Category Archives: Marginalia

You have caught the tenor of the argument

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You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. …  You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (Burke 110-11)

This is Kenneth Burke’s analogy for academic writing, my own version of which I use in most of my classes. Composition instructors like the authors of They Say / I Say focus on the phrase “then you put in your oar” as the turning point (13-14). For me and my profession, the key phrase is “you have caught the tenor of the argument.” Embedded there I see so much about information literacy — what people are talking about, what positions have been covered already, what evidence counts as good evidence in this conversation, what terms will this group use and understand when talking about the topic, whom will you need to acknowledge as you lay out your position… You have caught the tenor of the argument.

Another thing I love about this conversational analogy is that the protagonist is never quite done listening to others and incorporating their ideas into new statements. The research process is not linear.

(Er, I’ve finished the prefaces and introduction to this book now. I promise not to write a blog post for every 5 pages of reading. Really.)

Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941

Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. “They Say / I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. Second Edition. W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.

This would probably be better if I knew what I was talking about

By IRIS Posted on by

I’ve begun to notice a pattern. Apparently I think of information literacy as a branch off of the field of rhetoric rather than science, no matter what the title of my degree says.

In my job talk for my current job (before I really knew anything about being a reference or instruction librarian, or about what my work would look like) I talked about how research allows you to listen in on the other end of the phone conversation — how any one piece of writing is only part of the story, and a fuller picture emerges when you listen to more voices.

My understanding and teaching about citation and attribution always deals with citations as rhetoric, not only because they build bridges between the various parts of the relevant conversation but also because they signal to your readers “See, I have chosen evidence that you will think is really great evidence for this claim, so please think highly of my claim.”

The rubric my colleagues and I have been developing to help us sift through student papers to learn about the students’ habits of mind when it comes to incorporating evidence into their own work is all couched in their rhetoric, since that’s all we have to go on. So we look for how well they make a case for their evidence being the ideal evidence for their goals, and then at how skillfully they weave it into their justification for their claims.

And now I’m reading They Say / I Say, which has gained great traction on our campus, and the first paragraph of the preface starts out:

The core of this book is the premise that good argumentative writing begins not with an act of assertion but an act of listening, of putting ourselves in the shoes of those who think differently from us. [...] When writing responds to something that has been said or might be said, it thereby performs the meaningful task of supporting, correcting, or complicating that other view. (xiii)

And I’m thinking “that sounds an awful lot like the way I teach information literacy.” Listening in on what’s been said before and using that activity not just as a way to gather facts but more importantly as an ongoing act of building a framework for your thinking and writing and communicating.

And I’m thinking that maybe I should actually learn something about rhetorical theory since I’m currently basing a whole lot of my work on an area that I really know very little about.

So, rhetorician denizens of the internet, what do you recommend that I read as I reverse-engineer some actual knowledge into this theme of mine?

Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. “They Say / I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. Second Edition. W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.

Why Would Undergraduates Need Those Clunky Databases Anyway?

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Google Scholar has made great strides in the 6 years I’ve been a librarian. It’s great. I use it all the time. And now interesting new research by Xiaotian Chen shows that Google Scholar contains nearly all of the articles held in several standard library databases, which is also great. Chen’s article finishes with a flourish, declaring, “The conclusion cannot be clearer: libraries can seriously consider cancelling a large number of subscription-based abstracts and indexes since their unique contents and value are rapidly evaporating” (Chen 226).

This would probably be true if the unique content and value of subscription databases were housed solely in the citation, abstract, and potential for full text access, but in fact it misses the point for many researchers. And it misses the point particularly for undergraduates.

Search is all about term matching, and terms are often the hardest thing for undergraduates to harness. So one key value of a database or search engine is the way that it introduces students to helpful information such as terms that might be important to their topics, genres of publication that are relevant to the scholars in the field that study the topic, and ways of judging the source’s relative weight by providing clues about other things the author has written or about how often the source is cited by other sources. These are not things that undergraduates are able to do just by looking at a citation and abstract.

Google Scholar is very forgiving of bad searching. It will nearly always give you something, even if you enter “impact of cell phones on globalization” into the search box. (Two of my big goals for this last term were to get students to stop searching for “impact on” and “globalization.” I was only minimally successful.) Because it’s so forgiving, it can be a great place to start. However, it’s pretty bad at leading you to new search strategies once you’ve found the one article where the author uses your phrase in her abstract.

Disciplinary databases are not nearly as forgiving of bad searching, so they may be pretty intimidating places to start. Where they excel, however, is in foregrounding those elusive, mysterious, and powerful terms that students need so badly if they’re going to revise their searches and gather more disciplinarily relevant material. The vocabulary, controlled and otherwise, is one of the two key advantages of disciplinary databases. These databases also help students make decisions about the relative worth of a source by (usually) giving links to other things by that author, other things published in that journal, citation counts, bibliographies, indications about peer review, and so on. And sure, these aren’t things that students are used to looking at when they enter college. But in my experience, these are tools that students very quickly come to rely on.

For the totally at-sea undergraduate, the most powerful research process will probably look something like this: take a citation found using a messy search in Google Scholar, plunk that citation into a library database, mine the resulting record for terms and other useful information, read a couple of articles “instrumentally,” and then repeat the process as needed with better and better terms each time.

So is Google Scholar a database killer? Like Steve, I think not. I think it’s a great tool that complements our other tools. And hey! It’s free!

Chen, Xiaotian. “Google Scholar’s Dramatic Coverage Improvement Fiver Years after Debut.” Serials Review 36, no. 4 (2010): 221-26. [Available via ScienceDirect]

The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses

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This morning, a Geology professor presented one of her assignments to this workshop that I’m attending, and one concept jumped out at me. She said that one of the things that makes Geology difficult for freshmen is that all evidence can be interpreted in multiple ways (Sound familiar? It sure does to me from both my Literature and my LIS backgrounds). Turns out, this was articulated as a philosophy of studying Geology back in 1897 when T. C. Chamberlin published his ideas about The Theory of Multiple Working Hypotheses.

Holding more than one hypothesis in your head leads to “certain distinctive habits of mind,” particularly thinking critically about each hypothesis and being more thorough in looking at the range of potential evidence (845-846). The idea is that if you don’t get attached to one theory, you won’t fall into the trap of only seeing or “lingering with great pleasure” on the evidence that fits that theory (840). You’ll also always have to confront the issue that one or the other of your hypotheses might not stand the test of research, which forces you to constantly evaluate each one’s validity.

This strikes me as exactly what I’ve struggled to articulate to my students who come to me with research questions for which they’d really just like to find some articles from which to pull supporting quotations. Whether the questions are overly simple (how better to know that you’ll find supporting evidence?) or impractically difficult, my students really aren’t interested in evidence that complicates their projects. (The major exception being those who feel they should find at least one source that definitively and categorically disagrees with them, in order to tear it to pieces while demonstrating that they’ve considered counter arguments. But this is not really holding a counter-hypothesis in mind.)

If I can get students to entertain the possibility of at least temporarily holding another hypothesis in mind, perhaps they’d be more thorough in their research, and perhaps they’d be more able to take a critical look at what they’ve found.

Of course, I should note that Chamberlin identifies a couple of disadvantage to this approach. First, it’s not something that “young scholars” can do very well (848). (Hmmm… that seems to include my entire audience.) And second, you can’t express “more than a single line of thought at the same time” (857). In other words, in the middle of our lightning fast 10-week term, I’d be asking them to entertain the possibility of doing a bunch of research that wouldn’t contribute directly to their final product. That’ll go over like a lead pipe to the head.

Still, I wonder if there’s a way to be more conscious about this as a method of thinking while acknowledging that it is not entirely practical for my students.

Chamberlin, T. C. “Studies for Students: The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses.” The Journal of Geology 5.8 (1897): 837-848. [Available via JSTOR]

The Pot Calls the Kettle Black…and Ends Up Looking Blacker

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[Edit: If you're reading this in an aggregator, be aware that after the first three paragraphs each section has a heading. The text is there, but the formating isn't.]

Thomas Mann has some very good points in his rebuttal of Karen Calhoun’s report on the Changing Nature of the Catalog. I agree with him that subject control cannot go away. I agree that there are many levels and kinds of searchers and that “quick information seekers” need different things than scholars of, say, history. (Though I would argue that scholars of different disciplines each have different needs, and that the scholarly research examples Mann gave were overwhelmingly History and Literature oriented.) Relevance ranking is not necessarily the best option for all researchers, and new researchers will probably always need some training. I would also hate to see careful cataloging disappear in favor of whatever is faster and more automated. (This might work marginally well in the sciences, but I can’t see it ever working well for the humanities.)

But that’s all that I got out of his report (21 pages plus and appendix) except that he’s very, very angry at Calhoun. I think that he could have made his points much more effectively if he’d kept a tighter lid on his anger, sarcasm, italics, and multiple punctuation (such as when he says, “Pushed beyond-??” on page 15). This narrative tone is so deafening that it completely drowns out his argument. In fact, all the silent screaming and ranting that Mann did kept him from building a plan for the future that looks anything different from the library services of the past. (And in the spirit of full disclosure, let me say that I’m reading this from the perspective of a librarian at a four-year college library.)

His primary flaw is that he talks in absolutes, in “either/or” terms, in it’s-better-for-them-this-way terms, and with the idea that if we have something nobody else has people will come. I also disagree with his dismissal of the business model of evaluating our services.

Either/Or Thinking, so 1.0
Most of Mann’s rebuttals go something like this: “Calhoun’s argument advocates change; this change wouldn’t serve my scholars; things should stay the same.” For example, he bridles at the concept of increased reliance on keyword searching. He argues that Google-like searching is not as powerful as subject searching, and that it isn’t as good at collocating. Given. But who said catalogs would turn into Google? And his example that “Cuba — History — Invasion, 1961″ collocates more items that are actually about the Bay of Pigs than “Bay of Pigs” would gather disregards the process of discovering the controlled vocabulary in the first place. I don’t know of many librarians who, hearing a request for items about the Bay of Pigs would say “Oh, search by subject for Cuba–History–invasion, 1961.” If we don’t know these things, how will our users? Staring at the blank search box to which Mann often refers, the vast majority of users will not come up with the proper controlled vocabulary. Instead, they will use keywords and (hopefully) use the results of this search to find the appropriate controlled vocabulary. I would urge both authors to think in terms of increased keyword accessibility AND access to controlled vocabulary.

Also, I agree that displays of LC subject headings help map the breadth and depth of concepts. I do not think, however, that left-justified lists are the only ways to do this. What if users were able to choose between a left-justified list and a spatial concept map?

There are many more examples, but I’ll only mention one more. One section of Mann’s argues against relevance ranked result lists because scholars need instant access to the most current research in their fields. Why oh why can’t we give people a choice between relevance and date ranking?

It’s Better for Them This Way
My absolute least favorite sentence in the whole critique is: “The fact is, no researchers — either scholarly or superficial — will ever do efficient searches in online resources without some prior instruction and education.” This cop-out is his answer to the problem that even though searching for the LCSH subheading “Personal Narratives” will bring back more consistent results than the keywords “eyewitness accounts” and the like, but that researchers will rarely if ever come up with this phrase without help. This cop-out is just like it’s cousin “We only have 50 minutes.” It’s simply an excuse for a broken system. So, what if we allow user tagging of subject terms to add to the (limited) “see” and “see also” records? We should not require users to learn esoteric subject headings just because that’s the only way to get consistent results. Let’s fix the system instead.

Again, there are lots of examples of this type of thinking in Mann’s work, but this post is getting WAY too long, so I’ll move along.

We Offer Something Nobody Else Does, So People Will Come
This doesn’t even need explanation. Some people might come. But just as users shouldn’t be satisfied with the first superficial results of a broad keyword search, we shouldn’t be satisfied serving only those with intense and complex research needs or those who’ve uses libraries before.

Libraries and the Business Model
Just because we don’t depend directly on our users for our funding or work actively toward making a profit doesn’t mean that the business model doesn’t apply to us. At my library, the fact that the librarians are working actively to customize our services to our population, that we experiment with new ideas and services, that we show up to campus events (even evening ones), and that we’ve put ourselves “out there” in the campus culture has resulted in drastically increased support from college administration and therefore significant financial commitment from the college. Second, we should be evaluating our services as rigorously as do those who have to do so in order to receive paychecks. And finally, just because we think of new ways of doing things doesn’t necessarily mean that we turn our backs on Mann’s “scholars.” It means that we find ways to serve the “scholars” and the “quick information seekers” and everything in between.

Oh, and by the way, implying that catalogs have a “life cycle” does imply that death is an option. That was not rhetorical sleight of hand. That was the whole point of the metaphor. (See Mann’s rant on page 5.)

That’s my rant in response to a rant. Constructive criticism and rebuttals welcome.