3.3.5 Writing case descriptions
Case descriptions were written to focus on infrastructure formation and knowledge creation in situ. Decisions on inclusion or exclusion of details were based on relevance to the research questions, and importance for a coherent narrative. To guide inclusion or exclusion of detail, I asked “if the reader had additional information, would it change the findings of the piece?” or if further details would have any other influence on those findings (Gullion, 2016, p. 31).
The aim was to provide a coherent account of group projects and to use particular elements, interactions, use of tools and communications to illustrate common and contrasting approaches to collaboration and knowledge creation. With finite space to cover seven groups, each case
description, while describing activity through common focii, offers a different level of detail on elements of infrastructure and knowledge work. For example, one case will describe the function of a communication tool in detail, and another will follow the creation of a shared object step by step (see Table 2 for a summary of what elements were highlighted in each case). While every element is not treated at the same depth in each case, the aim was to find both commonalities and exceptions, and so support findings with appropriate range and depth of evidence, noting “key, essential, striking, odd, interesting things” (Silverman, 2014, p. 135).
Coding of transcripts guided choice of events, objects and interactions. Writing involved using noted points in transcripts, diagrams and gathered project objects to chronologically work through group interactions and write and illustrate the story of each group’s collaboration. Student interview questions were aimed at eliciting first impressions, key events in projects and final view of the group product and process. I re-read transcripts of interviews to bring perspective to description and analysis of the cases. Where relevant, student comments were used to supplement observations. I constantly referred descriptions back to group documents and transcriptions, and I updated diagrams in turn as I refined details. While the descriptions were guided by theory and the research
8 While the freehand nature of the diagrams does not support non-visual reading, colour vision deficiency is
questions, my aim was to describe what was happening from evidence in the data. This is to trace “what people are doing” rather than trying to “peer inside peoples’ heads” (Silverman, 2014, p. 230 original emphasis).
In interactional multimodal analysis, we are not much concerned with the perceptions, thoughts, and feelings that people are experiencing, but we are concerned with the perceptions, thoughts, and feelings that people are expressing
(Norris, 2004, p. 3).
One of my aims in writing was to “put the reader in that place” (Gullion, 2016, p. 77) through
evocative description. Projects in this study could cause some frustration and stress for students and were also the site of humour and camaraderie; I try to evoke the tone and elements of this in my writing style, which intersperses some informality and affect within a scholarly approach. Patton (2002) uses the phrase “empathic neutrality” (p. 50), which I have strived to achieve in my
descriptions of the cases: empathy for the people in the study and neutral non-judgement of their activities.
I follow advice on writing ethnography (Gullion, 2016) and many other researchers in using personal pronouns in presenting my research, that is, ‘I’ and ‘me’ rather than in the distancing third person of phrases such as ‘the researcher’ or ‘the observer.’ Importantly, this signals the reflexivity of
research, “the way that the researcher acts on the world and the world acts on the researcher, in a loop” (Taylor, 2001b, p. 17). The observations, while based on data and aiming for neutrality, are still my observations and in the context of my interest in the sociomaterial conditions of epistemic agency.
In the discussion of findings, I re-examined the results to bring together a comparison of the cases on framing and disposition as well as elements of secondary and primary level infrastructure. Because of the differences in task and scaffolding, I grouped cases by task.
3.3.6 Generation of the ‘synthesising object’ and categorisation of cases
In the process of analysis, I formulated criteria for identifying a novel type of epistemic object, which I named the synthesising object. I developed this concept from detailed analysis of cases in which individuals created substantial objects that extended concepts from group discussion. The object diagrams for each project showed connections between shared conceptual development and individual contributions, as well as the role of objects in the conceptual and practical workflow of a project. I derived a definition of the new object from the object diagrams as well as discourse analysis of object-centred interactions. I identified five main characteristics of a synthesising object. It is:
1) In artefact form. It can be shared, modified and used by others.
2) Created by an individual (potentially a sub-group) who recognises a need. 3) Based on shared knowledge work.
4) An expansion, addition to, (re)organisation or adjustment of perspective for collective ideas. 5) Usually a transformation of mode or format. For example, it could interpret a verbal
Analysis of how objects were using in collaborative work suggested potential roles for synthesising objects, including as a focus for ongoing shared conceptual development. The significance of this concept is supported by calls to focus on the interaction between individual and shared epistemic agency, and the processes at play (e.g. Cress & Kimmerle, 2018; Stahl, 2013a; Zhou, 2012; see end of Section 2.2).
Chapter 6, Section 6.2, discusses synthesising objects. The VideoTech (education, Section 4.4) and Village (engineering, Section 5.3) cases include detailed examples of synthesising objects.
I used summarised analyses of projects to compare dimensions between them, first on approaches to the project: division of knowledge work versus shared knowledge creation. Of the cases that showed sustained shared knowledge creation, I further categorised them according to whether the group produced substantial synthesising objects. A short description of the classifications is in the next section, ‘Organisation of results and discussion.’