Goal: To learn how to conduct an interview, and transcribe an audio recording.

Getting Started: You need to read Lindlof & Taylor, “Qualitative Interviewing”.

Directions:

1. For this project you will need some sort of audio recorder. This might be a tape recorder or an app for your phone. Make sure you know how it works before your interview, and that it will record for at least 60 minutes.
2. Before interviewing, read Ed Hutchins’ interviewing tips and potential interview questions and read Lindlof & Taylor’s discussion of Qualitative Interviews.
3. Contact a participant in the activity from Project 2 who is willing to talk to you about the activity.
4. Set up a time and a quiet place to talk to your informant.
5. Obtain informed consent for interview recording from your informant using the interview consent form.
6. Turn on the tape recorder and interview your informant about the activity you took photos of. Start with the photos you used in Project 2, but feel free to use other photos as prompts in the interview. Ask your informant to explain what is going on in the activity.
7. Record at least 30 minutes, but no more than one hour of interview.
8. Listen through your interview and make an index of what it contains. This should be a list of topics discussed or events in the conversation with some indication of where they appear on the tape. Then choose one or two passages to transcribe.
9. Transcribe about 1000 words using relaxed transcription techniques. For this, you should just try to get all of the words that are said, including false starts and other disfluencies.
10. Consider using Express Scribe, a handy transcription tool, that can be downloaded for free here Before trying it out, you should read the tutorial.
11. Write up the index for your interview. Be sure to indicate on the index which sections of the interview were transcribed. Type up the transcription in clean form. Ed Hutchins has a really nice example of an index and transcription

REMEMBER: NO INFORMED CONSENT means NO GRADE.

Due 3/19: Turn in your index and transcription.

Part 2: Describe and Analyze Cultural Models

Credit to Ed Hutchins from whom I’ve adapted this project idea and taken some of the text for the directions.

1. Your homework is to complete the NIH Protecting Human Research Subjects training. According to the website, the course takes approximately 3 hours to complete. (It may take some of you less time. If you have already completed the training for another class or project, you do not need to repeat the training, but you do need to submit your certificate).
   
2. At the end of the training, please PRINT your certificate and bring it to class tomorrow. (Alternatively, you can send me a PDF via email if you are able.)
3. Look ahead to the Photo Documentation project which is due on 2/26. Start thinking about it now. (The informed consent form link does not work yet but will be posted soon.)

Goal: To learn how to attend to the details of the world of everyday activities.

Directions:

1. In this project you are going to take photos of an everyday social activity. First, choose an activity. It should be something that interests you and something to which you have access. It could be something you do with your family or with your roommates or friends. It could be an activity at your workplace, or in someone else’s workplace. The people involved in the activity should be adults 18 years of age or older. You should choose an activity where you can get close to the action, one that probably has some significant cognitive aspects you can observe. If you are unsure about your choice, please consult with your Professor. You must obtain the informed consent of participants in the activity before you take photos. The procedures for obtaining informed consent are described on the informed consent page. While you are obtaining that consent, also find at least one participant in the activity who will agree to talk to you about the activity later.
2. Look ahead. This would be a good time to make contact with a community that will provide the data for the remainder of the class projects.
3. Observe the activity for a while before taking pictures. Get a sense for the nature of the activity.
4. Take pictures of the activity. Try to capture interesting aspects of the activity and the social and material environment in which it takes place. Take at least 15 shots.
5. Carefully look at your pictures and choose 2 of them that you find most interesting.
6. Carefully describe what you see in the two photos. Stick close to the data and pay attention. Look for evidence of cognitive activity. Hopefully, you will see things in the study of your photos that you did not see while observing the event live.

I assume you will use a digital camera for this assignment. The camera in your phone will even be fine, if it has sufficient resolution and a flash (if needed). If you do not have access to a digital camera, you can purchase an inexpensive disposable camera and have the film developed at, e.g., a CVS or Walgreens.

Maximum 800 words of text. Additional figures and tables (if they contribute to the description) are not included in the word count.

Due: 2/26

Note: NO INFORMED CONSENT means NO GRADE.

Download: Informed Consent Form

Credit to Ed Hutchins from whom I’ve adapted this project idea and taken some of the text for the directions.

All research using human and animal research subjects is subjected to oversight to protect the research subjects from unacceptable harms. In the case of research on human beings, a cornerstone of research ethics is the concept of informed consent. Your research subjects must consent to being a part of your study, and they must be informed about the nature of any risks involved. Human subjects research is reviewed by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) and the Office of Research Compliance (ORC).

The research activities in this class will be conducted under the terms of an application that Professor Brown submitted to the ORC. This application covers the Photo Documentation and Interview activities, as well as the optional Video Ethnography project. You must follow all of the instructions on the project page and on this page.

General Instructions

1. You must obtain informed consent from every person you collect data from before you collect the data. You must explain to them what you want them to do, what information your are going to collect, and what you will do with the information you collect.
2. You must keep clear records of the consent given by all participating subjects. Keep track of your consent forms. Keep a record of the total number of subjects you work with.
3. The people involved in the activity should be adults 18 years of age or older.
4. You will not interview subjects about their personal lives or other topics that may be socially sensitive.
5. You will not collect any sort of data on any illegal activity.
6. You will do whatever you can to protect the interests of the subjects.
7. If complications arise in your relationship to a subject or subjects, report the problem to your professor immediately

Informed Consent Forms

Download and print enough of the forms to take with you to do your data collection.

1. Photo Documentation Form – Make sure all of the participants in the activity that you observe and document sign a form, even if you do not actually photograph them.
2. Interview Consent Form
3. Video Project Form – Make sure the participants all sign the form before you video them. This project is optional.

Credit to Ed Hutchins from whom I’ve adapted these project ideas and taken some of the text for the directions.

Late Work / Make-up Exams

No late work or make-up exams will be allowed without consent of the professor prior to the due/exam date, except in situations where University policy requires it.

Class Attendance

While reading and writing are crucial parts of the course, the central philosophical activity is live discussion. While class will occasionally involve bits of lecture, this is merely an instrument to a more well-informed discussion. Attendance is thus considered mandatory.

Classroom expectations

You are expected to have read the assignments before class, and it would be to your benefit to also read them again after class. You are expected to bring all of the texts assigned for each day’s class, and have them available to refer to. You are expected to listen respectfully to the professor and your fellow students, and participate in class discussions and activities.

Further standard University policies can be found at http://go.utdallas.edu/syllabus-policies

These descriptions and timelines are subject to change at the discretion of the Professor.

Conceptual Tools

These concepts will be resources that we return to repeatedly throughout the semester. Any improvements to these definitions that you can suggest are welcome.

• Process vs. System
  • Processes are events that take place in time
  • Systems are persisting, organized, made of parts
• Artifact
  • Material object created or modified by humans in order to be incorporated into meaningful actions.
  • Material AND conceptual
• Mediation
  • A process by which some third entity alters the interaction between two other things.
• Tool
  • Artifact that mediates between an agent and some object or environment towards some goal.
• Sign
  • Artifact that mediates between person and environment or social interactions towards some interpretation or meaning.
• Activity
  • Collective undertaking with a guiding object or motive.
  • Composed of goal-directed actions and routinized instrumental operations.
  • E.g., Healthcare
• Activity System
  • Community organized by rules and norms, tools, and a division of labor engaged in an activity.
  • E.g., Physician working at a clinic.
• Actant
  • Humans and non-human tools and objects.
  • Action as interaction, mediation
• Toolforthoughts
  • Amalgam of tool and thought
  • According to Shaffer and Clinton, all tools involve thoughts and vice versa
• C^3^ Process/System
  • Cognitive-Cultural-Communicative Process/System
  • Nascent notion of my own coinage
• Ecological Validity
  • Related to external validity – generalizability across groups (populations)
  • Grounded in or reflecting real-world settings and real-life conditions.
  • Generalizability from research setting to natural setting.

Theoretical Approaches

These are the theoretical approaches to cognition-culture-communication (C^3^) that we will be discussing this semester.

The big four:

1. Situated Cognition / Learning / Action
2. (Socially) Distributed Cognition
3. Cultural(-Historical) Psychology / Activity Theory / CHAT
4. Actor-Network(-)Theory

Other related approaches

• Sociocultural/Socio-historical Psychology/Theory / Mediated Action / Mediational Means (Vygotsky/Wertsch)
• Enaction / Enactive Psychology
• Embodied Mind / Embodied Cogniton
• Extended Mind / Extended Cognition
• Ecological Psychology
• And MORE!

Methods

Cognitive Ethnography
~ Combines aspects of traditional psychological and anthropological method.
(Participatory) Action Research
~ Specifically aimed at improving and researching conditions simultaneously, organically.
~ Subjects of study are also co-researchers and agents of change.
Multi-Level Methods
~ Phylogenetic history, cultural history, ontogeny, and microgenesis.
~ Look at: Institutions, Activities, Individual Interactions
~ Methods: Evolutionary, Historical, Developmental, Ethnographic, and Experimental
Model Activity Systems
~ Design and implement an activity system that is sustainable
Actor-Network-Theory
~ Actor-Network-Theory claims to be a theoretical and methodological resource. We’ll try to understand this claim later on in the semester.

CCC Home | Week 1: Introductions

These are main features of the dominant paradigm(s) that our main readings will be critiquing and providing alternatives to.

Objects of Study / Ontological Divisions

1. Mind – Cognition (broad), Person, Agent
   1. Feeling – Emotion / Affect
   2. Thinking – Cognition / Knowledge
   3. Acting – Decision
2. Society – Groups, Culture (broad)
   1. Culture
   2. Language
   3. Institutions
3. Communication – Modes of interaction
   1. Media / Information
   2. Rhetoric – Writing / Speaking
   3. Organizations

Associated Disciplines

1. Sciences of the Mind
   • Psychology, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience
   • Philosophy – of Mind, Epistemology
   • Artificial Intelligence, Education
2. Sciences of Society
   • Sociology, Anthropology, Linguistics
   • Economics, Political Science
   • Philosophy – Ethics, Political
   • Humanities: History, Literature, Art
3. Sciences of Communication
   • Communication Studies, Media Studies
   • Network Theory, Information Theory, Telecommunications
   • Rhetoric & Comp, Journalism

Theories and assumptions

1. Computationalism – Cognition as information processing, formal.
2. Reductionism – Society to Mind, Mind to Life, Life to Chemicals, Chemicals to Atoms…
3. Functionalism – Mind and society as complex, structure system whose parts are understood in terms of how they function within and are shaped by those structures.
   • System as stable whole. Body and organs.
   • A type of reductionism
4. Mind is deep, culture is superficial – e.g., Chomsky.
5. Communication as thought-downloading.
6. Learning as passive, receptive.
7. Cartesianism – The mind is separate from the body, world. It is independent of culture. Our own mind is what we know best, because we have direct access to it, unlike the world.

CCC Home | Week 1: Introductions

Here are a list of tips on your writing assignments, such as this week’s Cognitive Diary activity:

1. Your job is to produce a document that makes it easy for us to see that you did the reading, thought about the issues, and did some real research.
2. Make specific connections to the readings, e.g., in defining concept, applying theoretical ideas, making comparisons to someone’s work, or in applying methods defined or used by someone else. Always cite the author – use Chicago/Turabian author-date format.
3. When you make a claim, especially one that isn’t obvious or commonly known, back it up with evidence that supports or illustrates it. Evidence in this class can include both ethnographic observation, images, interview transcripts, etc. as well as references to evidence in articles and books by other authors.
4. Work on making your paper concise, communicating as much information as needed in the space allotted.
5. Please proofread your papers. If possible, get someone else to read your paper and help you edit it.

Many of the points in my general Term Paper Guidelines and Helpful Hints are applicable for all writing assignments.