In this blog, I’ll be taking some time to go over the research I’ve been doing, analysing the sources and lastly understanding how it’s relevant to my project.
An example of one of the initial pieces of research I came across (other than the ones that are mentioned in our course already) is M Cecil Smith’s small article on The Benefits of Writing.
https://www.niu.edu/language-literacy/_pdf/the-benefits-of-writing.pdf
An article like this doesn’t actually teach me anything new but does give me a legitimate bias for some of my arguments. The main part I would want to quote is the fact that writing does help one think and is integral to being able to “concretize abstract ideas” and “connect the dots in their knowledge”.
Of course, an article like that is an initial piece of research as it doesn’t really help me decipher a clear benefit of written dissertations over the audio paper.
An interesting source I will use is Chapter 14 The Audio Paper As Affective Attunements of the book Practical Aesthetics, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath.
In my own personal research document, when I was gathering sources, this book came up multiple times because it has a chapter devoted to the topic, but chapter 14 is written by 2 pioneers of the audio paper, Sanne Krogh Groth and Kristine Samson.
While it takes a similar route as their online manifesto and articles, there are still a few things I could use in this chapter. The quote “The core of the audio paper is an academic argument, as it is positioned in ongoing research; it brings in new perspectives to a defined research topic; and it argues with adequate and sensible means” sticks out to me. In the first paragraph, Groth and Samson set out some obvious guidelines for the audio paper, the notion that an audio paper is meant to bring in new perspectives to research just isn’t congruent with the audio papers I’ve seen. I mean this is because the research focus in many audio papers is lost or they don’t actually try to further academics in any way (instead focusing more on the layperson as the main listener).
Though, this first page does a great job of defining what an audio paper is, a definition I wish I saw sooner in this module.
Another important line is “As an academic media format, we argue that the audio paper contributes to an aesthetic-affective encounter enabling the researcher and the listener alike to attune into a field of research.” I wholeheartedly agree that the audio paper is an effective medium in terms of getting ideas across that would not be possible in the written format, but I do wonder why I haven’t been able to find as many audio papers on this topic or why it is correct to disseminate this information in a written format despite trying to usurp traditional academic writing with the audio paper.
Something else I thought was interesting was the lack of any mention of the audio paper being used in any formative education, so it’s clear that its scope of usage never covered learning institutions. Why that is the case I do not know.
A small thing that I’ve been thinking about is how Groth and Samson have a big invested interest in pushing the concept of an audio paper as they have a lot of work in the field and are trying to position themselves as pioneers of the audio paper format. That aspect is linked to the fact that in a lot of documentation on audio papers, there is a bigger focus on being revolutionary or a subversion of academia rather than an improvement on written dissertations.
As I’ve been researching more and more for this project, something that has stuck out to me is that there isn’t much literature on Audio papers in the context of undergraduate university courses, which is a problem because I don’t really want to be self-referential. On top of that, I do find it awkward to constantly reference the course as a source rather than an article or book.
What is even more awkward is how Groth and Samson are the only sources I can use that actually talk about audio papers at length, which is very problematic because of the reasons I outlined before. A lot of the articles I found were either written by the pair or clearly involved with the two in some way.
All of these problems make for an interesting path for my paper yet one that maybe not be right for me to talk about at my level of academic achievement. But then again, something like this would only be relevant now and not after I’ve graduated.