The experiential dimension of online education: Phenomenological hermeneutics and educational technology

Anecdotal Evidence: Hermeneutic Heuristics for Phenomenological Investigation of ICTs

Norm Friesen; March, 2007

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Abstract

The application of hermeneutic phenomenology to the analysis of absorbed, practical, lifeworld involvement is unavoidably aporetic: Investigating these inextricable involvements using any explicit, reflective, theoretically-grounded methodology would seem to violate either the involvement of the former or the reflectivity of the latter. This paper has as its starting point the understanding that this contradiction can be addressed through a heuristic redoubling of lifeworld involvement and commitment rather than an emphasis on analytic calculation or theoretical remove. It outlines how this can be accomplished through the use of the methodological device of the "anecdote," explaining its intimate interrelationship with the central presuppositions and understandings of hermeneutic phenomenology. It presents the anecdote as a unit of analysis that can employed in phenomenological analysis to act as a "concrete counterweight" to more abstracting, eidetic, etymological and other phenomenological investigative techniques. Describing its origins in the Utrecht school of phenomenology, and its subsequent refinement in the work of Max van Manen, this paper illustrates how the anecdote can be further adapted, specifically to the research of computer technology.

Introduction

Writing about computer science, Phil Agre makes the compelling claim that "technology is at present covert philosophy; the point is to make it openly philosophical." Agre, like many other theorists and practitioners, sees computational logic and design as firmly rooted in layers of positivistic Western philosophical tradition --from Turing and Boole through Leibnitz (e.g. Davis, 2000) and even as far back as Plato (e.g., Dreyfus, 1992). Paul Dourish, a computer scientist formerly of XEROX PARC, agrees: "the development and application of computational technologies is& most certainly a&philosophical enterprise [typically associated with] a rigorous Cartesian separation between mind and matter, cognition and action" (2001, p. vii). By its very nature as artifact and mechanism, the computer itself stands as a kind of "existence proof" for the rationalistic core of this tradition. Through its ubiquitous, exacting and rule-bound operation, computer technology seems naturally to invite sustained analyses along broadly rationalistic, cybernetic or cognitivist lines, as has occurred in areas not necessarily seem compelled to such an emphasis: Human-computer interaction, systems design, and of greater relevance here, distance education and e-learning. (Notable exceptions to this are Turkle's ethnographic investigations, and some of the writings of Weizenbaum and Winograd; see Turkle 1985, 1997; Weizenbaum, 1976; Winograd & Flores, 1987). But Dourish goes on to observe that although these "philosophical positions of long standing" these same positions "have been under continual assault since around the 1930s" (2001, p. vii). For it is around this time that "philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein began to articulate radically new positions on cognition, language, and meaning." These understandings offer valuable opportunities for exploring new dimensions of these technologies and their use, and for avoiding some of the impasses that have long plagued certain conventional research directions (for example, in e-learning; see Reeves, 1996). Emphasizing these new understandings, especially the implications of Heideggers philosophy of "hermeneutic phenomenology;" Dourish and others have been developing a variety of methods for carrying out research that reflects the aforementioned early 20^th century intellectual sea-change. It is the intention of this paper to contribute to the methodologies for the investigation of computer technology that build on these "non-rationalist" understandings of cognition, language and meaning derived from Heideggers hermeneutic phenomenology, and has been refined by Max van Manen via the Utrecht school of phenomenology. Central to this method the unit of analysis of the "anecdote," a brief mimetic, indexical account emphasizing the vicissitudes of everyday experience. Combined with techniques from empirical and other methods of phenomenological research (eidetic reduction, etymological and other linguistic analyses), this paper shows how this unit of analysis uses the mimetic, simulative powers of language to provide a vicarious experiential form of evidence of special value for phenomenological investigation.

Heremeneutic Phenomenology

Although many of the concepts and terms associated with hermeneutic phenomenology are notoriously difficult to translate from the original German into English (e.g., Dasein, Befindlichkeit, Zuhandenheit), various attempts have been made to articulate the conceptual vocabulary of this philosophy in English, some with considerable success (e.g. see Dreyfus, 2001; Guignon, 1983; Radovan, 1997). A starting point for a quick overview of the central presuppositions or principles of hermeneutic phenomenology can begin with Dreyfus point that "The detached, reflective stance" that is centrally assumed in both Cartesian reasoning and scientific inquiry "is derivative, not primary" (Dreyfus, 1991). What is instead primary is absorbed, practical, lifeworld involvement --from which one gains distance only periodically, or momentarily, or indeed, only as a kind of illusion: "We are caught up in the world and," as Merleau-Ponty says, "we do not succeed in extricating ourselves from it in order to achieve consciousness of it." (1945/62). That we are part of a world in which we are "caught up" is only one of a large number of certainties that are taken as given in a kind of "non-cognitive" manner, as we gradually become competent members of our culture. Such certainties are not provided to us through though some kind of methodological skepticism, as Descartes and many who came after him would have it. As Gadamer famously says: "Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live."

As Wittgenstein says, "It would be absurd to ask of the infant drinking its milk: does he know that milk exists? Just as absurd as asking: Does a cat know that a mouse exists?" But for the baby (unlike the cat), not only are milk and a range of other "givens" encountered in this way, but voice and language are encountered similarly and often simultaneously with them. Focusing more specifically on the world of experience of the articulate adult, Gadamer further emphasizes

Experience is not wordless to begin with, subsequently becoming an object of reflection by being named, by being subsumed under a universality of the word. Rather, experience of itself seeks and finds words that express it.

Paul Ricoeur puts this in slightly different, but equally compelling, terms: "To bring [experience] into language is not to change it into something else, but, in articulating and developing it, to make it become itself." Echoing both Ricoeur and Gadamer, one could say that language is "co-emergent" with experience. Language is not separate from our beings. Instead, "we are not beings who 'use' symbols, but beings who are constituted by their use" (Lye, 1996: http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/ph.html).

This inextricable proximity of language and experience finds perhaps its most prominent articulation in Gadamers Truth and Method:

&language has no independent life apart from the world that comes to language within it. Not only is the world world only insofar as it comes into language, but language, too, has its real being only in the fact that the world is presented in it.

It is this "world disclosing," "world-constitutive" characteristic of language that anecdotal method leverages much in the same way that the hermeneutic circle builds on the inexhaustible interpretability of the lifeworld.

Co-constitution through committed action, gestural expression

What is both experienced and expressed in this way is referred to as the lifeworld. This world is at various times said to be structured, constructed, shot through with meaning, and is also said to constitute a "context" or "background" against which all of our engaged practical activity takes place. But in every case, one of the properties of the lifeworld is that it can never be "completely explicated (and hence not formalized)" Emphasizing that all knowledge and meanings (linguistic, communicative and otherwise) arise against this background, Radovan explains:

[Any] attempt to explicate all the content of a background is bound to failure since every step of such an explication would introduce new expressions which would require a further explication, and so ad infinitum. On the other hand, assertions without a background would have no meanings (i.e. no interpretation) at all.

In a move that will be repeated in a different context later in this paper, this circularity or infinite regress that is associated with knowledge in lifeworld is seen by hermeneutic phenomenology not as something to be "overcome" through greater precision or more exhaustive epistemological efforts. Instead, it is something to be affirmed, to be seen as constitutive of the very essence of knowledge. For it is this circularity that constitutes what Gadamer and other hermenuticians have termed the "hermeneutic circle:"

&the movement of understanding is constantly from the whole to the part and back to the whole. Our task is to expand the unity of the understood meaning centrifugally. The harmony of all the details with the whole is the criterion of correct understanding (Gadamer, 1989; 291).

This circularity is the movement through which knowledge arises; the lifeworld becomes known through a circular movement from the particular (what is analyzed and known) to the general (the "lifeworld") and back. It is above all interpretive or hermeneutic knowledge that is gained as a part of this cycle or dynamic of distance and nearness, as Gadamer explains. In this process, what might be called "truth" is not discovered as a correspondence between theory and reality. In terms used by Heidegger, it is not veritas: "the correspondence of the matter to knowledge [or] the correspondence of knowledge to the matter" (Heidegger, 1943). Instead, Heidegger uses the word alethia a term which as he points out, can mean "truth" and "unconcealing."

"Truth" is not a feature of correct propositions which are asserted of an "object" by a human "subject" and then are "valid" somewhere, in what sphere we know not. Rather, truth is disclosure of beings through which an openness essentially unfolds. All human comportment and bearing are exposed in its open region.

Truth, in other words, is not a collection of facts which can be falsified or validated, but instead something whose acquisition is better characterized through verbs like "discovered," "exposed," or "revealed." Truth is not acquired through doubt and skepticism, but to those who are open or can become attuned to it.

Hermeneutic phenomenology does not attempt to deny the importance and value of non-hermeneutic knowledge, the knowing of enumerable facts and certainties, falsifiable and divorced from situational, emotional and other vicissitudes. However, hermeneutic phenomenology does not see such knowing as paradigmatic of all knowing; instead it emphasizes the primacy of a different type of knowledge for which affect, emotion and more generally, disposition are constitutive. This is a kind of knowledge that is more a question of disposition and comportment, attunement (Befindlichkeit) --how we find ourselves in everyday action and situation-- than of explicit, enumerable characteristics of cognition. Van Manen has described different manifestations of this knowledge in terms of kinds of knowledge that "resides in actions as lived," "in the body," "in the world" and "in relations." This is illustrated through questions like "instinct" when avoiding a traffic accident while driving, or the cultivation of a kind of "atmosphere" and "attentiveness" in conversation, or when teaching or speaking publicly.

But before considering this further, it is important to emphasize one last feature or principle of hermeneutic phenomenology, communication. Occurring as concernful action against the inexhaustible background of the lifeworld, communication appears quite different in this context from the way it is generally imagined or understood. As Heidegger states, communication "is never anything like a conveying of experience, such as opinions or wishes, from the interior of one subject into the interior of another" (Heidegger 1962 [1927], p.205). It is not an exchange of information between otherwise physically separate subjectivities. In absorbed, everyday involvements, communication appears instead as a "process in which, through the coordination of [this everyday] action, meanings are shared and a common world is brought into existence." Since language generally, as remarked earlier, is co-constitutive of the lifeworld, then communication is the collaborative "bringing into existence" of a world or part of a world that is shared. Speaking more generally, communication, like knowledge, is an inseparable part of a way of being. In this case, it is a being together with someone else, a sharing of a disposition, a particular kind of attunement or befindlichkeit. "Through [communication] a co-state of mind, a mitbefindlichkeit&a co-understanding" Heidegger says, "gets shared." Through communication, in other words, interlocutors "find themselves" together, in a shared intercorporeal context of co-presence (although both do not need to be physically or literally co-present; recall the experience of getting an intimate, personal email or phone-call). Like knowledge and befindlichkeit, feelings and emotions rather than explicit cognitions are constitutive of this co-presence or mitbefindlichkeit specifically, they are manifest as mood or atmosphere: This is a shared disposition that can be associated with a particular place, a particular person, relationship, even a particular exchange (especially if it is heated, pleasant, encouraging, etc.) As such, atmosphere, mood and by extension, communication itself, represents what contemporary German phenomenologist Waldenfels refers to as a Zwischeninstanz, an "interstitial entity" something that, as he says, finds "its adequate ground neither in the order of things, nor in the realm of the mind" (2005). Instead it is somewhere in-between these two. Whether it takes place through the written word or in intercorporeal co-presence, communication is something that it is not under the control of any one party, but at the same time, it generates an atmosphere or mood, and is not simply arbitrary or imposed from without.

The Utrecht School and the Phenomenological Method

Opposed as they are to traditional philosophical, computational, and sometimes even common sense understandings of mind, knowledge and language, the principles of hermeneutic phenomenology form the basis for an equally counter-intuitive and radical research method. This is the hermeneutic-phenomenological method as initially conceived by the Utrecht School, and as developed further and given explicit articulation by Max van Manen.

The Utrecht school, which flourished only for a decade or so --from 1946 to 1957represented a loose grouping of scholars who applied hermeneutic phenomenology to research a range of disciplines:

The Utrecht School consisted of an assortment of phenomenologically oriented psychologists, educators, pedagogues, pediatricians, sociologists, criminologists, jurists, psychiatrists, and other medical doctors, who formed a more or less close association of like-minded academics. (Levering & van Manen, 2003; 268)

Since the 1970s some of the work of this group "has inspired variations of a practice-based phenomenology& especially in psychology (eg., Giorgi and Moustakas), in nursing (eg, Benner) and in education (eg, van Manen)." One of the key characteristics of the work of the Utrecht School is the conversational, even informal character of the texts they produced. These texts tend to interweave anecdotal and other forms of description together with analysis and reflection in a manner that makes the effort and the implicit methodologybehind their production difficult for the reader to detect. Despite the creation of some exemplary pieces by the members of the Utrecht School, it is the very accessibility of these texts combined with the fact that the members of the Utrecht school did not produce any text exclusively on the question of methodologythat in many ways "closed the possibility for others to exercise these same practices" (Levering & van Manen 2003, p.268).

Van Manen characterizes his own hermeneutic phenomenology "an eclectic phenomenology of practice," and elsewhere as "a context-sensitive and transdisciplinary form of inquiry into lived experience." In Researching Lived Experience, van Manen explains in some detail how it is possible to create the kinds of interleaving of analysis, reflection, and anecdotal description that typifies the texts of the Utrecht School. In this book, he also goes into some detail in explaining how to collect, combine and refine rough anecdotal descriptions ("lived experience descriptions") and interview as well as fictional material. Naturally, these explanations do not involve any ridgid guidelines, specific formulae, or strict protocols. At the same time, van Manen also steers clear of linking his methodology with a specific, explicit set of philosophical principles, and avoids enumerating the typical "literary" or "rhetorical" characteristics associated with anecdotal descriptions. This paper seeks to address these last two questions, and while not providing a simple protocol for this research, it hopes to show how a hermeneutic phenomenological research orientation follows from the basic hermeneutic-phenomenological principles outlined above. It also hopes to show how the anecdote provides phenomenological research, specifically in computer technology, with a singular means of sustaining its orientation to the phenomenon in question, and avoid reproducing in accounts of human action and expression, the positivist assumptions so effectively instantiated and demonstrated in this technology. In this way, this account of hermeneutic phenomenological method also maps out a way to maintain a close and productive connection between research and "ongoing, absorbed, practical activity in the world their readiness to hand" (Introna & Ilharco, 2003; 231).

But any attempt to bring to principals of hermeneutic phenomenology into practice in research must address a number of questions; questions that arise from the apparent contradiction or tension between absorbed, practical, lifeworld involvement and its reflective investigation. We must ask: How can this hermeneutic-phenomenological research be practiced as a recognizable method, and also at the same time be consistent with the principles of hermeneutic phenomenology? Inquiry seems to be robbed by the understandings of hermeneutic phenomenology of many of its most familiar and effective tools. This includes the primacy of the detached, even nominally objective, stance --which is revealed as secondary, or even illusory and a falsehood. Language, as an unencumbered analytic tool that the researcher can utilize independently from his or her "being," to identify, analyze and categorize, is also not available. Isolating an object of study from its background in which it might gain its meaning for analysis --indeed from the self which experiences them-- is also seen as a kind of falsification. Finally, knowledge itself is not primarily seen as something so that can be set out objectively, as a series of enumerable and conclusive findings or even as a delimitation of a particular problem space. The understandings of language and world, of knowledge and action in which these useful analytical tools are grounded are not only unavailable, but are actually seen as misrepresentations, as counter-productive to the orientations of hermeneutic phenomenology itself.

The phenomenological method articulated here becomes an effective means of inquiry precisely by leveraging and making the most of the characteristics of the world, (non-)cognition, and especially of language, as articulated in hermeneutic phenomenology. If knowing is a matter of disposition and attunement, arising from concernful action, then this method advocates that the researcher take up caring, involved and attuned orientation to the subject under investigation. Hermeneutic phenomenological research then becomes, as van Manen explains, "An attitude or disposition of sensitivity and openness to everyday, experienced meanings as opposed to theoretical ones." Correspondingly, the act of research itself becomes an enactment of this kind, a sort of "dwelling with" the problem or question rather than a clear-cut, rational protocol. Since this enactment occurs in inextricable connection with the lifeworld, then this method emphasizes an explicitly hermeneutic dynamic between the irreducible complexity of the lifeworld and the object of investigation which can only have its meaning in this context. "Phenomenology is the active and reflective participation in meaning. The notion of phenomenological knowledge as understanding aims at a special form of discursive and embodied understanding" (van Manen, 2001 online).

Central to the enactment of the hermeneutic-phenomenological attainment in research is the question of language. Because language is what constitutes us through its use, and because language is co-emergent with experience itself, it serves as a singular tool of remarkable utility to the researcher. "Language was the first virtual reality," as has been variously observed (e.g., Back, 2006), and it is in this sense that it is understood used methodologically in the anecdote. Instead of a tool of analysis and designation, of correspondence to a reality that it seeks to adequately describe, it is a tool of emulation, amplification and simulation. Hermeneutic phenomenology, as a research method, undertakes a "process of contextualization and amplification rather than of structural essentialization" (Hein & Austin, 2001). What is important to this method, in other words, is that language, especially written language, can be used in the way that is much closer to its use in fiction than to the conceptual language used in this paper and in academic writing generally. In the anecdote, language is uses language to bring to life the experience(s) that are the object of its inquiry. In doing so, the anecdote utilizes and emphasizes discursive forms that transgress a number of the tacit norms of scholarship and research generally, and of technical design and writing in particular.

The Anecdote

The term "anecdote" has been deliberately chosen by van Manen for its counter-positivistic and colloquial overtones:

Anecdotes have enjoyed low status in scholarly writings, since, in contrast to historical accounts or reports, they rest on dubious factual evidence. They express a certain distain for the alienated and alienating discourse of scholars who have difficulty showing how life and theoretical propositions are connected. (119)

The anecdote is a short, simple story, a vividly concrete presentation of a single incident that is intended to stand out precisely through its incidental nature, its individuality and concrete particularity. As a methodological heuristic, the anecdote often begins in media res, sometimes providing quotes in the form of dialogue (or interior monologue), and has a climax that often makes a point, and then closes quickly. The anecdote is also characterized by what it is not: It does not present general principles, statistical patterns, or theoretical constructs that intend to speak to cases generally. It is not something that is used as evidence, not simply or factually "real." Nor is it simply or entirely fictional or subjective. Van Manen mentions that their use "&in the writings of&Sartre, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty are not to be understood as mere illustrations to "butter up" or "make more easily digestible" a difficult or bring text" (116).

Turkle: Nor do anecdotes serve as texts for decoding ethnographically.

In keeping with the conception of language as co-emergent with the world and with experience itself, anecdotal use of language is to be judged in terms of how well it simulates and emulates the experience in question, on how well its language is able to evoke and open a world to its reader. The relevance and validity of the anecdote is gained, in other words, through its recognizability rather than its statistical or evidentiary generalizability. Correspondingly, this validity is not acquired through the generalizing, universalizing capability of language, but --again perhaps counter-intuitively-- through concrete vividness rather than abstract universality. In this way, a qualified generalizability is attained. For example, in a generally phenomenological consideration of habitus and habit in human-computer interaction, one could argue:

The role of reflexive, habitual actions in computer use has long been ignored in favour of rationalist accounts where decisions of the user appear to be almost as rule bound and logical as those of the computer. A good counter-example is provided by the description of the typewriter user in Merleau-Pontys account of the "the spatiality of ones own body and motility" (1945/62; 144). One also need only to recall an occasion where an almost reflexive, habitual clicking of an "okay" or "no" on a dialogue box led to a result that was quite the opposite of what that was actually intended.

On the other hand, one could write:

"Do you wish to save the changes to document 1?" I've seen the message many times before while closing a document or program. Usually, I just click "OK" without reading it. But in a moment of confusion --perhaps because I am in a rush to leave my desk-- the message makes me uncomfortably uncertain. I pause to look at it with a vague sense of impatience and unease. "Do you wish to save the changes to the document?" "No, I actually don't even want to close the document," I think to myself and with a rapid, reflexive gesture of my index finger I hit the mouse button: "No." The document closes.

"Oh no!" Immediately I realize that Ive done something wrong. I just lost half an hour of work! Frustrated, I try to suppress the awareness of what I just did.

This last description does not simply invite the reader to recall a "good counter-example" or point the reader to other places where such an experience or example might be provided. Instead, attempt to provide for the reader or to show the reader to such an experience and counter-example. This is an encounter where the specificities the first person narrator, the rushed situation, the momentary confusion, the pang of regret are all intended to contribute to a broader recognizability of the description. The repetition of fixed, interactional phrases like "Do you wish to save the changes to the document?" are intended to heighten this effect. Through the same concrete particularity, this description reveals a number of interesting and possibly important aspects of human-computer interaction that may not be so evident from more abstract references or descriptions which, as descriptions have already interpreted and analyzed before they leave the author's hands. For example, in resonance with the principles of hermeneutic phenomenology, the anecdote emphasizes that knowledge or more broadly, facility in working with the computer, can be understood as intimately interconnected with emotion or questions of disposition: "Confusion" arises from haste, the appearance of the dialogue box results in "uncomfortable uncertainty;" and with a "vague sense of impatience and unease," the regrettable reflexive action is taken. The power of anecdotal descriptions to reveal these kinds of connections or patterns initially as a form of reflective research to the writer, and later as a demonstration to the readeris a further, important aspect of this method. Research discoveries of the highest value can be made while the researcher is refining and reflecting on these descriptions, and also while he or she is working through an interpretation or amplification of their significance.

The recognizability of the anecdote, in turn, derives from the fact that it is grounded in the shared lifeworld --the realm of everyday concernful action from which we so easily take flight when we undertake research. These somewhat ephemeral but nonetheless essential qualities of the anecdote are developed through careful reading by the researcher, colleagues, interviewees, and by re-writing based on their suggestions and ones own impressions. But first, the data for these anecdotes must be collected via a number of sources: open-ended, conversational, and sometimes situated interviews, in which interviewees are not only asked questions about relevant experiences (focusing on what they felt and sensed, rather than thought or believed), but also on related incidents that they might be able to recall. A second source can be descriptions or anecdotes from literature (novels, and other informal descriptive texts). Especially in an investigation of computer technology, yet another source can be retrospective reflection and discussion of interactive exercises undertaken with the computer with subjects and or the investigator (the latter being not altogether different from the usability heuristic evaluations outlined by Nielsen, n.d.). The anecdotal descriptions utilized in a phenomenological research paper can reflect one particular incident among many gathered. It may also not reflect one in particular, being instead an amalgam of a number of interviews and incidents gathered; indeed, it a completed anecdote may contain elements not contained in any one interview or source, but strongly suggested by them. Generally these short mimetic and indexical texts are first composed as "lived experience descriptions." They can then be read by interviewees, and by other researchers working in the same field or with the same methodology. They are subsequently re-written, refined and honed on the basis of the responses of these readers, and through the careful analysis and reflection of the researcher. All of these activities as well as the integration of anecdotes into a hermeneutic-phenomenological textare considered to be an important part of the research.

The Anecdote as Literary and Ethnomethodological

As mentioned earlier, the anecdote appeals to a different standard of verity than those associated with other, more explicitly empirically-grounded descriptions, accounts and forms of research generally. A passage from Aristotles Poetics cited by van Manen explains this difference. [check how v Manen uses this]

The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular (Section IX)

The position of the anecdote between history and poetry, fact and fiction is intended to broaden its expressive power. The recognizability of the anecdote, the primary ground of its validity, naturally does not apply universally in any simplistic or unqualified sense of the term. The universality gained by the anecdote, as a piece of poetry rather than a historical or fictional account is not universal generalizability. It is a thoroughly qualified universality that related to shared human meaning and significance rather than facts that can be seen to exist outside of them. Indeed, its very particularity and concretion may cause it to be much more readily recognizable to one reader than to another, or limit it quite clearly to a set of concerns, projects and norms that may vary over time. Some of the works of the Utrecht School have met this fate, such as Buytendijks 1961 work, Woman: A contemporary view. At the same time however, the lifeworld of concerns and norms that might be used as a reference for the recognizability of a description is not to be understood a single anthropological reference point of norms and commonalities. Instead, it should more often be used in the plural: Lifeworlds which differ across cultures and within a single persons range of experiences. Moreover, the enduring and sometimes renewed popularity and adaptability of works of fiction (e.g. by Cervantes, Shakespeare or Austen) is testimony perhaps not so much to the timelessness any literary cannon, as to the continued recognizability of the practical involvements of the characters, and of the essential features of the lifeworlds within which these actions occur.

Speaking of lifewords and actions presented in literature, it is worth emphasizing that the development of the anecdote draws upon the skills exhibited by the writer of fiction. Correspondingly, terms of fictional or literary analysis can be used to describe the character of the anecdote further. As indicated earlier, the anecdote is a mimetic account insofar as it shows it imitates it allows the reader to vicariously live through the experience. (see Auerbach) This term is understood here in contrast to term diegtic, referring to "telling," and denoting a type of narrative where readers are distanced from the action, rather than living through and identifying with it. This distinction helps to differentiate the anecdote as a phenomenological method from descriptive and editic methods. Thus, in the anecdote, one should avoid saying "waiting for a server response was frustrating" but instead, evoke frustration through a kind of emulation or enactment of impatient waiting: "The blue line crawled soooo slowly across the screen that I finally picked up something to read." As this and the previous example shows, language can be colloquial rather than formal, and the materiality of colloquial expressions and language in general its expressive sound, its alliteration and rhythms, and both aural and typographic forms of "onomatopoeia"-- to be heightened rather than suppressed to achieve mimetic effect (e.g., see Gumbrich, 2004).

The anecdote is, in its experienced particularity, thoroughly indexical, making frequent use terms such as I, you, she, here, now, it --which "vary in reference with the individual speaker" (Merriam Webster). Anecdotes, like fiction generally and everyday conversation in particular, are marked by these indexicals. This again presents an important distinction to more theoretical, natural- or social-scientific discourse. In fact for Harold Garfinkel, who founded ethnomethodology as a kind of science of indexicality, both the presence and the studied absence of indexicals is crucial is precisely this distinction:

Features of indexical expressions motivate endless methodological studies directed to their remedy. Indeed, attempts to rid the practices of science of these nuisances lends to each since its distinctive character of preoccupation and productivity with methodological issues. Research practitioners studies of practical activities of a science, whatever their science, afford them endless occasions to deal rigorously with indexical expressions. (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 6)

So when researchers are unable to get rid the "immense, obstinate and irremediable nuances" presented by indexicals, they may still try distinctions" and "substitutions." But these, as Garfinkel points out, are always of limited value, being accomplished only for all practical purposes (p. 7) However, in some ways like ethnomethodology, the anecdote as a method represents an attempt and amplify to affirm, rather than to seek to expurgate the "nuisance" of indexical expressions. This, hopefully, is further evidence of the character of the anecdote as a move away from abstraction to concretion from Vorhandenheit (occurrentness, present-at-hand-ness) to zuhandenheit, (circumspection, availability, ready-to-hand-ness).

Other aspects of language that are suppressed in formal writing are critical to this type of writing as research: connotative and evocative language rather than a purely denotative and informative lexicon become important. Atmosphere, tone, voice, mood and ambience are also aspects for cultivation and special attention in this type of writing. Finally, as incidents, anecdotes incorporate --in highly condensed form-- a narrative structure. Like any narration, it consists of a disruption of equilibrium, recognition and attempted repair of disruption, and (possibly) a reinstatement of equilibrium (Todorov, 1981). Because of its brevity, these stages generally appear in highly condensed form, with the anecdote often beginning directly with the disruption, with recognition playing a central role, and sometimes with any reinstatement of equilibrium only being hinted at. So, the short example provided above begins with the disruption of equilibrium --with the question, "Do you wish to save the changes to document 1?" It then explains how this disruption "plays out" and is recognized, and only hints at the fact that the reinstatement of equilibrium will require the re-typing of some forty minutes of work.

Where the subject of such a narrative is engagement with technology, it is not surprising that this narrative dynamic closely resembles that of a technical (or other) breakdown. This has been understood in the hermeneutic-phenomenological terms, and as having significant potential for new design approach presented by Winograd and Flores (1987):

Following Heidegger, we prefer to talk about breakdowns. By this we mean the interrupted moment of our habitual, standard, comfortable being in the world. Breakdowns serve as an extremely important cognitive function, revealing to us the nature of our practices and equipment, making them present-to-hand, perhaps for the first time&. New design can be created and implemented only in the space that emerges in the recurrent structure. (77-78)

In this connection, anecdotes of breakdowns, and also (possibly) of workarounds and other responses for them, also are much closer to the ethnographies of technology produced by Suchman and her former colleagues at XEROX PARC than the discourses that predominate in many design texts, and much of the more promotionally-oriented literature of educational technology. As van Manen says, "anecdotes may provide an account of certain teachings or doctrines which where never written down." This may be especially the case in the collection and representation of accounts from the everyday lives, for example, of a socio-economic class (Charlesworth, 1999) or those with mental disorders (Haase, 2002) or handicaps (Saevi), but it also applies to computer use and design as well. User practices, "work-arounds" frustrations, and technical breakdowns are generally and sometimes systematically filtered out of research and technical reports, and from statistical and other forms of data gathering. In articulating his rhetorical theory for computers and other mundane artifacts, R. R. Johnson describes these as

Hidden from view, almost imperceptible because they blend so perfectly into the backdrop of daily, mundane experience, are stories that beg to be told of people as they work with, against, and through technologies that abound in our lives. These silent, hidden stories have been effaced in modern times, however, as the value placed upon the stories of everyday knowledge --of "know-how"-- has given way to the "knowledge in the machine, " or the "knowledge in the system". (Johnson, 4)

Such studies tend to focus on how the technology can or does work, no on how it fails to accomplish what is expected. Too frequently, reports, narratives and anecdotes of such failures and breakdowns remain in the realm of neglected user complaints, and exchanges in newsgroups or coffee-rooms. The anecdotal method can serve as a means of rescuing such accounts from elision in more rationalistic discourses.

Since the approach described here is enactive, it is best learned by doing, and best shown through example. The example below, provided in concluding this papers main discussion, describes another experience of human-computer interaction, likely to familiar to different readers.

"You've got mail!" A message box pops up and my computer chimes softly. A quick glance shows that it's from an old friend who also happens to be in an online class I'm taking. It seems a bit impersonal and vague, but I click on the reply button and type a cheery greeting. I tell my friend that I enjoy taking the class with her but that I'm finding the subject matter kind of boring--and that I'll be glad when the semester is over. Later in the day, I check my email again, and am surprised to see that I have received a message from myself. I click on it only to see that it is the message I earlier sent to my friend. I feel an embarrassed blush as I realize what I have done: I've sent the message to everyone in the class, including the instructor! The message that I originally replied to was actually one that my friend sent to our class email list! I feel like an idiot! (Friesen, 2006)

Such an anecdote can, of course, be followed by interpretative, generalizing text. In the case of the paper from which the above anecdote is taken, this interpretive text provides a very broad overview of the literature, observing how its general tenor is one that has the effect of making users feelings of foolishness and inadequacy seem clearly dysfunctional in our "networked" or "information" society. In its original context, this anecdote is followed by such a generalizing discussion, which leads to a brief overview of the paper for which it serves as an opening description. After this overview, a further anecdote is provided, very similar to the description provided of failing to save a file upon closing an application.

By moving from a kind of simulated, vicarious immersion in practical technologically-dominated lifeworld particularity through to reflection, interpretation and generalization (and possibly back again to lifeworld particularity) the method of the anecdote can be couched in a kind of writing that emulates the oscillation between particular and general that Gadamer describes as part of the hermeneutic circle. Such a dynamic enables a hermeneutic-phenomenological investigation to go from the non-thematic, natural attitude to articulation and theory and back to absorbed practice again without getting forever lost in the abstraction and alienation of the general, conceptual and theoretical. In this way, it is able provide academic writing, broadly understood, with at least the hope of remaining oriented to the "at handedness" of its object of investigation.

Conclusion: (Unfinished)

Like phenomenological analysis more generally, the anecdote has the specific goal of increasing the "the potential readiness to hand of the findings" of the investigation of lived experience within which it is embedded. As such, the heuristic of the anecdote is ultimately undertaken with the aim of informing or rather, shaping "our ongoing embodiment and action" in the lifeworld situations with which it is concerned. As such, it has the potential to cultivate a disposition or habit, to refine an attunement, or to trigger a particular kind of action, through a dwelling in the concrete particularity of lived experience. As van Manen states, "in itself, a well-crafted anecdote has the ability to affect action and cause reflection." However, it is of course important that neither the anecdote or the phenomenological reflection with which it is associated be reduced to the "flickering& elf-awareness of the individual... in the closed circuits of historical life an exercise in arbitrary opinion in the guise of vivid or compelling description. Whatever theme or question it is investigating, hermeneutic phenomenology must endeavor to "open up possibilities, and keep them open," perpetuating rather than foreclosing on the cyclical nature of the interpretive endeavour of uncovering and understanding. This means its conclusions are tentative rather than final.

References:

Davis, M (2000). The Universal Computer.

Dreyfus, H. (1992). What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason.

Guignon, C.B. (1983). Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge (Hackett, 1983

Haase, M (2002). Living with "obsessive compulsive disorder." In Writing in the Dark. In van Manen, (Ed) 52-83.

Todorov, T. (1981) Introduction to Poetics.

Radovan, M. (1997). Computation and Understanding. In Mind versus computer: were Dreyfus and Winograd right? M. Gams, M. Paprzycki, & X. Wu. Amsterdam: IOS Press pp. 211 -233 (esp. 219-220).