590 Lecture 4 -
What We’ve Covered
- Week 1: Research Topic & Question
- Week 2: Method & Recipe for the Literature Review
- Week 3: Vibe Scholarship - Applying AI to Close & Distant
Reading
This Week
- What I had planned:
- Finding Your Scholarly Voice: Peers / Audience / Venue / Field
- Drafting a section of your review in a scientific and
humanities mode
- Literature Review Sample: In the Scientific Mode
- What we’ll actually do:
- Activity 1: How do the Humanities engage with Literature? Case study
of “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
- Activity 2: Discuss Structuration and Metadiscourse
- Activity 3: “Vibe Scholarship” - Fast Drafting Review
- In the Scientific Mode
- In the Humanities Mode
Keep AI Handy…
- As we go, it’ll be helpful to have your AI of choice open
- Consider using an AI you’re less familiar with
- Free versions ought to be fine
Slow
Reading with AI: Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?
- Why? Complex example of a humanities text. Presumes knowledge of
Western philosophy, political debates around representation
- “Classic” contribution to decolonial, feminist debates. But long,
hard to parse / summarize
- Spivak often criticized for performative contradiction:
- Argues for universalization of education, including the most
excluded (the rural, illiterate, women) - the “subaltern”
- But references US academia, French & German philosophy, English
colonization, old & new Indian scholarship… who can understand
her?
- So… good case study for AI
- Use the Google Doc to make collective notes as we go
- Cyber-social Reading? ‘Vibe Scholarship’ in action?
Who is Spivak?
Message from
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak -THE 2012 KYOTO PRIZE - YouTube
An Aesthetic
Education in the Era of Globalization – Gayatri Spivak - YouTube
- Hybrid Intellectual:
- Born and educated in India
- Higher ed, later career in the US
- But a Europeanist - translated Of Grammatology by
Jacques Derrida (1971?)
- Return to India - the idea of the subaltern in
education
- Concerned with the question and meaning of
representation
Can the subaltern speak?
Spivak, G. C. (2023). . In Imperialism (pp. 171-219).
Routledge.
jan.ucc.nau.edu
Group
Reading with AI: Some questions (but develop your own)
- What is “subaltern”? Why this term?
- What is Spivak doing exactly with her literature?
- Contra Foucault and Deleuze? Why? And why use Marx against
them?
- Who else does Spivak assemble in what we might call the “drama” that
she stages?
- Why no (or few) US scholars? Who are the key French and German
figures in her analysis?
- Who are the Indian scholars, and how are these voices
mobilized?
- What is the significance of the two German translations of
representation: Vorstellung and Darstellung?
A key quote - what does it
mean?
Conversely, invocations of ‘libidinal economy’ and desire as the
determining interest, combined with the practical politics of the
oppressed (under socialized capital) ‘speaking for themselves’, restore
the category of the sovereign subject within the theory that seems most
to question it.
Prompting ideas
- “Produce an (abstractive / extractive) (critical / descriptive)
summary”
- “Identify the latent structure of the text”
- “List the key thinkers Spivak invokes - and tell us about her
relationship to them”
- Develop a conceptual map?
- “Find the most obscure passages or paragraphs”
- then “Read line-by-line” (for a given paragraph)
- “Identify and explain German / French / Hindi terms”
- “Describe the influence of ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’”
- “What would Foucault or Deleuze say in response?”
- etc. etc.
Takeaways?
- Can AI help us with slow, close, deep
reading? Can it help us read more than the text before us?
- Think of AI as “hypertext 2.0”? “Cybertext”? Palimsestic reading
(the texts behind the text)?
- If we think of terms like intertextuality, autopoesis and Derrida’s
famous aphorism (first translated by Spivak) “There is nothing outside
the text” - was poststructuralism (Derrida, Spivak) correct?
Structuring Your Literature
Review
Pick a principle: - General > Specific – can
confirm but also contrast (“General theories of
pedagogy suggest… However studies of adult language learners
also show…”) - Chronological (“By the 1960s, discussions of AI had
already become more muted…”) - Thematic (“The concept of ‘attention’ is
used in roughly similar ways in machine and human learning…”) - Spatial
(“Studies in Asian universities show that …; in contrast, findings from
North American universities suggest…”) - Developmental (“First I will
discuss Descartes’ presentation of the mind/body problem. I then move on
to look at 20th century critiques of this distinction….”) - Other? -
Nested Categories (chronology then thematic, etc)?
Some Guiding Notes
- Specialization: Can work well when you want to convey a sense of
narrowing down a focus: Education > K12 > Math
learning > Algebra > in rural Mid-west schools
- Chronological: Can work well when you want to convey a sense of
progress
- And how your work extends that progress
- Thematic: Can work well when you want to convey a sense of
overlaps, intersection and
gaps
- And how your work discovers and fills one of these gaps
- Spatial: Works well when you want to convey a sense of cultural,
spatial or geographic difference
- And how your study attends to a location or zone not previously
studied
- Developmental: Works well when you plan to build your argument
through a sequence of positions / thinkers / ideas
- And show how you will blend, contrast or critique all of these
positions / thinkers / ideas
How do I Decide?
- Typically iterative:
- Go forward to discover the gap
- Move back from the gap to discover the structure
- Experiment with different structures
- Mock up your structure (more on this next week)
Metadiscourse / Signposting
- Assume your reader does not know the
literature
- A literature review is often pedagogical - teaching
the reader about a field, in order to persuade them about the gap your
research fills
- Helps you in authoring - does Y really follow from
X?
- Be prepared to write / re-write this metadiscursive text often -
especially early, as you experiment with structural principles
(chronological etc)
Making It Explicit
- Cannot be too explicit about your structure:
- Introduction (future tense):
- “In this literature review I will…”
- (or if you prefer) “This review will…”
- Conclusion (past tense):
- “In this review, I have discussed literature relating to…”
- (or if you prefer) “This review has…”
- Along the way:
- “In the last section, I discussed…. In the next, I will…”
- Can be blended through connective language. “While the preceding
studies illustrated how use of AI in education has been studied
extensively, less has been said about how AI contributes to the
student/teacher relationship. Some exceptions include studies by X, Y
and Z…”
- Ask AI for suggestions…
- “Give me examples of metadiscourse for a literature review”
- Or “Give me a table and distinguish between metadiscourse used in
(a) scientific and (b) humanities discussions of literature
Practice in Groups…
Using 3-6 sources from your database (Week 3), develop:
- A paragraph of a scientific literature review
- A paragraph of a humanities literature review
Make sure to introduce and conclude the paragraph.
Exaggerate the scientific and humanities styles – and
the metadiscourse!
The Scientific
literature review
The Humanities
literature review
- What does your humanities audience expect?
- Use Spivak, G. C. (2023). jan.ucc.nau.edu
- or other examples
- Write 4-5 sentences - cite 1+ references
- Use metadiscourse to introduce / compare / contrast / conclude /
transition the paragraph
- 15 minutes?
- Use Google Doc - Homework for Week 4
Finally
- Read both versions
- (Optional) Ask AI to add even more “metadiscourse” to the text
Discuss
- Which did you prefer to write? Which did you find more persuasive to
read?
- What kind of audience would you usually write for?
- Could you imagine blending these two extremes?
Future Weeks
- Week 5: Scaffolding
- Week 7: Drafting / Use of AI
- Week 8: Final Literature Review