Digital Writing Research: Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues

Title: Digital Writing Research

Sub-title: Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues

Editor(s): Heidi A. McKee and Danielle DeVoss

Publish Date: August 2007

Pages: 476

Format: Cloth

This volume focuses on how writing technologies, specifically digital technologies, affect research--shaping the questions asked, the sites studies, the methodologies used, ethical issues, conclusions, and the actions taken by scholars, researchers, and teachers.

In this collection, the authors analyze methodologies, technologies, and ethical approaches for researching digital writing and writers working in digital contexts. Although many of the chapters provide examples drawn from studies conducted or reviewed by the authors, the focus of each chapter is on articulating particular methodologies and ethical approaches for conducting digital writing research. Because of the increasing digitalization of writing in educational, institutional, and social contexts, all composition researchers need to consider methodological and ethical approaches to digital writing research

The core questions addressed in the chapters include:

• How have researchers adapted methodologies for digital writing research?
• What methods are used by researchers studying sign systems beyond the textual?
• How is a particular writing technology being researched by computers and writing scholars?
• What constitutes appropriate human subject research in online environments?
• How are computerized technologies, particularly global technologies, raising new ethical issues related to privacy, individual rights, and representation?
• How have computers and digital spaces changed collaboration among researchers and participants?
• How have electronic journals and other methods of publishing writing research influenced our research directions and the distribution of research findings?

Given the continually evolving state of technology and human interactions with and through technological affordances, what preparation do future researchers need?This volume will provide experienced researchers with the means to reflect on various aspects of their research and offer researchers new to composition studies or to computers and writing research an introduction to possible approaches and related methodological and ethical issues.

Contents:

Introduction. RESEARCHING DIGITAL COMMUNITIES: REVIEW, TRIANGULATION, AND ETHICAL RESEARCH REPORTS. Digital Spaces, Online Environments, and Human Participant Research: Interfacing with Institutional Review Boards, Will Banks and Michelle Eble. Through the Eyes of Researchers, Rhetors and Audiences: Triangulating Data from the Digital Writing Situation, Kevin DePew. Playing Scavenger and Gazer with Scientific Discourse: Opportunities and Ethics for Online Research, Michelle Sidler. RESEARCHING GLOBAL CITIZENS AND TRANSNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS. Ethos and Research Positionality in Studies of Virtual Communities, Fil Sapienza. Researching (with) the Postnational 'Other': Ethics, Methodologies, and Qualitative Studies of Digital Literacy, Iswari Pandey. Researching Hybrid Literacies: Methodological Explorations of 'Ethnography' and the Practices of the Cybertariat, Beatrice Smith. RESEARCHING THE ACTIVITY OF WRITING: TIME-USE DIARIES, MOBILE TECHNOLOGIES, AND VIDEO SCREEN CAPTURE. Studying the Mediated Action of Composing with Time-Use Diaries, William Hart-Davidson. Mobile Technologies and a Phenomenology of Literacy, Joanne Addison. Capturing the Activity of Digital Writing: Using, Analyzing, and Supplementing Video Screen Capture, Cheryl Geisler and Shaun Slattery. RESEARCHING DIGITAL TEXTS AND MULTIMODAL SPACES. Coding Digital Texts and Multimedia, Stuart Blythe. Composition Meets Visual Communication: New Research Questions: Susan Hilligoss and Sean Williams. An Ecofeminist Methodology: Studying the Ecological Dimensions of the Digital Environments, Julia Romberger. Riding the Wave: Articulating a Critical Methodology for Web Research Practices, Amy Kimme Hea. Multimedia Research: Difficult Questions with Indefinite Answers, Janice McIntire-Strasburg. RESEARCHING THE RESEARCH PROCESS AND RESEARCH REPORTS. Whose Research is it, Anyway? The Multifaceted Methods for Multimodal Texts: Alternate Approaches to Citation Analysis for Electronic Sources, Colleen Reilly and Doug Eyman. Messy Contexts: Research as a Rhetorical Situation, Rebecca Rickly.

Combined Bibliography / Author Index / Subject Index

[http://tinyurl.com/28x4mn]