Complex Mapping: Interactive Tracing Methods for Understanding Writing Development

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

Abstract

In this paper, I share results of iterative design research (Penuel, et. al, 2011) in tracing adolescents’ writing development. I explore the affordances of computer coding to tailor methods of interactive visualization for tracing development, which promise to shift perceptions of development beyond teleological models that frame youth, and their writing, in perpetual deficit.

Writing development is often framed in comparative terms, contrasting differences in written products composed by those with fewer years of experience with those who have more (e.g. Flower & Hayes, 1981). This product-bound approach leaves gaps in our understanding of individuals’ pathways across products and time. Rather, in this approach to tracing development, we focused on youths’ writing practices across time. By practice, I mean ideologically-framed (Street, 1984) patterned ways of using technology, knowledge and skill (Scribner & Cole, 1999) that are, in turn, producers and products of sociocultural contexts (Bourdieu, 1977). Contexts are considered nexuses of human interaction (Leander, Phillips & Taylor, 2010) in which the “configurations of shared practices themselves develop” (Dyson, 2007, p. 116).

Over nine-months time, seven educators and ≈200 adolescents (5 classrooms; 2 out-of-school organizations) employed two visualization treatments derived from Author and Colleagues (2011, 2015), i.e. multiples and elaborated timelines, to collaboratively trace youths’ writing development. Analytics of interactive data visualization tool use and archives of the multiples and timelines in concert with transcripts from design meetings, interviews with educators, and focus groups with youth informed the iterative design process. Collected and analyzed over three iterative cycles, each lasting nine weeks, analysis included thematic coding (Saldaña, 2009) and iterative visualizations of user analytics (Stornaiuolo & Hall, 2014).

Results from each sites’ tailoring of the interactive visualization methods, patterns across sites, and participants’ perceptions will be shared, as will the evolution of the visualization methods in light of these findings. Currently, multiples (Tufte, 1997), afford a one-glance look at coded and hyperlinked thumbnails of numerous and varied written products, prompts, contextual artifacts, and other indicators of writing practices. The thumbnails are collaboratively gathered, then coded with strips of color to indicate salient writing practices identified locally through “deep viewing” (Penrod, 2010), with collaborative notes regarding rhetorical context, framing and compositional choices (Author and Colleague, 2011). Multiples are then rendered into an elaborated timeline (Author and Colleagues, 2015), which affords an interactive, chronological view of coded thumbnails in categorized rows, and a second round of coding for dynamics of change across time. Timelines can be sorted by code or dynamic, generating multidimensional views of particular sequences in youths’ developmental pathways.

To date, we have found the collapsing and expanding timelines for local purposes showed educators developmental pathways previously shrouded by traditional grading methods. Multiples were rearranged from the original design illuminating new connections across artifacts. Primarily done by youth, such interaction with the visualization methods showed increased senses of agency in regard to writing development, which also was seen across each design cycle as youth made informed and purposeful decisions about their writing practices in reference to the methods.

Authors

• Anna Smith, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Paul A. Prior, University of Illinois