sam smiley, 7 August 2021, "We Are All Screwing Up and Sticking With It - Intervention Word Clouds", contributed by Emily York and sam e smiley, STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 7 August 2021, accessed 26 April 2024. http://www.stsinfrastructures.org/content/we-are-all-screwing-and-sticking-it-intervention-word-clouds
Critical Commentary
sam smiley:
EVENT: Online NSF funded workshop in Critical Pedagogy
DATA AND TIME COLLECTED: 12:55 PM EST to 12:56 PM EST
PROFILE OF PEOPLE CONTRIBUTING: Primarily people teaching in higher ed in the field of Science Technology Studies. College educated.
AGE RANGE: 20-54
GENDER RANGE: M, F, nonbinary
ETHNICITY: Primarily white
TECHOLOGY USED TO GATHER DATA: zoom (comments area?)
PROMPT: how do you orient toward feminism/decolonial/more than human in the classroom
Methods of visual coding:
1) I used https://wordclouds.com. This tool allows fairly refined visual coding. It also creates an excel file so that we can see frequency of words. The objective of doing this was not to create a final “product” but to get a birds eye view of what the datum tell us.
Excel file word count summary:
7 times: Students
6 times: Classroom
4 times: First, teaching
3 times: Course, feminism, feminist, one, orient, reading, try
2 times: another, attention, authors, becoming, built, can, care, centering, different, engineering, experience, explicitly, feel, frequently, global, ideas, i’m, justice, make, means, multiple, orientation, outside, prompts, readings, science, social, stories, teachers, term, thing, use, vulnerable, whether, write, writings
Many others appeared once.
2) I took the same data and represented it 3 different times using different colors and fonts. This was to triangulate. Color and font can bias with just one round, so doing 3 rounds and then writing metacommentary on the differences helps to keep the data analysis more reflexive and trustworthy.
3) The next step would be to take those images and data and bring it back the participants to talk about the representation and then further coding.
3) If I were to take it farther I would use another coding application (such as Quirkos, or something in the public domain, or just hand code) and create a data poem. With all these different ways of looking at the data, it opens up new ways of having conversation and doing research.