How would a Technography Work?

Many, though by no means all, of the major workplace writing studies in the past twenty years or so have relied on ethnographic research methods, and in my opinion we’ve learned a great deal. For instance, individual authorship is much different in the classroom than in the office space, and writing review is often an act of socialization rather than simply correcting and improving a text. My gut feeling, though, is that the tools with which writing review is conducted have changed to the point wherein we need to start thinking of technography rather than ethnography. A technography is an ethnography wherein the human activity in question is observed and recorded via technology. That single definition isn’t a stretch from a more traditional ethnography: certainly, an ethnographer takes notes and transcribes them using technology, and can observe in person how people use technologies to carry out their daily activities.

But, having read through a couple of Kien’s works, I’m beginning to revise that definition to something more like: a technography is a study in which technology is regarded as an active participant among a pool of other participants. According to Kien, “industry uses the word technography to define real-time, multiuser document production. In this scenario, many users network and interface with the technology directly to produce a common text, much like having a group of individuals each equipped with chalk and eraser gathered at a blackboard to produce a text” (Qualitative Inquiry, 14:7: 1102). This particular example is so much in line with how I suspect workplace writing review takes place that I think it’s worth beginning to think of technography as a useful way of theorizing that activity. Within individual engineers in particular, the drive to write is usually missing entirely, and because the engineering profession requires substantial amounts of writing they normally only write in teams. From an ethnographic research perspective, the individual fades into the background as the rhetoric of engineering takes over via many hands and keyboards.

A true technographic study would look at the performative aspects of both the participants and the technologies in question. But if I’m looking at workplace writing revision, how is it technographic? How would I describe the role the technologies play in aiding the revision? The first step is to discover what kinds of tools engineers use for workplace revision, and that can be done pretty quickly. Regardless of the particular tool in question, a technographic approach allows for analysis of how that tool is used—and uses—the writers. For instance, MS Word will make spelling and grammatical suggestions, and my experience with students engineers suggests that those suggestions are almost always followed. Thus, MS Word makes suggestions during the revision process, and those suggestions are followed. An ethnography would make note of the humans’ response to the software while potentially overlooking the software’s role. This seems to be technography’s value, not that an ethnographer would ignore technology—there is too much evidence that that is simply not the case—but that we need a theory to account for the technological actor.

A technographic outlook also allows us to insert the workplace into the classroom via the dynamic nature of digital workspaces. In other words, since work isn’t necessarily performed in the cubicle anymore, those digital workspaces can be accessed from the classroom, thus allowing students and instructors (and researchers) a peek inside while treating the black box that makes it all possible as an active participant.

I’ve searched the EBSCO Communication and Mass Media Complete database for references to “technography,” but found only two sources, both by Kien. My guess is that while actor-network theory, which seems to serve as a foundation for how technography is theorized in communications studies, is well known amongst TC researchers, technography is not.

My concern, and it’s minor, is that “technography” is simply another way of saying something else, which of course is built upon something else, and which all comes back to something (ever) else. But such is the nature of all theories, that they are based upon the metaphors and analogies of others, and that while the current theories of a generation work well, they will inevitably be supplanted by others. But my sense is that the value, to me, to TC, of technography is that it allows for a greater latitude in interpreting the writing actions of groups within a technological framework that accounts for that framework as an actor. I’ll have to do additional reading to find out how technography, stated as such or not, is represented within the literature.
For now I think the next step is to determine which revision tools engineers typically use for writing/reviewing in teams. Team working (I’m deliberately avoiding the overused “teamwork”) is a key component of technography, and engineers from students and recent graduated to older, more experienced PEs work in teams almost constantly. So the team aspect of this particular technography, dealing as it does with writing review, might need to begin with a couple of pilot studies (really just informal asking around). The first should be something like:

“When you review written documents in teams, what kinds of technology do you use?”

The next would need to begin focusing in on a particular action, or rhetorical situation, in which the engineers work in teams in order to revise a document. My question at that point is whether an ethnographic approach (direct observation) might work better than simply seeing a record of the revision process (the “before” document, an “in-process” snapshot,” and then the “final,” marked-up document)? I think both, just to be safe.

Another possibility might be to install screencasting software to capture the revision as it happens within the team and then simply review the recording and make a transcript. Of course, that might be dependent upon whether I could reassure my participants that I wouldn’t show their work to anyone else. Engineers rely upon their ideas and designs for income, and it wouldn’t be fair to share that work.

OK, next step: identify what kinds of workplace revision take place at engineering firms.

Technography as Method

Is it possible to use digital methods to replicate the results of ethnographic studies on workplace writing review?

The reason this question is important is because there is loads—and I mean loads—of evidence that novice writers only become advanced writers when they begin to associate themselves with the discourse, and thus the communities formed by that discourse, used by their chosen discipline. Thus, a newly-graduated engineer will start to incorporate characteristics of the professional discourse he or she sees and experiences in the engineering workplace. Technical communication and composition researchers assure me this is true. It’s a fact proven by empirical research. I’ve read that research, and it sure seems solid.

But it begs a couple of questions:
1. Why bother with writing courses in colleges if we’re not able to reproduce the circumstances of a professional writing environment (whether that’s for the law, accounting, marketing, engineering, etc.)?
2. If we can replicate those circumstances, and thus begin graduating students who are already professional writers in terms of their chosen field, how can we keep those circumstances both (a) updated, and (b) specific enough to help each student?
3. Surveys of employers consistently indicate that communication skills are at the top, or near the top, of the list of things those employers look for in a new employee. But if those communication skills are only learned once the novice communicator (writer) begins working within the professional workplace, how can our students hope to get jobs since, as students, they will always be novice writers?

I think working on #2 is our best hope, and, like Princess Leia recording the secret message in R2D2’s innards, we can only beseech the Obi-Kenobi’s of the professional world to help us out. So how do we go about replicating the circumstances of a professional writing environment? As always, that’s my central question.

Working with my genius wife, I’ve sketched out what I think is a preliminary plan for testing whether workplace revision processes, what Katz called “writing review,” can be duplicated within the classroom so long as we have some online contact with professionals. As I’ve lamented before, the way this has been researched in the past is to use a sort of pseudo-ethnography: the researcher gets permission to follow people around and watch what they do. But that’s time consuming. The researcher needs special training, the researcher has to follow folks around for long enough to get a good idea of what they’re doing, and then the researcher winds up with reams of field data that has to somehow be coded.
There has got to be a way around that. I don’t know if it’s intellectual curiosity or an intense case of laziness, but I feel as though we have enough digital tools laying around such that we can learn what we need without leaving the office. But what I need to know first is whether folks in the workplace are using digital tools for writing review, like Word’s track changes and commenting features, or Google Docs or even wikis. If they are, then we’ve got a start, because those are tools we can use for classroom assignments, and they are also the petard through which can hang ethnography.

Here’s the study, based on the premise that I can find three or four engineering firms that use Word’s track changes/commenting feature in their writing review process.

Two groups of students write a document of a professional genre, such as a Statement of Qualifications (SOQ).

That document is reviewed by two groups of professional engineers using MS Word’s track changes/commenting feature. One group of students knows that the reviewers are professional engineers; the other group of students does not.

The students see the reviewed document and are allowed to incorporate or not incorporate the suggested revisions. In interviews, the students asked to justify why and how they used the suggested revisions.

After the students make use (or don’t) of the revisions, the first draft, suggested revisions, and final draft is then reviewed by another group of professional engineers as well as by a group of writing instructors. The two groups (engineers and writing instructors) are asked to evaluate whether the students made effective choices when including or not including the professional feedback.

If the findings are positive: in other words, if the final evaluators indicate that yes, the students did make good use of the professional feedback, then we can argue that gathering feedback in this way, rather than ethnography, is a viable method of beginning the professional rhetorical assimilation of the students. We can also begin to encourage instructors to begin incorporating this method of feedback into their classes. Many professional schools, such as engineering and law, have close ties to the professional community; thus, finding participants to provide occasional feedback shouldn’t be impossible. We could also theorize that digital research methods are a possible alternative to direct data collection via ethnography, thus opening the door to more effective writing instruction within professional disciplines.

If the findings are negative, in other words, if the final evaluators indicate that no, the students not make good use of the professional feedback, then we can argue that perhaps ethnographic data collection is still the way to go when researching workplace writing review practices for inclusion in the classroom. We can also argue that writing revision is more than the written form of feedback: that there is socialization that takes place (as I believe Katz and others have argued) that cannot be recorded in the written word. We could also argue that, contrary to widespread belief, the “digital generation” is still pretty heavily reliant on face-to-face communication, or at least communication that’s not written.

One of the reasons, perhaps THE reason, this method holds so much fascination for me (other than the rampant laziness cited above) is because digital tools offer so many possibilities for recording human activity, and therefore also shaping human activity. It’s clear that we’ve changed some of our habits and work styles because of the Internet, and I think that it’s possible to begin re-shaping how we go about doing writing research, too. While loads of us certainly have done plenty of digital writing research, a great deal of that (think Kairos) deals with exploratory pedagogies and rather academic discussions of new media. I’m more interested in how folks use digital tools to get writing done in the cubicle, not in the classroom.

My wife proposed the word “technography” to mean a technological replacement for ethnography. I’ve just found a book in the A&M library that suggests the same, so that may be my hook: technography rather than ethnography. For me, technography suggests a digital observer rather than an in-person observer, and since so much of our work is digital, testing technography as a way of gathering data on workplace writing review seems like an obvious choice.