Notes from meeting with Sian on 5 April 2013

I've been a bit slow on this. Here are the notes from last week's meeting with Sian where we discussed my second draft lit review, dissemination, data analysis and a few other bits and pieces.

Some general comments:

• Really well written
  
• Nicely critical
  
• Done a great job on affordances – managed to say a lot in a short space
  
• Thorough
  
• Nicely structured
  
• Basically, it’s great and I should feel really good about it. It reads like a piece of scholarly work.
  

Gaps, weaknesses and room for improvement:

• There’s nothing on print dominance including the history. There is an identifiable print dominance in education. This needs to be acknowledged in my exposition section. If I’m going to make the point that it’s not all about print, I first have to recognise that it is significant. There’s a gap otherwise. What is essayistic linearity? Reshaping academic composition from what?
• Also in terms of historical context, maybe I need to talk in more detail about the way that texts were multimodal.
• I need to have more about the characteristics of multimodal text. What does multimodality do to text? This is what it can be like. I’ve only touched on authorship and there’s room for more.
• How have other people looked at how we assess multimodal artefacts? There might be some stuff out there. Worth looking for this, though. This should go within the ‘decomposing artefacts’ section.
• I need to write more directly in relation to my own research. At times it’s like I’m shying away from it. It’s OK to write directly – and in the first person – about the research project and questions within the lit review. I’m situating myself as a researcher, not aspiring to be objective – I’m doing some more interpretative.
  

Fitzpatrick?

• Is it worth looking at other examples of multimodal literature e.g. Darius Glass, Alisdair Gray, Tristam Shandy? I could maybe use screen shots.
  
• The dissertation form should reflect the content. Ideas should be presented in a particular way for a reason. For instance, there needs to be some significance to the use of soundtrack, even if it might take the reader some time to work it out.
  
• Is it risky to go for multimodal dissemination? No, it’s essential to present ideas multimodally considering my topic. Have a look at Matthew Preston’s web essay from IDEL a few years back (it will be on course gallery). Incorporates music. 
  
• Considering there are relatively few interviews, investing time in Dedoose might not be worth the effort as its purpose is to deal with data collaboratively. It also costs.
  
• Hyperresearch might be a better option than Dedoose, but maybe I should just use MS Word with hyperlinks for transcription.
  

Things to leave out:

• Stick to summative assessment frameworks, rather than trying to cover formative and summative.
  
• It’s OK to leave out the counter-linguistic turn due to lack of space
  
• Don’t go into digital authorship unless it’s a major theme