Resonance Maps: Tracing Connections in an Online Writing Community

• In Event: Emerging Methods for Studying Adolescent Writing Across Spaces and Over Time

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore a method for visually representing and analyzing emerging patterns of collaborative writing in online contexts. The presentation reports on the Write4Change Project, a global community of adolescent writers and teachers who collaborated online to share their writing and create social impact.

Theoretical Framework
One of the central ways young people participate in a digitally connected world is through their writing, now understood to involve the composing, (re)mixing, and assembling of texts and other symbolic artifacts across multiple modes, media, and languages (Bezemer & Kress, 2008; Lankshear & Knobel, 2011). Writing is arguably the most important form of communication in the 21st century, enabling and facilitating social interaction, knowledge creation, and self-expression (Brandt, 2015; National Writing Project, 2010; Purcell et al., 2013).

Methods/Data Sources
We examined 4 teachers and 60 adolescents between the ages of 13-19 across 6 months of online activity. These participants, physically located in the US, Canada, and India, were connected through an invitation-only online community called Write4Change. With a specific goal of investigating online collaboration during the writing process, data included semi-structured interviews, observations, video/audio recordings, network analytics, daily archives of online postings, and iterative visualizations of networked activity.

Our analysis relied on purposeful blending of analytic approaches to examine our data from multiple vantage points and explore it in greater depth (Author, & Colleagues, 2015). Drawing on scholarship involving visualizations of networked activity (Yoon, 2011), interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995), and multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris, 2011), we developed resonance maps, or visualizations of the “intertextual echoing of ideas across space, people, and texts” (Authors, 2014, p. 29). Constructing resonance maps was an analytic process that included layered visualizations of online participation patterns, thematic analyses of participant interactions, and catalogues of posted materials and their external links.

Findings
Across analyses of writing in networked spaces, attention is often focused on tracing individual composing practices that lead to products that resonate with networked audiences. However, using an expanded methodological approach, we shift focus from products to processes that resonate on the network. In doing so, we explore networked collaborative writing practices as they develop in real time on the network through iterative, interactive resonance maps. We discuss how the resonance maps revealed three previously hidden dimensions of youth’s collaborative composing: 1) vulnerability management; 2) “crowded talk” (Soep, 2006); 3) authorial positioning.

Significance
To address the complexity of meaning making in a world characterized by global, networked flows and constantly emerging technologies, researchers must develop flexible, responsive tools to trace these complex practices (Authors, 2014). Resonance maps represent one such tool for investigating the emergent dimensions of meaning making on social networks by tracing echoes and parallels across an online system. Just as instructional practices have moved from strictly focusing on products to purposefully including the processes of writing, scholarly work on networked writing activity also must take a turn toward processes as emerging, evolving, and ultimately shaped by the network.

Authors

• Matthew Hall, The College of New Jersey

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania