In the morning session today Sara Sullam and I will be presenting our work on exploring nominal (in our case study - bibliographical) data. We do it by borrowing a method from educational research - the notion of phenomenographic variation. #CHR2023🧵
First, what is #phenomenography and how could it help us. In contrast to phenomenology that studies what phenomena are, phenomenography is concerned "only" with how these are perceived. We build on the idea that scientific inquiry could also be seen as learning at the collective level. This is especially true for interdisciplinary research conducted by a team of researchers (hello digital humanities). A theory that emerged from phenomenographic research is what is called variation theory, i.e. one needs to experience variation to comprehend a phenomenon. And there is a very specific way to achieve this: by using patterns of contrast, generalisation and fusion
These patterns of variation consider aspects of phenomenon, which at a simple level could be seen as dimensions of data. The simplest of the three patterns is contrast, the idea that to start understanding a phenomenon one needs, to consider each of its dimensions in isolation (i.e. variating it while keeping others fixed). Our example is from translation of Italian novels from the post-war period into the UK market. We apply contrast on authors. Our way to fix other dimensions is by counting them
Sorry, that was incorrect. Pratolini is not the only one with two publishers in the UK, but the only one who has two publishers repeatedly translating works of his