Length: 1000 words
Worth: 20% of your Final Grade
Final draft due: by email, Sept 30, start of class (please see file naming guidelines in the syllabus)

We’ve started exploring the usefulness of discourse analysis for teasing out texts’ assumptions. We’ve especially focused on the appeals that such texts make to certain kinds of knowledge and data, as well as what these appeals might reveal to us about the communities that write and read them.

For your first major assignment, I’d like you to write and submit a discourse analysis of your own. Instead of a semi-public memo, this time the object of your discourse analysis will be…an object. Specifically, I’d like you to look at a material or virtual object that you use to somehow interact with or make use of data: reading it, taking it, referencing it, and/or translating it.

What do I mean? This object may represent data to you in a particular way, like a mail order calendar (daily, weekly, monthly). Perhaps it expects data input of a certain scheme, forcing you to fit data you already have in certain categories. Or maybe it impels you to code data you don’t yet have a certain way, like the clinical Veterinary form in our Schryer reading. Maybe this object is a device or document you use or carry with you, like a keyboard, a fitbit, a moleskin notebook, a passport, a chronograph diver’s watch, or a credit card. Maybe it’s something you’ve used as a student or on co-op: in the lab (like a thermometer, oscilloscope), or in some administrative context (like some part of MyNortheastern). “Object” here is also broadly conceived, and this doesn’t have to be a physical object. It could be a software or web interface that you use to query data, or a form that collects data by asking you to identify information about yourself. It could be an HUD or RPG character pane in a video game, or the readout in a camera viewfinder.

Genre

This is a discourse analysis, so you will be asking the usual questions that this genre might ask, but adapted for a material or virtual object. Your guiding questions for this assignment are as follows:

  • What is the stated purpose of this object? Where is this stated and how? What purposes does it have that may have been left unstated, but are still implied by the context in which it’s normally used? How and why do you know that?
  • What are the explicit and implicit politics of the object? A friendly reminder that we aren’t talking here about party politics. Instead, what does the object represent as valuable to the community (or communities, since there may be more than one!) for which it is designed? What lexicons or systems of classifications/standards does it adopt? What ones are absent? What power-based hierarchies might it take for granted? What evidence of these choices exist in the object, or in materials that commonly accompany it?
  • Crucially, what might the presences and absences listed above tell us about what the object assumes its about its community of practice, including who are members of that community and what values they take for granted? You may describe a few of these assumptions in passing, but pick one major assumption about which to conduct your analysis. This will be the core argument of your paper.
  • Finally, what is a major consequence of these assumptions? How does the way the object is designed, as outlined above, affect when, where, why, and how it’s used? What frictions might a user experience while using it because of these assumptions?
    • This may not apply to all choices of object, but are there any significant ways that communities have used this object that resist its explicit purpose or politics?

Audience

Your audience for this assignment is the rest of the class and me. As such, you will need to explain any technical terminology you use and you will have to introduce and explain any background information, contextual framing and specialist knowledge with which we (and especially I) might not be familiar.

Tone

Please feel free to have some fun with this essay. You probably don’t want to write a dry essay that addresses each of the above guiding questions one by one (“The stated purpose of this object is blah…The explicit politics of this object are blah”), and I absolutely, definitely don’t want to read something like that. If your essay reads like it would be better off as a bulleted or ordered list, you will not be fulfilling the requirements of this assignment. So, please use narrative prose. Describe to your reader the scene where this object is used, or what you see. Feel free to use the first person (“I” or “we,” meaning you and your reader), or even the second person (“you,” your reader, although be careful about who exactly you have in mind…). Incorporate supporting evidence by following up conceptual statements with description (“For example,…”, etc.), or using descriptions to then conclude something about them. Clarify arguments and statements for your reader by stating them a different way (“In other words…” or “That is, …”). We’ll go over some of these strategies in class. As we’ve seen from Bowker and Star, it is possible to write readable and lively prose while also being informative, precise, analytical, and persuasive.

Assignment Requirements

I will be looking for:

  • you to pick an object that interests you and that you know something about! This will be a dull assignment otherwise, and that tedium will more than likely come across in your writing.
    • Be sure, also, to pick an object with enough features, specific-enough uses, and defined-enough user communities. (Choosing a pencil, for instance, may be possible but not really the best idea: you only have the pencil’s point and eraser to talk about for the most part, and a LOT of people use pencils for a lot of purposes. A golf pencil and scorecard, for example, might be a better choice.)
  • your paper to start with a description of the object and its context of use, including any specialist knowledge.
  • the adapted discourse analysis components listed above (not necessarily in that order).
  • detail! Be sure to ground your conceptual claims in material descriptions of your object’s characteristics
  • your use of the vocabulary of at least one framework from our readings for class, either:
    • Schryer’s work on genre as records; or
    • Bowker and Star’s classifications/standards

    When using the vocabulary we’ve covered, please be sure to properly introduce and attribute the readings or theorists in the text, citing in a consistent style. The choice of style is yours — you might use the Object Lessons or Star “Harley” examples that we will go over in class as models for how to bring in and discuss texts and concepts. Since this is not a formal acdemic paper, there is no need for a works cited here. Please make sure you appropriately define your terms, assuming that your essay might be read someone other than your primary audience, who does not know what you mean by “classification” or “standard” or “genre.” It may be useful to mix multiple frameworks, since different aspects of your object may remind you of a concept from multiple readings: if so, be careful when switching back and forth that your reader knows which concept is taken from where. If you need suggestions here, please ask me, or a classmate, or someone at the Writing Center for in-text attribution strategies. The library’s Citations & Bibliographies Subject Guide is also a valuable resource.

    • Note: there is no requirement to conduct “outside” research for this assignment. That said, if your argument leads you there (perhaps when establishing context, or when discussing consequences), please appropriately cite any supporting material in the text, as well.