Poetic Distillation: Artistic Transcription Analysis in Autoethnographic Literacy Research

Abstract

As artists and critical literacy scholars, we continually seek out methods that more clearly and accurately reflect not only a way to analyze data, but an analysis that highlighted both the critical and the aesthetic for purposes of expanding and disrupting our commonplace notions of literacy, literacy teaching, and literacy research. We see poetically informed analysis – an area in arts-based qualitative educational research that uses the affordances of poetry to express interpretations of data. Our focus on the arts in literacy research extends beyond their use as objects of study or forms of representation; we seek to use artistic methods in the very analysis of data. To that end, we employ found poetry as an analytic method, creating poetic transcriptions – a process of reading across transcripts to locate key phrasing and recurring motifs. The significance of poetic transcription lay in its metaphoric and imagistic features that permit us to tap into both our literacy and artistic imaginations. Our goal is not to create poetry from our data or to claim ourselves as poets. Instead, we draw upon what we see as poetic impulses in spoken language to look at data through the beginner’s eyes that the arts can make possible.