BUT HOW?!

We will take a discursive approach. This means we will look at what kind of rhetoric is
employed, what kinds of interpretative repertoires are used, and what kinds of cultural
discourses are cited.

There are many different approaches to discourse analysis (i.e. CDA or critical discourse
analysis, historical discourse analysis, conversation analysis) and rhetorical analysis, but
because I am feeling particularly helpful, below is a primer. The citations are linked to
articles and sources available online or to books I have made available for you in a
dropbox folder. In that folder I have also made available two books by James Paul Gee
(“How to do Discourse Analysis, a Toolkit” and “Introduction to Discourse Analysis”) that
most American digital humanities and digital rhetorics students are taught by. If you have
no prior contact with discourse analysis, I recommend you at least skim those, and then
put them on your reading list. Gee is very straightforward (especially for a discourse
analyst).

Discourse has been defined as text in context (this catchphrase mostly relies on Teun
van Dijk’s ample work on discourse analysis and context) or as the social practice of using
language, which depends on and is constrained by cultural and social structures.
Discourse analysis is basically a set of ideas about analyzing texts (kind of like
ethnography is a set of ideas about studying cultures and people, not a strict method). So
discourse analysis, in the broadest sense is a systematic, detailed analysis of text in its
context. Or the “study of language in use” (Gee, 2011: 8). This can happen on many
different levels or layers.

When we take a critical approach in discourse analysis (and many experts agree that all
discourse analysis is/should be critical, because language is always political), we assume
that while texts are socially constructed they also impact on the construction of social
realities. This gives discourses certain ideological powers to, for example, reproduce
heteronormativity, racism, sexism etc. Jorgensen and Phillips (2002: 49/50) suggest
(relying on Laclau and Mouffe) focusing on the following when doing discourse analysis:

 Nodal points, master signifiers and myths, which can be collectively labelled key
signifiers in the organisation of discourse;
 The concept of chains of equivalence which refers to the investment of key
signifiers with meaning;
 Concepts concerning identity: group formation, identity and representation; and
 Concepts for conflict analysis: floating signifiers, antagonism and hegemony.

Van Dijk writes about the need to choose which discursive structures you will analyse.
Discursive structures are for example:
 morphology and word building (neologisms),
 sentence structure,
 semantics (active and passive semantic roles, political correctness, implicit and
explicit meaning),
 speech acts (asking, commanding),
 or graphics and layout.

When we do discourse analysis we focus less on what people say and more on how they
use language to construct their social worlds, their selves and their realities. So it is about
the social, cultural, political, ideological functions of the texts’ linguistic characteristics (for
example word choice).

Rhetorical analysis could be described as a type of discourse analysis. Rhetorical

analysis essentially focuses on how discourse functions persuasively. One can focus on
language and utterances, which we consider the most direct and obvious form of
discourse, or anything that functions discursively, which is much less direct (building
design, architecture, or other physical objects can function persuasively. Likewise,
nontangible elements of culture function persuasively as discourse. A norm or cultural
climate might “speak” to you. In these indirect cases, we use the form ‘discursive practice’,
rather than discourse). And when looking at how language is used, specific linguistic
elements or structures are paid attention to. So rhetorical analysis may look at types of
deixis used (I, you, us, here, there, tomorrow…), at how verb tenses are used to indicate
doubt, requests or certainty, at rhetorical devices like metaphors and metonymy (Ruiz
2009). When we take a critical approach to rhetorical analysis, we want to know how the
chosen rhetoric subverts or reproduces the readers’ (or listeners’ or viewers’) existing
attitudes and opinions. For a great primer on rhetorical analysis, we suggest the text by
Sonja Foss .

For an example of an article that conducts a critical rhetorical analysis on workers’

discourse, see Markham 1996

When we want to take a critical approach, but do not want to focus on analyzing large
cultural or societal discourses (things that hold ideologically true in a particular society at
a particular time, discourses that have a lot of power to direct people’s lives), but instead
want to focus on how people use discourses in their everyday lives, we can rely on
something called discursive psychology and more specifically on analysing
interpretative repertoires.

Discursive psychology, the subject of Chapter 4, shares critical discourse

analysis’ empirical focus on specific instances of language use in social
interaction. But the aim of discursive psychologists is not so much to analyse
the changes in society’s ‘large-scale discourses’, which concrete language
use can bring about, as to investigate how people use the available
discourses flexibly in creating and negotiating representations of the world
and identities in talk-in-interaction and to analyse the social consequences
of this. Despite the choice of label for this approach – ‘discursive psychology’
– its main focus is not internal psychological conditions. Discursive
psychology is an approach to social psychology that has developed a type
of discourse analysis in order to explore the ways in which people’s selves,
thoughts and emotions are formed and transformed through social
interaction and to cast light on the role of these processes in social
and cultural reproduction and change. (...) In discursive psychology, the
stress is on individuals both as products of discourse and as producers of
dis- course in specific contexts of interaction .... (Jorgensen and Phillips,
2002: 7)

Potter and Wetherell (1987) and Wooffitt (2005) basically see discourse as
an interpretative repertoire.
 Interpretative repertoires are recurrently used systems of terms used for
characterizing and evaluating actions, events and other phenomena. A
repertoire /.../ is constituted through a limited range of terms used in
particular stylistic and grammatical constructions. Often a repertoire will be
organised around specific metaphors and figures of speech (tropes) /.../.”
(Potter & Wetherell 1987: 149).

So interpretive repertoires are flexible resources that speakers can use “to establish their
accounts of the world as solid and objective and competing accounts as false and
subjective.” (Phillips, 2007: 293). Vivian Burr (2015) in her book on Social
Constructionism, has called interpretative repertoires a culturally shared toolkit of
resources for people to use for their own purposes. social resource that When we analyze
interpretative repertoires, we should pay attention to how and for what purposes people
use different repertoires, and what problems. There are usually multiple interpretative
repertoires in use at the same time, and people choose to use them depending on the
context. Potter and Wetherell (1987) say that repertoires are just one component in a
systemic approach to a study of discourse. When we analyze interpretative repertoires we
pay particular attention to metaphors, grammatical constructions, similes, repetitions etc.

Repertoires may be characterised by a distinctive vocabulary, particular

grammatical and stylistic features, and the occurrence of specific figures of
speech, idiomatic expressions and metaphors. (Wooffitt 2005, 35/36) (I
recommend you read the chapter called Two Key Studies).

Here are some examples of the different kinds of discursive research of social media
practices:
 Work that looks at traces of people's social media use (pictures they post, blog
posts, tweets or Facebook status updates they write) and analyse those
discursively. Basically these analyses look at what wider cultural discourse are
being (re)produced, for example about race, gender, sexual identity, health or child
rearing and what the implications of that are. (for example Kat’s most recent article
with Nancy Baym).
 Sometimes researchers look at the discourse of a specific digital practice within
the wider culture. For example this article by Rob Cover (2006) looks at the rhetoric
of addiction in both academic and popular discourses about gaming.
 Sometimes researchers look at what discourse social media platform companies
use about technology and its use (this can be thought of as a discourse analytical
parallel to for example research on the affordances and constraints of ToS and
interfaces). For example Freishtat and Sandlin (2010) look at how Facebook
seeks to influence “discourse around the role of technology in both the personal
and broader cultural lives of youth, as (it) draws attention to, and shapes,
perceptions of particular online practices and relations among social, economic,
and cultural capital” (511). They say that Facebook uses a rhetoric of “technology
gospel” to make users behave in particular ways on their platform.
 And then occasionally researchers look at what kinds of discourses practitioners
(users) themselves (re)produce about the technology or the platform they use.
Annette Markham analyzed discourse of self-described ‘heavy users’ of the
internet, focusing on how they explained or defined ‘the internet’ vis a vis their self,
relationships, and experiences (1998). There are some examples where users
interpretative repertoires of discourses of the internet as such are analysed (for
 example look at Campbell’s (2005) analysis of how religious users shape and
negotiate the Internet to make it seem suitable for religious use, or Savolainen’s
(2004) analysis of Finnish users’ interpretative repertoires about the internet and
about their preferences as to where they find information, or Liu’s (2010) analysis
of Chinese participants accounts of their relationships with the internet and the
subject positions they undertake). Mascheroni (2014) has analysed parents and
children’s interpretative repertoires of how children’s smartphone use is mediated
by parents (although I would say that the analysis there is just a thematic analysis,
and not really a nuanced discourse analysis).

NOW, WITH ALL OF THIS IN YOUR HEAD:

1. Take some notes
2. Do a brain dump about what it makes you think about (a brain dump is 20
minutes of freewriting on anything pertinent that goes through your head)
3. Carefully and slowly read the outtakes from the autoethnographic material
assigned to you (list below). This is called “close reading” and it’s an
analytical technique. Also watch one video.
4. Set it all aside for at least 3 hours.
5. Go back to it, reread the material or at least reread your notes and
annotations.
6. Do another brain dump about what it makes you think about (a brain dump
is 20 minutes of freewriting on anything pertinent that goes through your
head)

Before you start reading and watching, please treat all this material sensitively, do not
leave it laying around. We have been allowed to analyse this material, but we will only
reproduce it without people’s names. Names have been removed from the textual data
already, but the videos are with people’s faces and sometimes with glimpses of their
names, obviously when we write anything based on the video we will not use names, but
please also avoid names in your notes, and delete the video from your computer after
watching. Do not share any of this data with anyone else.