Visual Thinking + Discourse Analysis

One question many discourse analysts ask when they’re familiarizing themselves with data is: how could things be different? If you’re comfortable messing around with Photoshop and your text includes images, then you can create sketches as a way of making these hypothetical differences more concrete. Sketching is a powerful way to explore the effects of, […]

sketching discourse

I’m tinkering with metaphors to explain/teach discourse analysis to an undergrad human-centered design class. One way to explain it might be in terms of an iceberg. Discourse is sort of like an iceberg in the sense that there is a lot going on beneath the surface that we don’t see when we encounter talk and […]

New Journal Article

Terrific (not-so-new) news! She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation published an article I wrote with Erik Stolterman about whether knowledge claims could be a useful way to distinguish research communities from one another. Here is the abstract: While much has been written about designerly knowledge and designerly ways of knowing in the […]

what should theory mean?

I’ve been collecting (and modifying and losing) thoughts about theory and the different ways it has been discussed and debated in academia for some time now. Recently I started organizing a collection of readings on/about theory according to different concepts like: theory development, theory-practice relationship, theory-artifact relationship, etc. What’s really striking about all these readings […]

Knowledge Contributions | Discourse Analysis

Borrowing from a personal email exchange, in my final paper I’d like to look at “how publications in a journal likeĀ Nature talk about their knowledge contributions and how publications in a journal like Design Studies talk about their knowledge contributions.” The interest stems from a parallel research project I’m doing about theoretical vs schematic knowledge […]

Critical Discourse Analysis

Some background: I read this week’s readings, went back and re-read the notes I took from last week’s readings, looked at my last few blog entries for this class, and took a (brief) second pass at this week’s readings. Here’s where I’m at: We’re learning different schools of discourse analysis and I’m having a heck […]