As a graduate student, what captured my attention right away in the Introduction of Derek Mueller’s book, Network Sense: Methods for Visualizing a Discipline (2017), was his sympathetic characterization of the sheer quantity of material those in English studies (or history, philosophy, sociology, political science, etc.) are encouraged to read:
“When scholarship and conversations are piling up en masse, how does one grasp the insurmountable complexity sufficient to participate in disciplinary conversations? There are any number of plausible responses to this question, the most commonplace of which involves vague truisms about diligent attentiveness and hard work. No one would argue that being an active, engaged reader by conventional methods is anything short of requisite to a life as a rigorous scholar. But such as time-honored adage as “read everything” or “read steadily” (i.e., all day, every day) does little to acknowledge the unbridled accumulation of disciplinary materials—the too-muchness of entering conversations that started many decades (even centuries) ago and that, therefore, demand back-reading while also tuning in to current conversations . . . ” (p. 6).
Mueller introduces two methods in his book: distant reading and think description. Both methods address the daunting volume of stuff (scholarly books, anthologies, Festschriften, textbooks/guides, articles, conference papers, dissertations, etc.) in a field Mueller identifies as RCWS: “rhetoric and composition/writing studies” (here one might add technical communication: RCWSTC). Distant reading is contrasted with close reading. Thin description is contrasted with thick description. “Distant and thin treatments,” argues Mueller, “foster primary, if tentative and provisional, insights into what I refer to as network sense—incomplete but nevertheless vital glimpses (later on he calls it an “epistemological capacity”) of an interconnected disciplinary domain focused on relationships that define and cohere widespread scholarly activity” (p. 3). It is focused on discerning patterns. Network sense, in large part, aims to steer us away from lore, specialization, and niches (p. 21). Network sense complements “a generalist’s wherewithal,” and helps to minimize (if not eliminate) “homophily bias” (p. 21).
Although I focus on thick and thin description in this blogpost, the picture below reminded me of close reading and distant reading. The dock is close; the mountains are distant. The person could swim towards them, sticking the water’s surface. The swimmer, however, could also get sucked into the depths of the water.
Let’s begin with thin description. Thick description is, no doubt, a term with which many reading this weblog are familiar. Clifford Geertz, the famous anthropologist, used this term to mean ethnographic participant-observation “which . . . pursues investigative empirical depths and provides and interpretive account, in effect regarding human activity as suited to text-like hermeneutics” (p. 10). Geertz was the anthropological inspiration of Stephen North’s famous book, The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (1987). North’s Making is an example of what Mueller calls “discipliniography,” a term inspired by Mary Daly Goggin’s description of journal editors and article writers as “discipliniographers” in her 2000 book, Authoring as Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition (p. 13). Reading about North, incidentally, reminded me of Jody Shipka; she used an anthropological approach in her book, Toward a Composition Made Whole (2011), based on the work of James Wertsch. Students’ detailed statements of goals and choices for their multimodal tasks may have something of a thick-descriptive feel to them—come to think of it. Thin description gets us away from an anthropological framework.
Thin description was coined by philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Heather Love, Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, uses the term as her answer to something Mueller phrases as “depth fetishism” (p. 28). Depth fetishism essentially means “interpreting deeply and more deeply still . . . as the hallmark of rigorous engagement with any variety of objects of analysis, from literary texts to discourse communities” (p. 29). The irony here cannot be gainsaid. Does Mueller want me to read his book deeply? Does he want me to skim and scan, skip and flip? His writing style suggests one read slowly and carefully; it is not written in an easily digestible manner. At any rate, back to Love. “Thin description names Love’s attempt to refocus literary studies on the positive epistemological gains located in empirical noticing, reconcilable sensory experiences, and techniques for sampling, selection, and reduction” (p. 29). Love’s focus is on texts and our feelings about them—how we approach them and what we do with them as scholars. It reminded me of how much we can get from an article by reading an abstract, how much we can get from a book by reading a review of it, an how much we can get from a movie by watching the trailer—activities that Mueller himself mentions. Thin description “insists on the value of other ways of knowing that . . . establish first impressions and operate as important sites of initiation for further inquiry” (30). Distant reading, which I’ll discuss more in my next blogpost, is Franco Moretti’s term describing “means of comparing, historicizing, and apprehending . . . large-scale phenomen[a] to differentiate patterns spanning” the enormous and the complex (p. 25). As aforementioned, Derek Mueller’s book is a challenging read. His style of writing is erudite (perhaps to a fault), and there were several places where I thought he could have put things more simply. The block quote above is one of the more straightforward (one of the least recondite) passages of his book. Again, the irony here is that the more difficult the prose, the more one must engage in close reading. In a particularly clear section of the book where Mueller discusses the introduction of blind peer review in CCC and how it changed submissions to that journal, I did find myself wondering if Mueller is familiar with Price’s law of research activity (which is similar to the better-known Pareto Principle). According to Price (if my understanding is correct here), half of the number of journal articles written in any field are produced by the square root of all the scholars in that field. This means if there are 1000 scholars in a given field or area of study, approximately 32 scholars produce 50% of the journal articles.
Digital WRTC 