Tag: Media

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)

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.

Interview training resource: Learning to ask good questions

Kyle

Interviewing people is kind of amazing, right?

I’m inspired by journalists shining a light on our fraying democracy, researchers discovering something new with every human encounter, storytellers weaving together strands of narrative from a whole host of voices, and everyday people practicing radical caring and empathy.

When we ask each other questions and care about the answers, new possibilities are born into lives on rails.

I wouldn’t say I’m an expert at interviewing. But I’ve done a lot of it over the years, and I was recently invited to share some of what I know with a group of students embarking on a research project.

So I give you Interviewing for research & media production, a fully remixable interview training resource to share or build on next time you want to help your students or colleagues get the most out of the opportunity to ask good questions of people with something to say. Which is everyone.

As always, would love to hear your feedback—or about ways you do interview training in your setting. Enjoy!

Fireworks for New Year's

Resolving to be changed—by religious change

Kyle

I’ve been doing the “year in review” thing over the last few days. As I look back on my year in media, the item that jumps out to me as the most surprising is a little video I made.

Y’all and others shared it enough when I posted it to Facebook in April that I felt the need to unpack it a bit in a subsequent blog post. I’ve been thinking about why it so caught people’s attention. Let me share two thoughts.

“U.S. Religious Affiliation, 1948-2017” by Kyle Oliver at prayr.cc/relig-affil (CC BY 2.0)

For one thing, visualizations are cool. You don’t have to be Edward Tufte to appreciate a beautiful graphic, and amcharts makes it relatively easy to create one. (Here’s my most recent amcharts handiwork.)

But as I think more about this graphic in particular, I’m guessing it’s the time series nature of the data that made it compelling. We have a name for what happens when you choose and share meaningful occurrences that unfold over time. We call it a story.

People cared about the graphic because it tells a story. It tells the story of religious change and a growing group who feel un-pressured to claim formal religious affiliation, or who actively renounce it.

This is a story that people of faith have a hard time not getting defensive about, even though plenty of research suggests it’s not (all) about us. It’s a story that religious leaders, in particular, find challenging—what with its potential implications for our livelihoods and all.

But I increasingly believe the defensiveness and fear only make matters worse. So as I write this on January 2, I’m adding a second New Year’s Resolution to my list. (Number One is dissertation related.)

In place of fear and regret about religious change, I want to cultivate curiosity.

Searching with others at flea market - a metaphor for religious change?
Photo by Phad Pichetbovornkul on Unsplash

In her landmark study of the religiously unaffiliated, Elizabeth Drescher writes the following, using her intentionally provocative term “Somes” to refer to the religiously affiliated (i.e., non-Nones):

my interviews with Nones as well as my conversations with many Somes make clear that most of us, regardless of how we see ourselves in terms of affiliation and unaffiliation, are actively attentive to and curious about each other’s spiritual or religious practices … For many Americans, the resources this curiosity brings to consciousness will find their way, directly or perhaps more obliquely, into their own spiritualities (p. 8, emphasis mine)

Our nation and the world are becoming more spiritually and religiously diverse. I want to treat religious change as an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to grow in my own faith and in my appreciation for the whole human family.

I’ve always been curious about others’ spiritual lives, but too often I’ve tempered that curiosity with shyness and fear. In some ways that’s been more true since I got ordained, wary as I am about how some religious leaders use apparent curiosity as a beachhead for coercion.

Heaven make me free of it. I want to learn to trust that my spark of curiosity is holy. I want to trust that I can interact with others in ways they will know to be genuine and respectful.

I want to read, hear, and see more about how people practice faith or make meaning. I want to be challenged to reflect on how it works for me and my communities as I encounter similar and different practices among my neighbors and their communities.

I suspect my new city will be a good place to let this curiosity do its beautiful thing, though Drescher shows (not altogether surprisingly) that the percentage of Nones is growing fastest in places we think of as very religious.

So if your hometown doesn’t yet feel like a likely place to be both challenged and nurtured by religious change – just give it a couple years.

Cover photo: Thomas Evans on Unsplash

Disclosure: This post contains Amazon Affiliate links.

Stained glass image

Starting grad school (and a newsletter)

Kyle 2 Comments

Pentecost feels like a good day to announce what I believe has been a Spirit-led discernment process:

In September, I will start full-time Ed.D. studies (that’s doctorate in education) in the Communications, Media, & Learning Technologies Design Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. I’ll miss being the digital missioner in the CMT@VTS, but I look forward to ongoing collaboration on several e-Formation initiatives.

There are too many people to thank for me to even make a go of it here. But I can’t not mention the person who envisioned and nurtured this vocation the last four years: Lisa Kimball. To say I couldn’t have done it without her would be an unpardonable understatement. Thanks, boss, for literally everything.

If you want to keep up with what I’m doing and continue to get resource suggestions, e-learning commentary, and of course podcast rhapsodizing, please subscribe to this new newsletter. My ‪#‎vtsdigimin‬ students inspired me to put it together.

I take very seriously my responsibility to share what I’m learning with the church, so don’t be shy with suggestions or requests.