here: for pedagogical purposes I want everyone to follow the paper format above; for the more interpretive papers, you will replace the Discussion section with substantive headings that “label” your analysis (e.g., Maternal Imagery in Silent Hill 2, Wicked Problems in Dragon Age: Inquisition).

Writing a Literature Review

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time I co-wrote a research article on multimodal artist Maira Kalman. The article reported on a multimodal project I developed for a Digital Video course on how Kalman’s approach to art echoed “radical” rhetorical theorists on the unpredictable nature of creative invention–on how we cannot teach creativity, but we can teach habits, practices, approaches, that might allow something creative to happen.

The original outline of that paper looked like this:

• Introduction
• Surveying Theories of Choric Invention
  • Gregory Ulmer
  • Thomas Rickert
  • Byron Hawk
  • Jeff Rice
  • Sarah Arroyo
  • Colin Brooke
• Explicating Kalman’s Aesthetic

Our reviewer feedback was tough, but fair:

On a similar note, the theoretical chops of this article come forward as relatively unconnected blocks. In the ULMER section, we get a block on Ulmer, interspersed with several others, but then it becomes a set of legos: a green block (Rickert [and Rickert and Kristeva]), then a red block (Hawk), then yellow (Brooke [and Brooke and Barthes]), then blue (Arroyo [and Arroyo and Deleuze and Guattari]), then purple (Rice [and Rice and De Certeau]). Each of these feels strangely disconnected and underdeveloped, particularly given the potential connections between Kalman’s work and each of these authors (as well as the theorists they are working in relation to).

Essentially, we had walked through our literature, or research, one source at a time (even if each of those sections often involved multiple sources). What we didn’t do is cut across all those sources to identify the most important ideas they have in common. We didn’t synthesize our sources.

Our second outline looks like this:

• Introduction
• Synthesizing Theories of Choric Invention
  • Prioritizing Space
  • Juxtaposing Subjective (Affective) Experience Alongside Objective History
  • Resisting Synthesis
  • Resisting Codification
• Explicating Kalman’s Aesthetic

The difference here is essential: moving from talking about one source at a time to explicating an idea. The Prioritizing Space section has references to Rickert, Ulmer, and Hawk. The Juxtaposing Subjective.. section also has references to Rickert, Ulmer, and Hawk. The Resisting Synthesis section has references to Brook and Arroyo. The Resisting Codification section has references to all of them, and brings in Rice and Shipka. I put this section last because it was the one idea that runs through all of the stuff I read.

Now I had a clear structure in place (four elements of choric invention) to read Maira Kalman’s work (and then to ask my students to consider in creating video remediations of their experiences in historic/affective spaces).

The point of the long story is this: whether you are writing a social/scientific research paper or a humanities scholarly analysis, you need to organize your lit review around ideas, not around names or articles (and researchers and scholars have names. Don’t write “this article” in an annotation or research paper).

In the proposal document, I suggested the following heuristic for helping you carve up your research:

• Research that shows there is a problem
  • Also: if applicable, research that argues there isn’t a problem
  • Some of this might appear in the introduction, then get repeated/explored in more depth in the lit review
• Research that addresses what is causing the problem
  • Not different articles, but different theories for causes (referencing multiple articles per theory if possible!)
• Research that measures the public’s perception (or lack thereof) of the problem, I don’t think anyone is working on this kind of project
• Research that offers solutions to the problem
• Research from which you can steal methodology for your primary research (which would go in the methods section)

By Monday morning, I would like you to complete your research annotations and compose a research synthesis, one that groups your research into conceptual categories rather than mini-book reports.

Think about the following template for getting started: Previous research on TOPIC has generally concerned itself with two/three/four ideas/concepts/issues. First, something. Second, something else. Third, something even elser. Fourth, a final thing. OR Maybe: Third, while scholars agree on A and B, they tend to disagree on C.

That becomes a mini-introduction, followed by four paragraphs that walk through each idea/concept/problem. Note that the same article might appear in many or all of those paragraphs!. That’s okay. The point is to make sure the topic sentences to paragraphs are about ideas, not articles.

• A recent example.
• Another recent example.
• One last example.

For each of these, let’s read slowly and try to do two things:

• Look at the first sentence of a paragraph. Does it have a citation?
• How many citations does a paragraph have?
• How many ideas does a paragraph have?
• Is the paragraph the author’s ideas or a summary of other people’s ideas?

Methodology

As I mention above, a methodology section has four general goals:

• How you collect your corpus (group of object you were going to study)
• How you analyzed your corpus to produce data
• How you analyzed your data or texts
• How you ensured your analysis was reliable

Not every study does all four of these things. For instance, scholars do not have to explain why their interpretations of a text are valid–the act of interpreting a text is making a claim for the ingenuity and relevance of the reading. But if you are reading 500 student papers and assessing them for the quality of their thesis statement, then you need to demonstrate how those evaluations are consistent.

If you create a survey, an interview, a focus group, etc, then this section has to walk us through the questions you asked. How/why did you ask this question; what does it attempt to measure, why is it important?

Let’s look at a very detailed example.

Homework

You probably have more research to read and annotate. If you’ve read all your preliminary research, then get to work playing your game or writing up your methodology or polishing up your research tools.

Heuristic for research annotations:
Can I answer all of the following questions?:

• Paragraph #1: What are the central arguments in the article?
• Paragraph #1: What recommendations do the authors make?
• P #2: How did they collect their evidence? [Methods]
• P#2: How did they analyze their evidence
• P#3: Why is the article important?
• P#3: What other article(s) does it echo or challenge? [Compare contrast]
• P#3: After reading this research, what recommendations can I make?
• P#3: How does the article contribute to my field of study, my present research?