Blackness and Initial Codes (Part Five)
so at this point, i’ve gone thru the data four times (and counting). the initial runs were to reduce the HUGE amount of stuff i came up with on my searches back in September ’05. not counting the one site that had 19000 webpages, i started with 1800 URLs/websites and 15000 webpages. the easiest part was coding everything to make sure it fit in my date range (DATE), which ran from August 29 to September 6 (end of the Labor Day Weekend). i was initially going to do a week, but realized as i combed thru my search results that many bloggers didn’t post entries over the holiday.
second coding group (WEBSITE) came up as a way to distinguish between blogs and websites, initially. As i went thru, though, i saw that i was getting types of non-blog websites, so i expanded the group to include Business, Entertainment, General/News, or Other categories. an “Other” category would include charities, churches, and professional organizations. I left that category as “Other” rather than breaking it down further because the uniting characteristic of those types of websites was that they were publishing a specific declaration of their hurricane relief effort, which was why my search pulled them up. a little spelunking into these types of sites revealed that they ain’t had nann notha thing to say about Katrina, so i feel comfortable with that grouping.
the third grouping was a little difficult. i realized as i was going thru the websites i had collected that the critical discourse analysis framework i picked up from Van Dijk simply wasn’t going to work (thank you Simeon Yates!).
The problem was that i was trying to evaluate discourse about Black identity…not about discrimination. so while the principles of Van Dijk’s CDA analysis helped me immensely, in practice i was trying to evaluate discriminatory discourse by Blacks in the same way as i was evaluating discriminatory discourse by Whites. even for the comparative model i was originally planning on doing, this approach rubbed me the wrong way. it didn’t fit my aims for the dissertation to argue that Blacks could be as discriminatory as Whites (or less)…i was much more interested in seeing how people used discourse online to construct offline identity.
i had to go back to my lit review for help. Mitra and Cohen’s chapter in Jones’ Internet Research was where i initially got a lot of inspiration; they call for a critical cultural textual analysis of websites for ideological effects. Their argument is that websites should be examined for their content and the significance of that content to the content providers (and their audience). Theirs is a 3-step approach: formal analysis, intertextual analysis, and the role of the audience.
Coupled with Mitra and Watts (2003) argument to consider the Internet as a discourse, i felt that i could comfortably apply rhetorical analysis to how African American websites generate a discursive identity based upon their worldview, moderated by the medium. My approach is based on my contention that African American public discourse is explicitly intertextual; that is, Blacks have always been engaged in arguing for their humanity on many levels with mainstream America. Thus, i centered my theoretical approach on DuBois’s observations of historical and cultural conditions for Blacks in America to contextualize why they presented themselves on the web in the ways that they do.
