First, I want to thank Dr. Aaron Chia-Yuan Hung for all his help with the visualisations. Without his imagination in translating my often inchoate ideas, not much of this would be happening.
The experiment in representation that I introduced in my June 11th entry is taking us in several directions. We are
- summarizing the links between settings, moments, and people, implied or explored in Jill Koyama’s dissertation, for example:
- a private corporation lobbying Congress to ensure that for-profit entities can provide “Supplemental Education Services”;
- principals and teachers facing an error made by the New York City Department of Education that identified them as a “School in Need of Improvement.”
- Finding possible graphic means to represent the links, for example”
- populating the Web of NCLB Consequences (and sub-webs)
What has been interesting so far is that the exercise is obliging me
- to be much more specific than the ‘paper’ format allows
- to face up to the need to imagine linkages for which we do not have good ethnographic evidence (these, when mentioned, are really Requests for Research)
- to push the evidence that each moment/setting is itself
- a web
- a source for further indications (indexes) of un-imagined linkages (this could be the most useful aspect of all this)
This raises a whole set of new analytic problems which I will address in another post.