What are the threats and potentials of big data for qualitative research?

Amid the big claims of big data, analytics, datification, and data mining, this article answers central questions for qualitative research. In the debates about the enormity and ubiquity of data in the digital world, qualitative research endeavors are seemingly threatened. But is big data necessarily better? Can big data answer the fundamental questions that qualitative researchers ask? This article interrogates the key issues for qualitative researchers in the big data era, positioning big data in its historical context. This article offers a critique of assumptions about access to big data, and uncovers the dark side of big data and privacy in a risk society. The potentials of big data for qualitative research are examined, providing recommendations to bring together complementary research endeavors that map large scale social patterns using big data with qualitative questions about participants’ subjective perceptions, rich expression of feelings, and reasons for human action

Big Data for Qualitative Research

Big Data for Qualitative Research covers everything small data researchers need to know about big data, from the potentials of big data analytics to its methodological and ethical challenges. The data that we generate in everyday life is now digitally mediated, stored, and analyzed by web sites, companies, institutions, and governments. Big data is large volume, rapidly generated, digitally encoded information that is often related to other networked data, and can provide valuable evidence for study of phenomena. This book explores the potentials of qualitative methods and analysis for big data, including text mining, sentiment analysis, information and data visualization, netnography, follow-the-thing methods, mobile research methods, multimodal analysis, and rhythmanalysis. It debates new concerns about ethics, privacy, and dataveillance for big data qualitative researchers. This book is essential reading for those who do qualitative and mixed methods research, and are curious, excited, or even skeptical about big data and what it means for future research. Now is the time for researchers to understand, debate, and envisage the new possibilities and challenges of the rapidly developing and dynamic field of big data from the vantage point of the qualitative researcher

Big Data for Qualitative Research

Big Data for Qualitative Research covers everything small data researchers need to know about big data, from the potentials of big data analytics to its methodological and ethical challenges. The data that we generate in everyday life is now digitally mediated, stored, and analyzed by web sites, companies, institutions, and governments. Big data is large volume, rapidly generated, digitally encoded information that is often related to other networked data, and can provide valuable evidence for study of phenomena. This book explores the potentials of qualitative methods and analysis for big data, including text mining, sentiment analysis, information and data visualization, netnography, follow-the-thing methods, mobile research methods, multimodal analysis, and rhythmanalysis. It debates new concerns about ethics, privacy, and dataveillance for big data qualitative researchers. This book is essential reading for those who do qualitative and mixed methods research, and are curious, excited, or even skeptical about big data and what it means for future research. Now is the time for researchers to understand, debate, and envisage the new possibilities and challenges of the rapidly developing and dynamic field of big data from the vantage point of the qualitative researcher

The multimodal construction of race : A review of critical race theory research

Issues of race periodically rupture in the national and internationalconsciousness, while at other times, there is a false belief thatsociety has arrived at a post-racial era. Either way, there remainsimpetus for the critical interrogation of the racialisation ofmultimodal literacies in education, and critical race theory (CRT) is aleading approach. This article reviews original studies thatcollectively analyse multimodal texts and practices to understandthe construction of race in education. Multimodal texts haveproliferated in online textual ecologies due to the ease ofproduction and rapid global dissemination of image-based texts inthe twenty-first century. Such texts combine two or more modes,such as images, words, sounds, and gestures. Sites for thecirculation of multimodal literacies–online and offline–serve todisrupt, reify, or perhaps even exacerbate racial identities, prejudice,and subordination in education. The review highlights the prevalentthemes: (a) Discursive construction of race in the spoken mode, (b)Anti-racist and multimodal counter-narratives, (c) The racialisationof multimodal literature for children and adolescents, and (d) Racein music, visual and performing arts, and digital media. Gaps in CRTresearch and challenges are posed for future research of race in thecontext of cultural and technological change

Introduction : Digital diversity, ideology, and the politics of a writing revolution

This chapter outlines some key theoretical directions important for studying writing and literacies in digital cultures. Digital Futures articulates new perspectives concerning the ethical, sensorial, and critical elements of writing and literacies, and contemporary debates at the nexus of literacies and digital rhetoric that have direct relevance to the social construction of authorial identities for youth and other writers in education contexts. Digital Diversity brings together the work of scholars from around the world to address issues of inclusion in contemporary writing and literacies research, from race to gender, and to the geographical displacement of refugees. Digital Spaces shifts the focus to social spaces that discursively shape, and which are shaped by, writing and literacies practices. Digital Ethics debates current ethical concerns associated with the social and ethical risks of children and young people's access to information on the Internet

Smart glasses for 3D multimodal composition

Extended reality technologies – mixed, augmented, and virtual reality, and future-related technologies – are rapidly expanding in many fields, with underexplored potentials for multimodal composition in digital media environments. This research generates new knowledge about the novel wearable technology – smart glasses – to support elementary students’ multimodal story authoring with 3D virtual objects or holograms. The researchers and teachers implemented learning experiences with upper elementary students from three classrooms to compose and illustrate written narratives before retelling the story with Microsoft HoloLens 2 smart glasses, selecting 3D holograms to illustrate the settings, characters, and events from the 3D Viewer software. The findings analyse how smart glasses supported students’ multimodal composition, and relatedly, the new modal resources available to students wearing smart glasses to compose 3D stories. The findings have significance for educators and researchers to understand and utilise the multimodal affordances of augmented and mixed reality environments for composing and storytelling

Rhythm in literary apps

This article addresses how rhythm may function in literary apps. The article has two aims: increasing the knowledge of how literary apps work as texts, by exploring their aspects of rhythm, and developing the understanding of the theoretical term of rhythm. The authors propose a rhythmanalysis in which two different types of rhythm – reading rhythm and narrative rhythm – are taken into account. The two types of rhythm may both occur at different structural levels in the text. This approach is applied to the analysis of rhythm in the popular literary app, Florence (Wong et al., 2018, Florence Tablet application software), drawing on concepts from multimodal social semiotics (Van Leeuwen, Introducing Social Semiotics, 2005), although leaning towards a more reception-oriented approach than the traditional text-oriented analysis in social semiotics. Literary apps are defined in this context as multimodal fictional narratives that can lead to an aesthetic experience for the reader (Iser, 1984, Der Akt des Lesens); however, non-narrative apps, such as poetry, may also be defined as literary apps. These apps may be read on a tablet or a smartphone. This article elucidates some of the many facets of rhythm related to the multimodal design of a literary app, which invites different forms of interactivity than the linear reading and page-turning of print-based picture books. The findings of the analysis show how rhythm not only contributes to the multimodal cohesional aspects of literary apps, but is fundamental to the meaning potential of the literary app

Multimodal literacy

Multimodal literacy is a term that originates in social semiotics, and refers to the study of language that combines two or more modes of meaning. The related term, multimodality, refers to the constitution of multiple modes in semiosis or meaning making. Modes are defined differently across schools of thought, and the classification of modes is somewhat contested. However, from a social semiotic approach, modes are the socially and culturally shaped resources or semiotic structure for making meaning. Specific examples of modes from a social semiotic perspective include speech, gesture, written language, music, mathematical notation, drawings, photographic images, or moving digital images. Language and literacy practices have always been multimodal, because communication requires attending to diverse kinds of meanings, whether of spoken or written words, visual images, gestures, posture, movement, sound, or silence. Yet, undeniably, the affordances of people-driven digital media and textual production have given rise to an exponential increase in the circulation of multimodal texts in networked digital environments. Multimodal text production has become a central part of everyday life for many people throughout the life course, and across cultures and societies. This has been enabled by the ease of producing and sharing digital images, music, video games, apps, and other digital media via the Internet and mobile technologies. The increasing significance of multimodal literacy for communication has led to a growing body of research and theory to address the differing potentials of modes and their intermodality for making meaning. The study of multimodal literacy learning in schools and society is an emergent field of research, which begins with the important recognition that reading and writing are rarely practiced as discrete skills, but are intimately connected to the use of multimodal texts, often in digital contexts of use. The implications of multimodal literacy for pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment in education is an expanding field of multimodal research. In addition, there is a growing attention to multimodal literacy practices that are practiced in informal social contexts, from early childhood to adolescence and adulthood, such as in homes, recreational sites, communities, and workplaces

Epistolarity: life after death of the letter?

Exploring what is at stake in the common lament that letter writing is dead, we cautiously celebrate a new age of ‘e-epistolarity’. In doing so, we build on our collaborative article of 2006, ‘Letters as/Not a Genre’, to consider the ongoing pacts, politics and arts in written relationship and the mixed methods that academics might adopt in analysing the growing archives of digital and digitised communication. As with our earlier piece, the essay is written as a dialogue, enacting our view that epistolarity enables the performance of self, though one that depends quite obviously on another

Sensory literacies, the body, and digital media

This chapter suggests that what is needed in current understandings of literacy practices is systematic attention to the role of the full sensorium evoked in the process of meaning making. Of particular interest is the hitherto neglected realm of the nonvisual senses and their role in children's literacy learning. The chapter demonstrates how the sensorial engagement of the body is intertwined in meaning making with different material presentations of digital and print copies of a picture book and in handwriting and process drama lessons. The e-book version of the Heart and the Bottle and process drama activities that draw on Beware of the Bears invite the reader to participate with the body in sense-making through haptic affordances that open up a rich set of possibilities for vicarious sensory engagement with the feelings and perspectives of the characters