Exploratory #3: Indigenous Expressions
Part I (Text Mining) due to Canvas by 2/23 (beginning of class)
Part II (Critical Blog Post Reflection) due on course blog by 2/26 (3:35 p.m.) [note the extra day!]
For your third Exploratory, to align with our discussions of "resisting colonization," I would like to ask you to do an analysis of cross-national (or cross-cultural) discourse for expressions of indigeneity, however you understand that term at this point in the semester. More specifically, I would like you conduct a multilayered analysis of any one of the following texts, and then visually represent your analysis in some form:
- Bella Abzug's Plenary Speech at the 4th World Conference on Women (Beijing, September 1995)
- Wangari Maathai's Nobel Lecture (Oslow, December 2004)
- Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's Nobel Lecture (Oslow, December 2011)
- Leymah Gbowee's Nobel Lecture (Oslow, December 2011)
Discourse Analysis
Generally speaking, a multilayered discourse analysis hinges on the assumption that expressions of language -- spoken or written -- contain transtextual, contextual, and intratextual information:
- transtextual: the least concrete or observable information, accounting for things like ideographs, ideologies, mentalities, historicity, symbolism, topoi, and non-explicit intertextual references (i.e., the ways that texts indirectly show their influences by other texts).
- contextual: quasi-observable information, usually referring to things like discourse positions, discourse communities, speaker/writer roles, agents, actions, forms or mediums of communication, social stratification, power, and voice.
- intratextual: the most concrete or observable information, accounting for things like speech acts, rhetorical tropes, metaphors, implications and suppositions, topic development, lexicon, syntax, typography, and materiality.
Now, in spite of the jargon often associated with discourse analysis, believe it or not, I would like you to discover your own multilayered approach -- one that attends equally to several layers or spheres of information: from most concrete to most abstract. So long as you are examining your text for multiple layers or spheres, you may feel free to analyze for what you want, and you may feel free to label the different parts of your analysis however you want in order to argue for the presence or absence of "indigeneity."
Visualization (i.e., Text-Mining)
I will ask you to create some kind of visual representation of your analysis, somewhat like "text mining," but using any means available to you to give us the most comprehensive picture of what you found, how those findings can be organized, and why those findings might be significant.
Very elaborate text mining analyses usually result in something like color gradiants, thematic domination, semantic clustering, or venn diagrams, among other things. However, your analysis will most likely be much simpler than these, since you are not necessarily running the text through an algorithm or a program. (I only ask that you not settle on a word cloud, as that will not show a sufficiently multilayered relationship.)
I will arbitrarily suggest the following work teams:
- Andrew, Ashley, Stephanie
- Meghan, Sean
- Mikaela, Travis
Critical Blog Post
For your follow-up critical blog post (which you will do individually), please reflect on the indigenous expressions assignment and how some aspect of this task has illumined/complicated/addressed/extended your reading of our texts for this week. As before, because Part I of the assignment involves analysis, I am expecting that this blog post will be especially robust (i.e., you will likely have a lot of observations that did not themselves make it into Part I, and this is the perfect place to share them).
The critical blog post is somewhat formal, not merely an individual reflection. It should be a minimum of 2-3 well developed paragraphs in length (a couple of screens), and my great desire is to see you engage expertly with both task and texts, at times speaking through or alongside what we read, and speaking with some insight about what we read (citing where necessary and embedding links where relevant). Since your post will be intertextual, I’ll ask you to use MLA or Chicago-style parenthetical citations where needed, and to be clear that we know which articles/authors you are referencing.
Please take time to define terms and unpack assumptions for us, using your posts as occasions to teach, and titling them creatively (or insightfully). Feel free to compose your post as a response to someone else’s, if you see an interesting conversation starting on the blog.
Enjoy the exercise!
-Dr. Graban
