Evolution of a Dissertation 2012-2020
When I refer to "my committee" or "the committee," I am, of course, referring to actual, living, breathing human individuals and not to some nameless, bloodless entity. My purpose on this page is to explicate the structural and conceptual evolution of this dissertation and not my own intellectual and emotional journey. However, I could not have begun, continued, or survived this journey without the active help and support of Drs. Jenifer Schneider, Tom Crisp, Danielle Dennis, Jim King, Jeff Kromrey (2012-2017), and Jenni Wolgemuth (2017-2018). You can read more about them and see their smiling faces here:
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June 2012: Inception of the Idea: The idea for the dissertation began in June 2012 when I attended my first Children's Literature Association Conference and heard a paper presented by Dr. Mark West, UNCC, about what kind of a reader Walt Disney was. I began reading a bit about Disney and discovered he had been a "newsie" or newsboy in the early 1900s. As my master's is in Journalism, I was intrigued by this possible connection and began seeing what I could discover.
August 13, 2013: Presented prospectus to committee. At this point, my plan was to focus on Disney, analyze the cartoons separately, and then to re-approach the cartoons from the perspective of an early 20th century Midwesterner. Additionally, we discussed my writing the dissertation in book form. Accordingly, I began focusing on Disney biographies and on the process of developing an initial protocol to use to study the cartoons; the narrative structure I developed would follow the Disney family from Normandy to England to Ireland to Canada to the Midwest during the Progressive Era where they would encounter the cartoons in question. The question was raised about whether the connection would be traced through a study of Disney's work, but I hesitated committing to include that as part of the study. |
October 31, 2013: Presented proposal to committee. The narrative structure I had planned and the grounded theory basis from which I was working did not align with the structure of the typical dissertation, and did not seem to provide the theoretical grounding required. Additionally, while the methodology was presented as one that developed over the course of the investigation, i.e., the evolution of the methodological process was as integral to the study as was the actual examination and analysis of the cartoons, that process was not far enough along to be presented in a coherent manner. Finally, the committee raised several "so what" kinds of questions about what intertextual connections could be established between the cartoons and Disney's work and whether the literature about mentor texts suggested any possible way to make a connective link in terms of how he received/perceived the cartoons.
Apart from structural and content-related issues, the committee also questioned whether this study needed to be reviewed by the IRB and asked for one cartoon analyzed in more detail than I had outlined. |
The slide show above contains some of the slides from my proposal defense presented on October 31, 2013, and reflects the narrative structure I envisioned. Omitted slides are mostly Disney family history and an explanation of the Progressive era in the United States, which is the time period relevant to this study.
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April 21, 2014: Contacted committee. By this point, I had rethought the structure of the dissertation and my approach to the material and the questions. I created a new, expanded outline (see below) and I sent an email to my committee outlining the progress I had made (see below), explaining that I had just finished taking a course in Rhetoric, which I thought would inform my work, and had rethought my approach to the project. I also included the confirmation that IRB review was not required, and I requested that we meet in August.
usfmail_-_resending:_committee_meeting_for_anne_anderson.042114.pdf | |
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August 18, 2014: Contacted committee. I sent an email (see below) to my committee outlining the progress I had made since my last email (see below) and confirming a meeting for September.
September 17, 2014. Committee meeting. In the months between April and September, I had:
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March 25, 2015: Email sent to committee (edited for length). Your feedback at the meeting included a couple of points I have been pondering: Jim King & Danielle Dennis noted the "change in voice" . . . in the narrative description of the cartoon and sensed a switch from description to interpretation. Jim suggested putting such comments in brackets (literal), which aligns with Bogdan and Taylor's (1975) methods . . . for phenomenological studies and with Spinelli's (1989) Rule of Ephoché, which calls for a metaphorical bracketing by the researcher . . . a self-awareness and suspending of expectations and assumptions, as it were, to focus on the data at hand. . . . Jim also suggested there is a difference between descriptive analysis -- which would definitely require that kind of bracketing -- and narrative analysis. . . . I would argue that narrative analysis requires some interpretation in order to produce a narrative -- and, therefore, produces a more distinctive "voice" -- but I obviously need to distinguish between the two and to defend one or the other more clearly. Jeff Kromrey asked what seemed to be an innocuous question about the part of the cannon that looked like some kind of threaded bolt with a wing nut on it. I took the question at face value and talked about what it probably was . . . . The more I have thought about this question, however, the more it seems to go along with Jenifer Schneider's question about why I chose to start with the cannon in my description instead of using a top-to-bottom approach (which I answered in terms of main character/main idea). . . . I think the real question is "How will I be sure I've not missed something in the cartoon?" This leads to another question, "How small of detail needs to be included? . . . " My first thought is that this goes back to the difference between descriptive analysis (each and every minute detail) versus a narrative analysis (story takes precedence over the details) . . . . . . . I need to distinguish between the two and defend one or the other more clearly. I also will find [a] way of marking the cartoons to be sure I haven't overlooked an obvious element. Tom Crisp suggested I look at Rosenblatt's Literature as Exploration . . . to help inform my thinking about whether I am doing descriptive analysis or narrative analysis. I'm leaning toward narrative analysis simply because these cartoons are stories not diagrams. However, I will include a discussion of both in the next version.
March 23, 2015: I attended Lindsay Persohn's proposal defense. I knew Lindsay's dissertation involved a curated analysis of images and that two of my committee members also were on her committee. In attending her proposal defense, I discovered that we, indeed, share similar methods and questions and that our committee members were expressing common concerns about our work. Additionally, we both are studying illustrative work initially based in a common time period. We have begun meeting periodically online to discuss our work and to think through problems.
I have spent some time reflecting on how your input and questions and requests have shaped the research . . . and wondering how I account for that in presenting this project. I think it is similar in nature to reading a journal article or some other resource that provides "aha!" moments, but I also think there are differences: Your questions and comments are pointed and specific, and you exert a different kind of immediate and long-term influence that can't help but affect how I approach this work. I mentioned the possibility of writing a reflective chapter, but I'm not sure what form that will take. Maybe sonnets or haiku . . . .
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February 23, 2015: Committee meeting.
During the fall, I focused specifically on being able to articulate the methodology in three particular areas (see PowerPoint to left):
Tom also reminded me September 9, 2015: Email sent to committee (edited for length): Effective August 20, I have accepted the position of Director of Blended and Online Learning for Eckerd College's Program for Experienced Learners (PEL)!
However, I haven't forgotten that I still have a dissertation (analyzing editorial cartoons) to write. Here's what's happening on that front:
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February 2016: My work had become so unwieldy that I felt I needed to rethink my outline. (See below)
From the Literacy Research Association's Acceptance Email Dated July 25, 2016: "Multimodal Data Analysis: A Curated, Open-Access Collection of Methodologies for Analyzing Digital, Visual, Gestural, and Filmic Texts has been accepted for the Literacy Research Association 66th Annual Conference, “Mobilizing Literacy Research for Social Transformation.”
The conference will be held at the Omni Nashville Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, November 30 - December 3. More than 1300 proposals were submitted for review, with an overall 77% acceptance rate." Mine was one of five methodologies included in the proposal, submitted by Dr. Jenifer Schneider, and in the open-access collection. I created the diagram above to be used as the home page for my project, "Using Cross-Modal Ethnographic Narrative Document Analysis (Cro-MENDA) to Interpret Editorial Cartoons . . . and other multi-modal texts" -- which is what I realized my conglomeration of methods had become. September 29, 2016: Email update sent to Committee and requesting meeting (Edited for length). To my long-suffering and very patient committee, greetings -- I find it hard to believe it has been a full year since I communicated with you, but my email records lead me to believe that such is the case. My apologies.
Here is what I have accomplished since I last wrote to you (unrelated to my work at Eckerd):
For now, what this means is that I really need to find a way to trim my dissertation to manageable means. I will be sending you some material within the next week or so for your review. My hope is that, when we next meet, you can help me talk this through. Until then, you may find it helpful to review my "Evolution of a Dissertation" page: http://awanderson.weebly.com/evolution-of-a-dissertation.html The two entries at the bottom of the page are the most recent.
October 17, 2016, Committee Meeting: See PowerPoint (below) and Notes that follow
Notes from the October 17, 2016, Committee Meeting (Sent October 29, 2016):
Thank you for meeting with me almost two weeks ago. We agreed this has become a dissertation about developing a method of interpreting editorial cartoons (as cross-modal, contextualized, non-linear narratives) rather than a dissertation about the cartoons themselves. Once the dissertation is complete, I plan to use the method to complete the work I first proposed -- but, at this point, trying to do both has become unwieldy and time-prohibitive. Therefore, I am dropping the Disney connection entirely, am not collecting data on or analyzing any further cartoons, and am focusing solely on the method. I have attached an outline of what I plan, and plan to have either Chapter 2 or Chapter 3 to Jenifer before Thanksgiving. |
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anderson.committee.usfmail_-_notes_from_anne_andersons_committee_meeting_10_17_16.pdf | |
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Following the Committee Meeting on October 17, I had a Skype discussion with Jim King, as I felt I had consistently misunderstood what he felt was missing from my work. Accordingly, I created a new outline with this new title and a new Chapter 4 as the main revision/addition:
New Title / October 2016: Developing & Using Cross-Modal Ethnographic Narrative Document Analysis
(Cro-MENDA) to Study Editorial Cartoons (and implications for its use with other cross-modal texts)
New Chapter 4: Demonstration: Cro-MENDA applied to one cartoon, in detail and with metacognitive narrative
I will provide a metacognitive narrative of my processes as I use the bases of Altheide and Schneider’s (2012) ECA to describe the narrative, use Rodriguez and Dimitrova’s (2011) FLVF to determine the topic, theme, and frame, and then use Morris (2009) and Navasky (2013) to discuss the cartoonist’s ideological stance and how this cartoon attempts to shape discourse.
The file below contains the full, revised outline.
New Title / October 2016: Developing & Using Cross-Modal Ethnographic Narrative Document Analysis
(Cro-MENDA) to Study Editorial Cartoons (and implications for its use with other cross-modal texts)
New Chapter 4: Demonstration: Cro-MENDA applied to one cartoon, in detail and with metacognitive narrative
I will provide a metacognitive narrative of my processes as I use the bases of Altheide and Schneider’s (2012) ECA to describe the narrative, use Rodriguez and Dimitrova’s (2011) FLVF to determine the topic, theme, and frame, and then use Morris (2009) and Navasky (2013) to discuss the cartoonist’s ideological stance and how this cartoon attempts to shape discourse.
The file below contains the full, revised outline.
outlinecromendadissertation.2016.102216.docx | |
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July 2017 - November 2018: Dropping Cro-MENDA and other acronyms
In July 2017, i sent a revised but very long Chapter 2 to my committee chair, Jenifer Schneider. She returned it with extensive comments, and it took me several months to process them. In the end, I moved some of the material into Chapter 1, simplified the admittedly awful language, and tried to be more mindful of the gaps I created by leaving out the transitions I assumed everyone would make along the way. i also dropped references to Cro-MENDA and to another acronym with which i had experimented in the interim. I also found a dissertation using qualitative methods to use as a template. I need reminding to simplify my writing and structure as much as possible to make it easy for my committee members to follow my somewhat unfamiliar format.
I also have developed visual representations of my conceptual framework and of a theoretical framework for the method and have a clear plan for each chapter:
I also have developed visual representations of my conceptual framework and of a theoretical framework for the method and have a clear plan for each chapter:
- In Chapter 1, I introduce the study, position myself in the field, discuss my conceptual framework and a theoretical framework for interpretation, define basic terms, and summarize the succeeding chapters.
- In Chapter 2, I discuss theories of editorial cartoons as social semiotic sites for ethnographic research; describe how editorial cartoons work in terms of non-linearity, cross-modality, and narrativity; and consider the contextual web in which cartoons are created and read.
- In Chapter 3, I review the literature regarding other methods used to study editorial cartoons, discuss how my method fills a gap, and walk through the process of how I developed the method.
- In Chapter 4, I demonstrate the method using the six cartoons in my convenience sample.
- In Chapter 5, i discuss my findings, limitations and potential uses of the method, and the challenges and rewards of writing this particular dissertation.
July 2018 - November 2019: Chapters 3 & 4 submitted
As of November 2019, I have completed, Chapter 3, but reviewing the literature regarding other methods used to study editorial cartoons and discussing how my method fills a gap has turned out to be only part of what was needed. I also have needed to explain how my method differs from Altheide and Schneider's (2013) and how I filled the gaps I found. These areas became my new Chapter 4, which I also have completed and have sent to my committee chair. I have begun Chapter 5, in which I will walk through the process of analyzing one cartoon, using the methods developed and discussed to this point.