The Elasticity of "Likeness": Resonance Mapping of Objects in (Cyber)Space

• In Event: 34.093 - Moving Data Across Methods of Analysis: Collaborative Research on the Complexities of Literacy Activity

Abstract

Purpose & Framing
How do researchers make sense of circulating, emergent, and dynamic texts and practices occurring across online, networked spaces? At what point do we classify a multimedia artifact as a composition and another a remix, or a series of posts or messages a conversation? Questions such as these have driven the present inquiry, which extends Silverstein’s (2005) interrogation of interdiscursivity with the concept of “likeness” to identify and demarcate the circulation of semiotic production within an openly networked professional learning opportunity for educators across five years of activity.

Silverstein (2005) proposed that interdiscursivity is not just a function of semiotic content, but also of positional “metasemiotic metricatilities” or the poetics of “repetitions, parallelisms, formal crescendos and diminuendos, ‘rhythm’ more generally” (p. 7). These metasemiotic features are then echoed in structures of “likeness” across spacetimes. When media, modalities, platforms, and authors are constantly shifting in openly networked, online communication, likeness as metasemiotic metricalities seems one potential way forward in tracing activity.

Research Context & Methods
As part of a larger interrogation into the social learning processes of international educators participating in an openly networked, online, collaboration focused on “connected learning,” this study considered five years of data from 2950 educators who composed and distributed compositions using: Twitter (n=27743 tweets [2014 & 2015 inclusive]); a Google+ Community (n=2521 members); a Facebook Group (n=239 members); and personal websites (n=156 submitted to blog feed).

To trace educators’ activity, our team engaged in rounds of resonance mapping (Stornaiuolo & Hall, 2014), a multimodal mapping technique to surface indirect connections across spacetimes. Resonance involves how “meanings ripple across and sediment within texts, objects, and people, activating and amplifying multiple, often contradictory, meanings as people act in the world” (Stornaiuolo, Smith & Phillips, 2017, p. 14) in indirect ways, and is particularly helpful in finding what ideas, texts, and practices become shared and circulate across space and time. In this study, resonance has been operationalized as “likeness” where the metasemiotic rhythmic patterns of various exchanges and posted artifacts were distinguished and mapped across the varied platforms, artifacts, and posts.

Findings & Significance
In mapping the learning activity of educators, we’ve identified as series of remix practices, sensibilities, and mobilities, as well as infrastructural hindrances in the design of the professional learning opportunity to the uptake of practices across the participating educators (Author 4 & Colleagues, 2016, 2018). As part of this collaborative analysis, I am revisiting the a priori assumptions made in individuating contributions and boundaries of sequences of interaction. Such reflexive introspection seems of critical import in democratizing evidence when the communicative landscape is in such flux. Across the four datasets in this symposium, likeness raises questions such as:
● What are boundary-making moves to account for movement, mobility, and change?
● How can we (and do we want to) take discursive tracing to scale and on the move with and alongside (not retrospectively) emergent activity?
● How far can the poetics of “likeness” stretch across time, mode, poetics? How far apart (in type & spatiotemporality) can phenomena share likeness?

Author

• Anna Smith, Illinois State University