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Early research and units of analysis Writing, Literate Activity, Semiotic Remediation: A Sociocultural Approach
Pilot 1 (Curriculum Studies Seminar)—a focus on texts and on professor’s task representations. Pilot 2 (Language Education Seminar)—field notes on seminar and a focus on student and professor task representations. (Prior, 1991, Written Communication)
Paul Prior Professor, Center for Writing Studies and English Department University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/pprior/Prior/home.html
Writing/Disciplinarity: A Sociohistoric Approach to Literate Activity in the Academy
Dissertation (Seminars in sociology, geography, American Studies, and Agricultural Economics)— audiotaping of seminars, stronger focus on student work across contexts, and on histories. (Multiple publications, including Writing/Disciplinarity)
literate activity When seen as situated activity, writing does not stand alone as the discrete act of a writer, but emerges as a confluence of many streams of activity: reading, talking, observing, acting, making, thinking and feeling as well as transcribing words on paper [screen, or any other media]. —Prior, 1998, p.xi
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literate activity as distributed semiotic activity that crosses scales and bodies. It is also clear that the historical trajectories of the artifacts, practices, and persons that interact in these scenes of writing implicate activity that is not only multimodal, but also temporally and spatially dispersed and distributed across multiple persons, artifacts, and sites. —Prior, 1998, p.137
Literate Activity Focal texts and transcriptional events are no more autonomous than the spray thrown up by white water in a river, and like that spray, literate acts today are far downstream from their sociohistoric origins. This notion of writing as situated, mediated, and dispersed is the basis for what I am calling literate activity. Literate activity, in this sense, is not located in acts of reading and writing, but as cultural forms of life saturated with textuality, that is strongly motivated and mediated by texts. —Prior, 1998, p.138
Lilah, literate activity, chronotopic lamination Chronotopes (Bakhtin, 1981) as embodied and representational, as lived worlds saturated with motives, affect, and narratives Lamination: Goffman’s (1974, 1981) term for multiple simultaneous frames/footings. Durant and Goodwin (1992) talk about these frames or contexts as relatively foregrounded and backgrounded rather than present or absent.
Agha (2007) suggests that language use is best understood as “events of semiosis in which language occurs” (p. 6).
Paraphrasing this, I would say literate activity is best understood as “events of semiosis in which writing is implicated.”
Chronotopic Lamination (Prior 1998, Prior and Shipka, 2003)—representational, embodied, and embedded
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Temporalities of writing "Each scale of organization in an ecosocial system is an integration of faster, more local processes (i.e., activities, practices, doings, happenings) into longer-timescale, more global or extended networks. It is relative timescale that determines the probability and intensity of interdependence …, and it is the circulation through the network of semiotic artifacts (i.e., books, buildings, bodies) that enables coordination between processes on radically different timescales."
The boundaries of each concrete utterance as a unit of speech communication are determined by a change of speaking subjects, that is a change of speakers. Any utterance—from a short (singleword) rejoinder to the large novel or scientific treatise—has, so to speak, an absolute beginning and an absolute end…. (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 71)
Lemke, 2001, p. 275
“The process of speech, broadly understood as the process of inner and outer verbal life, goes on continuously. It knows neither beginning nor end. The outwardly actualized utterance is an island arising from the boundless sea of inner speech, the dimensions and forms of the island are determined by the particular situation of the utterance and its audience” (Voloshinov, 1973, p. 96).
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A dialogics of language: Intertextual analysis and parallel discourse-based interviews in Sociology. Moira writes in Arenas draft 1 (first of seven that I collected): However, operationalized, this becomes tricky. Professor West revises: However, the relationship between objective change and subjective discomfort, and their implications for psychological and behavioral adjustment, remain problematic. Moira accepts West’s revision in Arenas 2.
A dialogics of language: Intertextual analysis and parallel discourse-based interviews in Sociology. Asked in a DBI is she would accept: However, operationalized, this becomes tricky. Professor West says: Here I would think that the new wording is simpler, so that’s a benefit of it, but the referent to “this” is unclear because uh, and I think that the revision changes the meaning of the sentence, because what you’re initially talking about here are the relationships among variables, a theoretical connection whereas the new wording introduces the issue of measurement and uh, and and it’s a- it’s ano- it’s another issue, so I think I would reject the alternative.
A dialogics of language: Intertextual analysis and parallel discourse-based interviews in Sociology. Asked 2 months later in a DBI if she would accept revising back to her original language (without identifying it as such): However, operationalized, this becomes tricky. Moira says: Ok, um, I like the change, because this was so wordy, but I don’t know if it gets at it () because I don’t know if it was necessarily in her operationalization, I mean because it- the article I was reading was more a theoretical argument than an operationalization, so, er, uh, or empirical work, so since she’s never tested it herself, I don’t think that “operationalize” would be the right word, but I would definitely accept revamping this sentence and simplifying it. I like this because of the ‘tricky’ but ‘operationalize’ is probably not the right word.
Composed utterances: Enfolding chronotopes Composed signs (whether material artifacts, enacted performances, or both) are not unique in having a history, but are special in the ways that history is sedimented into and impinges on the present. (Prior, 2009) Composed utterances (and genres) call on us to analyze the history of composition: § how a chain of utterances are woven together in a teleological project, § the various ways that a composed document/ performance may overtly or covertly index those focused histories of composition, and § the ways that production, reception, and use of composed signs take that history into account.
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Drawing composing processes and literate activity Asking professors, graduate students, and undergraduate students to draw representations of their composing processes for a specific writing task (or tasks) and then interviewing them about that process and how it related to their sense of their general writing. The drawing studies aimed in particular to trace the contours of literate activity—the shape it took over time, space, and activity.
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Kazmer's drawing of the writing process for her dissertation proposal.
“Curly-haired person comes in here, living large because, um, it was, this is the Esquire—it’s kind of hard to tell because it’s a little table and that’s- they’re pints there at the Esquire and this is us talking back and forth. And, um, finally I said, I have not been here for three and a half years to walk out of here without a degree. This is stupid! You know, I just, I can’t sit in front of the computer and just go, “heeh, heeh, heeh.” You know? I just have to write something. It doesn’t have to be the best dissertation proposal ever, it just has to be good enough to pass and, you know, that’s what people are always telling me, right? So, curly-haired person and the beers and the Esquire and, you know, I finally get to that point where it’s like, “NO!” Okay, fine. There’s typing on the screen now .“
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Contours of literate activity/chronotopic lamination ESSPs (environment selecting and structuring practices) and tuning “ESSP’s—the ways writers tune their environments and get in tune with them, the ways they work to build durable and fleeting contexts for their work— are central practices in literate activity. They call for attention to the agency of actors, to the production of environments, and finally to consciousness itself as a historied practice.” (Prior & Shipka, 2003, p. 228)
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Sense (Vygotsky, 1987; theme, Voloshinov, 1973) See Prior and Shipka (2003)
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semiotic remediation semiotic remediation semiotic remediation
semiotic remediation semiotic remediation Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) notion of remediation (that is, transformations across media, from book to movie to game).
the concept of mediated activity derived from Vygotksy’s work (in diverse articulations, e.g., Wertsch, 1991; Cole, 1996; Engestrom, 1987, 1993; Rogoff, 1990) dialogic semiotics (Voloshinov, 1976, 1973; Bakhtin 1981, 1986; Rommeitveit, 1990, 1992; Linell, 2009) recent articulations of mediated discourse analysis (Scollon, 2001; Scollon & Scollon, 2003, 2004; Norris & Jones 2005) Latour’s (1999) account of technical mediation in actor-network theory
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semiotic remediation What makes re- relations seem re- or co- relations Silverstein (2005), Irvine (1996), Hanks (1996) , Agha (2007): re-presentation re-purposing re-mediation re-cognition re-contextualization re-petition re-formulation re-play re-use re-mix co-text co(n)-text
IO: Situated activity in an art and design studio space at the University. n
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11-month study of the art and design group (mainly professors Joseph Squier, Nan Goggin and graduate RA’s Tony and Eunah). Video-taped meetings, some videotaping of individual work, interviews, collection of paper and electronic documents.
The original IO interface and one of the possible redesigned interfaces.
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“The drawing/text on the whiteboard …involved at least 29 separate actions that touched the surface of the whiteboard, movements made by two people (Nan and Tony) using two different colored markers over a period of less than three minutes of interaction. These boxes representing the Flash template were drawn, written, talked, and gestured into existence in a continuous process of semiotic remediation as Nan and Tony worked to arrive at a common understanding. The drawing and discussion of this representation of a screen window was also being coordinated with the PHP data entry screen on the laptop as well as with the other drawing on the whiteboard (representing a database architecture) and with gestures in the air. Inscription at the whiteboard then emerged in sequential, temporal, co-present interactive acts; it represented writing as activity rather than writing as only artifact (although inscriptions became artifacts-in-interaction and had at least potentially longer duration).” Prior 2010
Box gesture at whiteboard, 2-27
Nan’s gesture on 9-14 represents, I argue, the equivalent of unmarked direct speech—a rea recognizable repetition, indexed to a prior or represented other instance of a sign token.
Paper & pencil, annotated Flash template
Box gesture on table, 9-14
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Roozen (2009): Texts collected from two streams of activity
Writing, literate activity, semiotic remediation n
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Literate activity understood as events of semiosis in which writing is implicated Writing as embodied, mediated, and dispersed semiotic activity, as weaving-together and aligning practices Seeing all semiotics (from stable textual/material artifacts to fleeting gestures) as dialogic and thus taking heterogeneity as a given Attending to the people-, artifact-, and environment-making dimensions of literate activity
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A representative sample of sociocultural work on literate activity and semiotic remediation by Paul Prior, collaborators, and students (current and former). Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior. (2005). Participating in emergent socio-literate worlds: Genre, disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity. In Richard Beach, Judith Green, Michael Kamil, and Timothy Shanahan (Eds.), Multidisciplinary perspectives on literacy research 2nd Edition (pp. 133-178). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. —Translated into Portuguese as "A participação em mundos socioletrados emergentes" and reprinted in Charles Bazerman. (2007), Escrita, gênero e interação social (pp. 150-197). (Eds., Judith Hoffnagel and Angela Dioniso; Trans., Judith Hoffngel, Ana Regina Viera, Leonardo Mozdzenski, and Benedito Gomes Bezerra). Sao Paulo, Brazil: Cortez Editora. Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior. (Eds.) (2004). What writing does and how it does it: An introduction to analysis of texts and textual practices. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum/Taylor Francis. Kevin Leander and Paul Prior. Speaking and writing: How talk and text interact. (pp. 201238). Paul Prior. Tracing process: How texts come into being (pp. 167-200). Fraiberg, Steven. (2010). Composition 2.0: Toward a multilingual and multimodal framework. College Composition and Communication, 62, pp. 100-126. Leander, Kevin. (2002). Mapping polycontextual construction zones: Mapping the expansion of schooled space and identity. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 9, 211-237. Lunsford, Karen. (2002). Contextualizing Toulmin’s model in the writing classroom: A case study. Written Communication, 19, 109-174. Molle, Daniella and Paul Prior. (2008). Multimodal genre systems in EAP writing pedagogy: Reflecting on a needs analysis. TESOL Quarterly, 42, 541-566. Olinger, Andrea. (2011). Constructing identities through ‘discourse’: Stance and interaction in collaborative writing. Linguistics and Education, 22, 273-286. Prior, Paul. (in press). Semiotics. In Constant Leung and Brian Street (Eds.), The handbook of English language studies. Routledge. (28 ms. pages) Prior, Paul. (in press). Phenomenological and sociohistoric frameworks for studying literate practices. In Julie Christoph, John Duffy, Eli Goldblatt, Nelson Graff, Rebecca Nowacek, and Bryan Trabold (Eds.), Literacy, economy, and power: Writing research ten years after Literacy in American Lives. (22 ms. pages) Prior, Paul. (2013). Multimodality and ESP research. In Brian Paltridge and Sue Starfield (Eds.), The handbook of English for specific purposes (pp. 519-534). Wiley-Blackwell. Prior, Paul. (2009). From speech genres to mediated multimodal genre systems: Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and the question of writing. In Charles Bazerman, Adair Bonini, and Deborah Figueredo (Eds.) Genre in a changing world (pp. 17-34). Fort Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press. http://wac.colostate.edu/books/genre/ Prior, Paul. (2005). Towards the ethnography of argumentation: A response to Richard Andrews’ “Models of argumentation in education." Text, 25, 129-144. Prior, Paul. (2005). A sociocultural theory of writing. In Charles A. MacArthur, Steve Graham, and Jill Fitzgerald (Eds.), The handbook of writing research (pp. 54-66). New York: Guilford Press. Prior, Paul. (2005). Moving multimodality beyond the binaries: A response to Gunther Kress's "Gains and losses." Computers and Composition, 22, 23-30. Prior, Paul. (2001). Voices in text, mind and society: Sociohistoric accounts of discourse acquisition and use. Journal of Second Language Writing, 10, 55-81. Prior, Paul. (1998). Writing/disciplinarity: A sociohistoric account of literate activity in the academy. (The Rhetoric, Knowledge and Society Series, Charles Bazerman, Series Editor). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Prior, Paul. (1997). Literate activity and disciplinarity: The heterogeneous (re)production of American Studies around a graduate seminar. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 4, 275-295. Prior, Paul. (1994). Response, revision, disciplinarity: A microhistory of a dissertation prospectus in sociology. Written Communication, 11, 483-533. Prior, Paul. (1991). Contextualizing writing and response in a graduate seminar. Written Communication, 8, 267-310. Prior, Paul and Rebecca Bilbro. (2012). Academic enculturation: Developing literate practices and disciplinary identities. In Montserrat Castelló and Christiane Donahue (Eds.), University writing: Selves and texts in academic societies (pp. 19-31). Bingley, UK: Emerald.
Page 2 Prior, Paul and Julie Hengst. (Eds.) (2010). Exploring semiotic remediation as discourse practice. Houndsmill, UK: Palgrave MacMillan. Paul Prior. Remaking IO: Semiotic remediation in the design process. (pp. 206-234). Paul Prior & Julie Hengst. Introduction: Exploring semiotic remediation. (pp. 1-23). Roozen, Kevin. The ‘Poetry Slam,’ mathemagicians, and middle school earth: Tracing trajectories of actors and artifacts. (pp. 24-51). Jody Shipka. ‘On the many forms it took throughout’: Engineering a multipart, multiple site rhetorical event. (pp. 52-76). Prior, Paul and Julie Hengst. (2007). Exploring reformulation as a multimodal discourse practice. In Mohamed Kara (Ed.), Usages et Analyses de la Reformulation (Recherches Linguistiques Numero 29) (pp. 271-292). Metz: Le Centre d'Études Linguistiques des Textes et des Discours, Université Paul Verlaine—Metz. Prior, Paul, Julie Hengst, Kevin Roozen, and Jody Shipka. (2006). "I'll be the Sun": From reported speech to semiotic remediation practices. Text and Talk, 26, 733-766. Prior, Paul, Janine Solberg, Patrick Berry, Hannah Bellwoar, Bill Chewning, Karen Lunsford, Liz Rohan, Kevin Roozen, Mary Sheridan, Jody Shipka, Derek Van Ittersum, and Joyce Walker. (2007). Re-situating and re-mediating the canons: A cultural-historical remapping of rhetorical activity, a collaborative webtext. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 11.3. Available at http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/11.3/topoi/prior-et-al/index.html. Prior, Paul and Karen Lunsford. (2007). History of reflection and research on writing. In Charles Bazerman (Ed.), Handbook of research on writing: History, society, school, individual, text (pp. 81-96). New York: Lawrence Erlbaum. Prior, Paul and Spencer Schaffner. (2011). Bird identification as a family of activities: Motives, mediating artifacts, and laminated assemblages. Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, 39, 51-70. Prior, Paul and Jody Shipka. (2003). Chronotopic lamination: Tracing the contours of literate activity. In Charles Bazerman and David Russell (Eds.), Writing selves, writing societies: Research from activity perspectives (pp. 180-238). Fort Collins, CO: The WAC Clearinghouse and Mind, Culture, and Activity. http://wac.colostate.edu/books/selves_societies/. Prior, Paul and Steven Thorne. (in press). Research paradigms: Product, process, and social activity. In Eva-Maria Jakobs and Daniel Perrin (Eds.), Handbook of writing and text production. The Mouton de Gruyter Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Series, Volume 10. Kevin Roozen, Rebecca Woodard, Sonia Kline, and Paul Prior. (in press). The Transformative Potential of Laminating Trajectories of Pedagogical Practice: Three Teachers’ Developing Practices and Identities. In Theresa Lillis, Kathy Harrington, Mary Lea, and Sally Mitchell (eds.), Working with academic literacies: Research, theory, design. (16 ms. pages) Roozen, Kevin. (2010). Tracing trajectories of practice: Repurposing in one student’s developing disciplinary writing processes. Written Communication 44: 136-169. Roozen, Kevin. (2009).“Fan fic-ing” English Studies: A case study exploring the interplay of vernacular literacies and disciplinary engagement. Research in the Teaching of English, 27: 318354. Sheridan, Mary, and Jennifer Rowsell. (2010). Design literacies: Learning and innovation in the digital age. London: Routledge. Sheridan(-Rabideau), Mary. (2008). Girls, feminism, and grassroots literacy: Activism in the GirlZone. Albany: SUNY Press. Shipka, Jody. (2011). Toward a composition made whole. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Shipka, Jody. (2005). A multimodal task-based framework for composing. College Composition and Communication, 57, 277-306.