More recently, new literacies scholars Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear (2008) explained that remix has deep roots within the music industry, noting how audio-editing techniques have allowed artists to take apart and reorganize original songs and transform them into other musical creations. Building on this discussion of restructured song creation, Knobel and Lankshear argued that there are many avenues for individuals to engage in remix, particularly in the age of online media creation. Some contemporary examples of remix include:
Fanfiction—narrative or poetic text that enthusiasts create, using and extending characters, ideas, and information from a particular book, movie, videogame, or other fandom.
Machinima—derived from the portmanteau of machine and cinema, it is the creation of films through manipulation of videogame graphics.
Mash-Ups—remixed musical tracks created by blending two or more songs together to create a hybrid song. Mash-ups often combine instrumental music with the vocals from another song.
Memes—first introduced by Dawkins (1976), who used the term to address genes and DNA mutations. The meaning of this word now also characterizes cultural transmissions, often graphics or short animations with textual captions that pass from one person to the next, with slight variations between each passing.
What is central to each of the explanations of remix is the concept of creators’ agency, especially as it involves one building on and reworking established texts and concepts. With remix, customization is both acceptable and encouraged. When applied to discussions of research methods, remix offers flexibility, but it also requires the researcher to constantly negotiate and rationalize methodological and paradigmatic choices. Currently, mixed methodology supports the combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods, and we call attention to remix to highlight researchers’ agentive and creative possibilities when designing and conducting a multimethod qualitative investigation. More specifically, we suggest that a remix-inspired multimethod approach can be used to examine meaning making across online and offline spaces.
As introduced earlier, connective ethnography is an example of researchers taking creative and agentive stances as they investigate learning in online spaces. Leander (2008) acknowledged that “connective ethnography is informed by developments in several other fields, where notions of the research ‘site’ are being disrupted and relations are being traced among sociocultural practices and agents” (p. 37). Deborah A. Fields and Yasmin Kafai (2009) conducted a connective ethnography to examine how inhabitants of the virtual world Whyville moved and participated across the site. Not only did the researchers use a combination of data collection methods—from video to back-end data tracking to field notes and interview—but also they relied on the “insider gaming practice” of teleporting to investigate knowledge sharing and movement within the site (p. 48).
In this way, Fields and Kafai (2009) investigated networked field sites, as the site of the study was neither relegated to a singular space nor temporally limited. We argue that such thoughtful and productive remixing of methods is similar to what Greene (2007) and other mixed methods researchers might call a “dialectical” or “complementary strengths” combination of methods. There, seemingly disparate approaches (e.g., back-end data mining and face-to-face field notes) were brought together to create new insights about how participants learned to inhabit Whyville online and offline. Such innovative study designs advance the field of educational research and challenge researchers to attend to how learners move across and through multiple spaces.
Networked field sites allow researchers to trace how individuals move through multiple online spaces (e.g., from a Facebook site, to a fanfiction site, to a blog space) in order to make meaning. Researchers may call on multiple approaches to understand meanings made across spaces, just as Fields and Kafai (2009) did when examining participatory practices in Whyville. In this way, we can see how an emphasis on agency and creativity can move the field forward because researchers can be encouraged to view the boundaries of methodological traditions as porous; that is, researchers can see how methodologies can be combined to customize a research approach that is appropriate for a particular context of inquiry.
Inspired by remix, researchers may bring together a number of methodological approaches in order to investigate and understand meaning making within and across online spaces. Customizing a research approach, however, needs to be done with care. It would be irresponsible to simply draw from different traditions without an appropriate lens and purpose. As such, researchers should reflect on the affordances and limitations of the multiple methods, and ask questions such as these:
In what ways will the various methods work in concert to capture and discover meaning making that spans online and offline environments?
How will the remixed approach support the investigation of diverse field sites?
How will the approach enhance critical reflection of researcher positioning and bias?
Using the lens of remix, this book features examples of agentive and creative research approaches from design to data collection to data analysis. More specifically, we highlight how drawing on multimethod approaches and traditions can enable researchers
to move across various online sites, following participants, events, or networking residues (see Chapter Two and Chapter Four);
to traverse and analyze online and offline data (see Chapter Four);
to collect and gather participants’ cultural productions and systematically (whether chronologically, spatially, or another category) trace the evolution of those productions (see Chapters Five and Six);
to gather available back-end data (keystrokes, log-in data, and other algorithm data) and combine those data with traditional qualitative data, such as interviews (see Chapter Six);
to understand and implement ethical approaches to entry into networked field sites (see Chapter Seven); and
to engage in cocreation and coproduction in designing research studies with participants, even across disparate studies (see Chapter Eight).
As researchers embrace multiple approaches to study meaning making in a variety of online spaces, it is important to examine the creative and agentic techniques promoted by the concept of remix that one might take in designing his or her study. As more scholars enter their various fields of study (e.g., nursing, education, cultural anthropology, social work) recognizing that online spaces are important, scholars may be concerned with, and interested in, the diverse ways people engage in learning in online spaces. This might influence how researchers design studies to better understand these practices and meaning-making experiences. Judiciously selecting multiple appropriate methods to get to the heart of a research question is one of the biggest promises