Defining 'Text'

Reading a 1992 piece by Doug Hartman. I like this approach to defining text.

"The text has been rendered by intertextually-informed research in two ways. Both, influenced considerably by literary theory and semiotics, require an altered notion of what constitutes a text. Although we usually think of the text as the object one reads-a textbook, a section of a passage, or the alphanumeric code printed on a page-it need not be confined to the boundaries of printed language. A text includes both linguistic and nonlinguistic signs. A text can be an utterance, a gesture, a thought, a structure, a function, or a piece of art, music, or drama (Rowe, 1987; Short. 1986; Siegel, 1984); in this more inclusive sense, a text is any sign that communicates meaning."

with the end note:

"For the sake of clarity and consistency, I will generally use “the text” to refer to the physical, linguistic object, and “text,” “a text, ” “textual resource,” and “textual utterance” to refer to the more inclusive conception of a linguistic or nonlinguistic sign that communicates meaning. "

Here's the full ref:
Hartman, D. (1992). Intertextuality and Reading: The Text, the Reader, the Author, and the Context. Linguistics and Education, 4, 295-311.

And those other refs:
Rowe, D.W. (1987). Literacy learning as an intettextual process. In J.E. Readence & R.S. Baldwin (Eds.). Research in literacy: Merging perspectives, Thirty-sixth Yearbook of the National Reading Conference (pp. lOl- 1 12). Rochester, NY: National Reading Conference.

Short, K.G. (1986). Literacy as a collaborative experience. Unpublished doctoral dissertation,
Indiana University, Bloomington.

Siegel, M.G. (1984). Reading as signification. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University, Bloomington.

Class notes, Reading Research

Be open to the expertise of others, partners in research. Don't let ego get in the way. Your methodological decisions are dictated by your research questions and your orientation toward the data.

Kinch says, the higher the proposition density, the harder it is to understand a text.

Protocol analysis is inductive, a window into the cognitive process. You are making inferences to construct a model the cognitive process, a model of a reader's thoughts.

Subjects are trained in protocol analysis before data collection with similar task using different material. During training, reinforce process talk, not product talk. By doing this, you are skewing the verbal protocol toward the type of data you are looking for. If you don't train subjects, you can get a lot of unusable data. When you do, you run the risk of not finding things that you aren't looking for.

Subjects have to be engaging in goal-directed behavior so that you can collect data; they have to be trying to do something, not just read without a specific purpose.

The researcher's verbal prompts need to be on topic. Talking about making a hamburger while cleaning a carburetor will disrupt the cognitive process. In protocol analysis, you talk about the task that you are doing; it doesn't disrupt, it just slows down cognitive processing.

Just enough categories to account for the data. Start broad, with many categories, then check back with the data to narrow.

Next week, historical analysis.
Harvey Graff looks at what literacy does to cultures. He sees literacy's outside impact on culture, separate from culture. Doug Hartman and Jennifer Monahan research the history of reading. Also, content analysis and document analysis. Jim King and Norm Stahl work with oral histories. We will be looking at USF's collection of educator oral histories on iTunes U. Lastly, we will be looking at how one situates the history of reading for course delivery.