Category: Dissertation

Photo of one of Michelangelo's Prisoners sculptures

Analysis, Editing, & the Via Negativa

Kyle

Time to say a word about the final bonus episode of Becoming Tapestry!

In Chapter 4, I finished laying out the basic methodological approach to my project. In short, I employed a form of narrative analysis to outline the documentary as a whole.

The unit of analysis in this approach is what various theorists call moments or turning points or story plots. There are countless ways to represent a given experience. But in a big picture sense, what makes each one distinctive is the particular path the storyteller selects through a chosen set of moments and their meanings.

This is a constructive approach. I looked at all the data available and asked “What might I need to put in, in order to build the story I’m trying to tell?” At the project level, there wasn’t a viable alternative to such an approach. With hundreds of pages of field notes and recording transcriptions representing dozens of hours of on-site and online participation, I was only ever going to be able to include a very small percentage of the “data” in the overall account.

So I had to start with “nothing” and decide what I would consider adding.

Thus, I reviewed the data and coded for possible inclusion according to the many changes that took place during the project. This process led to a list of excerpts that includes but is not limited to the following:

However, in the more micro or local sense, there is another form of analytic activity, one that is subtractive rather than additive. To tell a longer narrative in a way people might actually choose to engage with, you have to remove as much as you can.

Probably at least half of the intellectual labor that went into taking each chapter’s script from a shitty first draft to a polished recorded episode was whittling them down. I had to cut out a lot of my scripted voiceover and even more of my audio excerpts.

Few of us speak very efficiently when we’re exploring ideas we’ve never articulated, and so the moments that are most revealing in my conversations with participants were also the moments that needed the most trimming.

The additive/constructive (coding) step created a relevant dataset of a more manageable volume than the full set of “raw” data. But the subtractive (editing) step helped get to the core of the ideas and meanings contained in the data.

I’ve got two metaphors for what the process is like, one slightly more conceptual but also clunky and imprecise, one further removed from the world of ideas but much more evocative.

Metaphor 1: Theologians have a term called the via negativa. You explore what God is like by clearly delineating what God is not like. I like this metaphor for editing because of its starkness. It’s hard to make cuts, because we get attached to work that we’ve done or moments we were a part of. So embracing the idea of addition by subtraction, of saying something by deciding not to say something, can make letting go a little easier.

However, this metaphor is misleading in an important way. The via negativa emerges from an acknowledgement that there are limits to what we can say about God because God is in some sense transcendent and not fully knowable.

Now, perhaps we need that perspective in the social sciences too—people are also a glorious mystery. But this ineffability phenomenon is not what usually leads to a “cut” in the the connected worlds of media production and research reporting. Unlike in the via negativa, what gets cut isn’t usually “wrong” (“We must not say that God is _____”), it just isn’t the strongest or most relevant articulation of whatever we’re exploring.

Metaphor 2: More helpful to me is the visual/material “idea” Michelangelo explores in his Prisoners sculptures. The sculptor saw or found, in his blocks of marble, human forms trying to free themselves. His task was to remove some of the raw material so that the forms that were “already present” (in some combination of his imagination and the actual structure of the stone itself) could be exposed.

Now, this little essay would be an awful lot to say about the process of removing a few words, a few beats of silence, or an entire clip from the audio timeline in Adobe Premiere (or the rough equivalent in the text-based analogs). Even I’m not that much of a process nerd.

All this has been worth saying because the final bonus episode of Becoming Tapestry becomes a piece of audio made by a kind of the sonic equivalent of the sculpture process. In this case, an entire 45-minute interview was the “fresh block of marble” from which I cut away until what was left was an 8-minute distillation of former Tapestry mentor Yesenia’s story.

No coding. No connective narration. Just cuts, and eventually a few beats of interstitial music to give the lister a moment to reset.

I’m still trying to articulate why I think it’s so valuable to occasionally work in this purely subtractive mode. I think it has to do with the fact that while this audio is still obviously a research-informed co-production of interviewee (Yesenia), interviewers (Hannah and Sam), and producer/editor (me), it remains entirely Yesenia’s words.

We all contributed editorial judgement. But it’s her story in a way that Becoming Tapestry Chapter 4 and even Team Z’s Digital Story isn’t just their story.

I’m still chewing on all this because I didn’t fully grapple with these final questions in the dissertation itself. We didn’t end up needing the “data” of Yesenia’s story because Team Z’s story ended up being so rich—and actually getting completed, a question long in doubt.

So I’m still reflecting on this artifact, which seems like a fitting way to end this series of blog posts on the dissertation’s eight episodes.

I hope to return someday with a sort of Season 2, bringing together this thread with some others I think are dangling from this project or might generatively connect this project to others. I also hope to make more media with Tapestry, and making stories like this one is a lot more sustainable than making full-fledged Digital Stories.

So stay tuned. Enjoy Yesenia’s story. And thank you for following me along this way.

Image credit: “Michaelangelo’s unfinished pieces Florence Firenze Accademia” by Scott MacLeod Liddle via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Zoe and Yesenia embrace after hiking

Sitting around the fire with Team Z

Kyle

You wouldn’t think it would be that interesting to listen to people making a video over Zoom.

Regular readers/listeners and people who have spent time with me will probably chuckle knowingly when I say that I don’t like making unqualified statements, especially about my own work. But I remember very clearly during my defense saying to the committee something like “Say what you will about Chapter 4—it isn’t boring.”

What’s more, I knew it wouldn’t be boring, even before we had finished holding the sessions during which Team Z created their digital story. Because it’s effectively a highlight reel of the “story circle,” the most fascinating aspect of the whole process. “Addictive” is how one of my training facilitators describes it. I think she’s right.

Hearing people try out bits of story, reminisce about the underlying experiences, respond to each other, make suggestions, etc. is where the ancient, relational human activity of storytelling meets modern media tools, particular genre affordances, and culturally specific narrative sensibilities.

Listening in on these conversations, even now, is nourishing to my soul. That’s especially true in this time when I, for one, am feeling starved for those experiences we might metaphorically call “sitting around the fire together,” whether it’s in the woods, or at the pub, or in a coffee shop, or on an meandering stroll to nowhere in particular (think “spazieren” if you know any German).

This is the episode where all the work of the series pays off. What we’ve learned about Tapestry, what I’ve learned about myself, the spiritual thread, the research thread, the media thread—it’s all there, and closing the loops is, I think, as satisfying as you might hope. (Whoops, I qualified that one!)

I hate to spoil any of it, but I dare you not to have a moment of empathy and connection and understanding of the Tapestry ethos when Zoe shows the group her keepsakes from former mentor Peg, even though we don’t get to see those keepsakes. You can hear in her voice what this group and what that particular relationship means to her. I don’t know any better way to “show” you what Tapestry is like, or to model the value and the technique of facilitating self-reflective media production, than to play back these recordings.

I hope you’ll come away feeling nourished too. And I hope in the process I’ll convince you that digital storytelling and related media authoring practices are worth your time and effort, in whatever spaces you seek to make meaning in your life or the lives of the people whose learning and formation you accompany.

Camper leaning on counselor

The pilot of a dissertation that might have been

Kyle

Before there was Becoming Tapestry there was … something else.

I had planned on calling the series Faith Adjacent (read idea refresher here) in order to more squarely associate my dissertation podcast as a whole with one of the core intellectual contributions of the project.

My tentative plan was to produce a more mixed-genre series that would continue season by season in a robust way after I had defended. Short documentary episodes exploring my research, across both the pilot and the main study, would be interspersed with colleague chats (see Bonus 2) and possibly with case studies from other faith-adjacent communities. Think less of an account, more of a platform.

Making the familiar …

The third bonus episode of Becoming Tapestry is the pilot episode for that now-abandoned series.

So there’s two senses of “pilot” at work here. This episode is about my pilot study, the digital storytelling project in a faith-adjacent camp setting that I gloss as briefly as I could in Act 2 of Chapter 3. You can read more about that pilot project in this write-up I presented at REA 2018—and I hope later in a revised version of this article. If our family hadn’t decided to relocate coasts that same summer, St. Sebastian’s might have gone on to serve as the site for my main study as well.

And then there’s the way that this pilot helped me try out some affordances of podcasting as research documentation, even though I significantly adapted the trajectory upon which I thought I was embarking.

So if you have a listen, I think there will be much that is familiar to you if you’ve been following Becoming Tapestry:

  • a “cold open” segment to begin the show in the middle of the action;
  • the use of pseudonyms to offer some protection of the identities of the participants;
  • reflection in the midst of the narration on this novel way of conducting and presenting research;
  • the theme music (“Intimate Moment” by MFYM);
  • the structuring of the episode around a significant narrative and analytic turning point in the research project itself; and
  • most importantly, the voices of young people reflecting on their experience of community and self-exploration within the site of the partner organization.

… strange

On the other hand, there are two things that are very different about this episode.

The first is the length. The episode clocks in around 13 minutes, which is comparable to the length of a single act in the format I eventually settled on.

I originally imagined that I’d be “podcasting through” the project, producing and releasing episodes along the way rather than when I had reached some discrete “end point.”

In that approach, I think shorter episodes organized around a single moment would have made sense. They would have needed to be much easier produce to turn them around quickly.

And it was the benefit of hindsight that made possible the longer narrative arcs of the episodes in what became Becoming Tapestry. I had to actually traverse multiple significant moments, and also have the perspective to select and weave in a couple significant pieces of existing literature, in order to tell a story that answered one of my research questions in a treatment that could feel complete, though of course not exhaustive.

Still, the trend in podcasting writ large has been toward shorter, more digestible episodes—audio you can listen to completely in an average-length commute. Like many scholars, I have a tendency toward unchecked verbosity, so I enjoyed and benefitted from being forced to be so concise. It’s fun to think about how the show might have taken shape according to this more condensed episode format.

The other big difference is in the tone of the tape. I love hearing the sounds of camp in the background of our conversation about what camp means. It’s such an improvement in terms of both illustration (“here’s what St. Sebastian’s Camp is like”) and intimacy (“here’s how we authentically related there”) over session recorded via Zoom.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed reflecting a bit on how Zoe’s and her mentors’ home lives came to the fore as we recorded our conversations online. But I would have loved to “show” you Tapestry through field recordings not orchestrated from my apartment.

Take on a “Take 1”

Anyway, in the same way that I lauded the requirement of a pilot study in my Chapter 3 narration, I’d like here to laud the opportunity of a pilot “text” for those considering research documentation formats outside the usual “book chapter and/or journal article” academic box.

Not only did I benefit from the opportunity to experiment with form. I was also incredibly encouraged by the reception this pilot received at the 2019 Ethnography in Education Forum at the University of Pennsylvania.

Non-traditional research takes so long partly because you don’t have super relevant exemplars to follow. You have to be your own exemplar. So producing something you can share with others, get some feedback about, and gain some confidence from, is I think even more important than with more traditional kinds of projects.

So I hope you enjoy this pilot of a series that never came to be, but that gave birth to something different and perhaps better. More than maybe any other piece of media in the whole project, I certainly enjoyed making it.

A "Tapestry Moment" instagram post

Good stories have conflict. Honest research has plenty.

Kyle

Chapter 3 feels like the episode that got away from me a bit. At least that’s how I’m still hearing it.

Even with good strategies for how to say “no” to a particular idea or piece of tape, I think it was natural that one episode before the big finish would become the repository of “everything else.” There is, I confess, a lot going on in the penultimate chapter of Becoming Tapestry.

But there was a theme to the “everything else.” I think what helps this story about “empathetic engagement” shine is that it’s the place where I got very honest about what didn’t go well in my studies.

In pretty much every research project I’ve ever participated in, there’s been at least one crisis moment that helped clarify the issues and stakes on the table. Usually the precipitating event raises a flaw in the design.

I wish more researchers could be more transparent about these moments, rather than framing their studies as having been flawlessly designed from the beginning. So this story part of the story is where I get honest about my mistakes—and especially what I learned from them.

I won’t spoil the various sources of tension, and how they resolved, in this little preview post. I will say that this is the episode about how I learned to stop worrying about timelines and love the process.

Ethnography works because you get deeply embedded in a field site—complexly enmeshed in the network of relationships and stories unfolding in/as the space. We simply cannot rush these relationships.

But since many of us are likely to try anyway, we better have some mechanisms in place for recognizing when that’s happening, for helping us pump the brakes when we do, and for reflecting on what these little mini-failures are telling us.

The failures I chronicle in this episode helped me understand more deeply how Tapestry works, and especially how to be a more just researcher.

It wasn’t easy telling this part of the story, and that’s probably exactly why it needs to be here.

"Colleague Chat" banner with james Nagle headshot over stained glass window background

Scholars Do More than Write

Kyle 1 Comment

Part of what excites me about audio scholarship is getting to share and engage with other researchers’ ideas in their own words and their own voices.

In every academic field in which I’ve studied and contributed (education, ministry/theology, engineering), I’ve always been puzzled by the disconnect between how research actually happens and how we recognize it.

It’s generally harder to get a piece of research published in a peer-reviewed journal than it is to get it accepted to a conference. And so journal articles tend to be what tenure committees, etc., seek out and reward.

But I’ve always found myself being much more impacted by others’ ideas— and I think also able to impact others with mine—through the more verbal and visual presentations that happen at conferences and similar spaces.

Of course, I’m all kinds of biased.

I’m an Enneagram 2, so I process the world through relationships and interpersonal engagement. I’m a media scholar, so I tend to find the format and affordances of text-dominated articles to be pretty restricting and unsatisfying. And as my mother wrote to my third grade teacher in a “tell me about your child”-type informal assessment, “Kyle would rather talk than write.” Still true.

Nevertheless, as I say in the introduction to the second interstitial bonus episode of my dissertation podcast, Becoming Tapestry, the writing/text-centric view of research feels to me to be something of a distortion of scholarly reality. Or perhaps it’s better to say that it doesn’t give the whole picture.

Scholars develop ideas in large part by talking them out in meetings with colleagues, by sharing them with their students in the classroom, by following where a conversation leads in synchronous spaces and not just asynchronous feedback requests and peer reviews.

I’m not arguing that the latter aren’t important. But I do believe the process is as important as the product in academic research, and the process is much more likely to involve talking.

So I’m delighted to present as part of Becoming Tapestry this “colleague chat” with my dear friend and fellow religious education scholar James Nagle.

We spoke in 2019, after my talk introducing the idea of faith-adjacent pedagogy, about where our work intersects.

Out on Waters book cover

Nagle teaches in and studies Roman Catholic high schools. He challenges Christian leaders of all stripes to think about the disaffiliative trends I discuss in episode 1 through lenses other than loss, failure, or departure.

Nagle also reminds us there’s a lot to learn from the young people on this journey. (Though of course it’s not just young people walking the disaffiliative path.)

People who “deconvert,” to use the term he engages with, often do so for religious reasons, and there are usually still marks of “religiousness” remaining in their lives and habits even when they become Nones or even atheists.

In short, Nagle and I are both interested in the educational possibilities that emerge around the edges of faith community boundaries and beyond binary, “in or out” notions of religious identity.

In this conversation, we had fun exploring Nagle’s work and chatting a bit about how mine relates to it. I’m grateful for the chance to show forth this mode of playing with ideas and making new knowledge, and of course for my friend’s willingness to play along with me.

And I hope, whatever your affiliation, you’ll check out his book Out on Waters: The Religious Life and Learning of Young Catholics Beyond the Church.

Photo of objects from the Tapestry guiding principles story

On the power of bonus episodes

Kyle

When you write your dissertation as a podcast, there isn’t a great way to do footnotes.

I do have some footnotes in my manuscript, at my committee’s suggestion. But I didn’t make any effort to register them in the audio episodes.

Basically, I decided people who would care about footnotes would be willing to do the extra work to track them down via links on the show’s website and investigate without further scaffolding from me. Being more proactive on my part didn’t feel worth the distraction to listeners who, understandably, don’t really care about these extras.

That’s how I handled citations as well.

I do admire shows that find creative ways to mark that a citation has just passed by in the voiceover. The show My Gothic Dissertation, the first dissertation podcast, uses one of those bells you find on desks for when attendants step away. It’s a clever, effective, and maybe necessary device in a humanities dissertation.

Similarly, at least one audiobook of David Foster Wallace’s writing—famously reliant on footnotes—inserts the “text” of footnotes directly with a temporary audio effect to mark the shift.

Anyway, I decided there were plenty of audio and cognitive layers present in my show already. I didn’t want to introduce another.

Still, the function of a footnote—to stick a little text off in a corner somewhere, where it doesn’t disrupt the flow of the main narrative—is incredibly useful. Maybe especially for people who like to qualify, complicate, and otherwise unpack what they’re saying/writing as they say/write it.

At a larger scale, that feels similar to what a bonus episode is all about too. Because Becoming Tapestry is an ethnographic project, I work on the assumption that my primary job is to immerse you in the “spaces” (that is, the sites and relationships) of the work.

This desire tended to lead me to say to myself “Add a little more tape. Just a little more. That last thing they said was so interesting! That introductory comment provides helpful context! I love the sound of so-and-so’s voice in that redundant sentence!”

Of course, the opposite usually needs to happen. The bulk of my editing energy was spent making cuts. And more cuts. And more cuts.

So it was incredibly useful to be able to say, in effect, “I’m going to play you a tiny bit of tape here, and if you’re interested in a full immersion, check out the bonus episode.” Which is what I do in Act 2 of the opening chapter.

And now that first bonus episode is available in your podcast feed. It’s the complete audio of Hannah introducing the guiding principles of Tapestry at a monthly mentor training.

There’s no better scene to immerse you in, because it’s representative of the moment when I realized I truly could write a religious education dissertation about an organization that isn’t traditionally religious.

So here’s a little bit of Godly Play, remixed with practices of organizational storytelling. The photo at the top of this post contains all the items Hannah speaks about.

With the introductory comments from me, it’s about 18 minutes. And it’s a great way to get to know my research partners.

Enjoy!