units of analysis
Francoise Herrmann (fherrmann who-is-at igc.apc.org)
Sat, 19 Sep 1998 21:35:47 -0700 (PDT)
Hi everyone, After attempting to argue back to chapter one with
soemthing like "the benefits of inescapable and inevitable blindness"
I find myself wishing that Mind as Action had been written some ten years
ago! It would have made my job a lot easier when focussing on what I
wanted to do. And trying to remember studies I did and would like to still
do, it seems that "units of analysis" are like tools in the larger
picture of what one is interested in doing. In that I agree that
background brings into focus the units, but sometimes also knowing
of the unit in abstraction of what drives the study becomes interesting
in and of itself. An exmple would be in the study of language use,
where indeed there can be a structural focus on units as small
as the phoneme, words (in a signifier/signified)perpective, and
syntax, followed by higher "bigger" units at the functional level
where ACTION comes into the picture, and finally discursive units.
And none of these are "right" or "wrong", to me they are like
a "tool kit" as Gordon Wells says, to do research, to get at
some phenomena that one knows or expects to find, and even better
to discover along the way. It is hard to spin on this in abstraction
of a particular setting and context. But it is good to have
Mind as Action to say for example "In this study of web usage,
the ones-using-the web may be viewed as object etc.. as the
pole vaulters, though the pole in question is a far more complexe
artifact etc..."
As for the elephant, I am sort of glad that noone is really seeing
it for what it is. Who is going to claim exhaustion? And who wants
to know it all?
Francoise
Francoise Herrmann
fherrmann who-is-at igc.apc.org
http://www.wenet.net/~herrmann