2.Networks are multiply linked, and this is achieved through what Spinuzzi terms weaving and splicing (p. 198). Weaving refers to the development of relatively stable parts of a network over time, whereas splicing refers to branching that converges as new interaction. For this study of Canada-US interdependencies, this has been realized methodologically as weaving in our coordinated efforts to have, for example, the survey results inform the interview questions, and, in turn, to have outreach for interviews cycle back into new survey results. In terms of splicing, a networked methodological approach operates as multiply linked in the discovery of unplanned convergence, such as when an interview informs a closer-up perspective on a smaller selection of maps developed from the survey’s geolocative data.
3.Networks are transformative. Spinuzzi discusses this quality in terms of circulating representations, that a network “must represent and reprepresent phenomena in various ways, often conflicting ways” (p. 199). Representations and re-representations are constituted among the people, texts, narratives, identifications, institutions, and locations detailed in the study. The mélange of representations coheres around questions of interdependence, yet the assortment of evidence answers to interdependency with considerable variation. The network transforms as these representations and re-representations circulate, and our work has, as it evolved, participated in that transformative endeavour.
4.Networks yield “black boxes”, which means they subsume and eventually obscure constitutive qualities that would be too complex to revisit with description or examination. That is, black boxes reduce complexity by replacing complex qualities with satisfactory stand-ins. This is represented in our work by survey and interview questions that center on nation-based identification. As Spinuzzi attests, black boxes “emerge from historically developing activities” (p. 199)—in this case, citizenship activities that asked respondents to identify themselves along a contained and historicized North-American boundary. Yet Spinnuzi also notes that these boxes “take a lot of work to achieve and maintain” (p. 199), and these complexities came to light as scholars discussed their nation-based identification in greater and more varied detail in the interviews.
In addition to these principles introduced by Spinuzzi, what we frame here as a “networked methodological approach” adds a fifth principle: networks afford and also therefore obligate researchers to multi-scale and multi-scopic consideration of the assemblage. This resembles Spinuzzi’s point about transformation insofar as it considers materially circulating representations; however, this additional principle introduces deliberate, purposeful considerations of scale (distance versus close) and aperture (wide versus narrow). Much like Johanek’s (2000) argument that we must systematize inquiry in order to contextualize research in the service of both flexibility and multidisciplinarity (p. 207), we suggest that one focus of research—here, the historic development and movement of Canadian and US writing studies scholars across the North American border that frame interdependence—may be better understood with “network sense” (Mueller, 2012) developed by mixed methods. Our individual chapters embrace different scales and different lenses in studying interdependence as both node and element, part and whole.
“The methods drawn together in this study are themselves interwoven, connecting across the multiple scales to ‘bring networks out of hiding’ (Latour, 1993) across different scales of activity. . . . The methods themselves form a systematic inquiry, operating as interdependently as the Canada-U.S. influences the study brings to light as a whole.” (Book prospectus)
Chapter 2, “Emplaced Disciplinary Networks from Middle Altitude,” written by Derek Mueller, posits its approach at the greatest distance, inquiring into relationships among survey respondents and the geographic locations they identify with. This chapter emphasizes the notion of network heterogeneity in terms of a person-geolocation nodal connection. The chapter’s use of interactive maps assumes a broad scale and wide scope to attend to patterned movement, particularly for the critical mass of Canada-based writing studies scholars who have taken up doctoral programs of study in the US before returning to Canadian universities. In tandem with the maps, the chapter presents summary findings from a survey concerned with geolocation and professional identification. These low-touch, distant methods work together to engage non-obvious phenomena in an attempt to get at the big picture of cross-border interdependencies, and provide a broad back-drop to the research featured in other chapters.
Andrea Williams’s chapter 3, ““Voicing Scholars’ Networked Identities through Interviews,” shifts to a slightly closer-up scale and narrower aperture in its interview-based methodology. In focusing in on person-to-person nodal connections in a network frame, the methodological emphasis here is on showing the multiply linked, relational aspects of a network, as well as the narrative representation and re-representation of conflicting perceptions of intellectual communities, such as the varied interpretation of organizations and conferences like the 4Cs, Inkshed/CASSL, and CATTW in creating and maintaining professional identities. In addition to tracing shifts in individual scholars’ identities, this chapter explores the different kinds of institutional hubs where Canadian scholars have clustered and their relation to the discipline in Canada and internationally. The interview-based methodology and thematic narrativizing of insights from the interviews both complements and intersects with the methodologies featured in the other chapters.
Chapter 4, “Four Scholars, Four Genres: Networked Trajectories,” by Louise Wetherbee Phelps, focuses even more tightly than chapter 3 on the networked individual, profiling the careers of four Canadian scholars to illuminate their participation in social networks over time and space. But it introduces a new element to our concept of networks by pairing each scholar with a genre, using their writings in these genres to trace their overlapping interpersonal and intertextual trajectories through multiple contexts. Beginning with the nodal connection of person-to-text (often already person-to-person through co-authorship or co-editing), chapter 4 expands the aperture to encompass layers of historical and contemporaneous connections among persons, places, institutions, organizations, events, texts, and documents, emphasizing the multiply linked and transformative notions of the network. By including genres whose functions in mediating disciplinarity have been overlooked, chapter 4 examines relationships among genre, transnational scholarly identity, and presence that can’t be explained by indices and citation analysis, with a view to challenging traditional disciplinary accounts and histories.
In chapter 5, “A Case-Study Approach to Examining Cross-Border Networks,” Jennifer Clary-Lemon adopts the most localized of the methodologies featured in the study. In examining the University of Winnipeg’s movement from intrinsic to instrumental case study, chapter 5 focuses in on a person-locale nodal connection. Clary-Lemon explores interdependencies from an institutional locale, comparing centrifugal and centripetal influences in the circulation of disciplinary influence into and out of a single institution. This chapter also highlights the transformative element of a networked approach by attending to the ways one networked locale illustrates the concept of interdependency over time and in conflicting ways.
In the conclusion to this volume, chapter 6, we draw together the insights gleaned by examining the concept of Canadian-American interdependencies in writing studies from the multiple scales and perspectives taken up in our individual chapters. Here, we collectively examine what kinds of “black-box” knowledge the survey, interview, and case-study data, taken together, provide in allowing researchers to manage, filter, and make sense of the complexity presented by doing multi-scopic work. In acknowledging nodal links among people, geolocations, documents, and locales, this chapter enacts the balancing work of interdependency as a black box: on one hand, stabilizing the interface of what we know about transnational scholarship; on the other, recognizing that that stability is always partial and temporary.
Taken together, we see the coordinated studies in our book as constituting a new methodological approach to multi-scopic forms of inquiry into one subject, serving our purpose of examining the contemporary and historical networks of Canadian writing studies as they have emerged in the last half-century.
The