Comment by Jessifer: This closing section has a lot of wonderful bits in it. I think the artfulness of this piece earns you the ability to make a stronger claim in the closing section. Even if it is an impressionistic one. It could even be in the parenthetical describing this last bit of music. I kind of love the parentheticals that offer a bit more substantive commentary on the choice. They feel like productive tangents that brush against the text in a useful way.

Comment by Jessifer: So lovely.

Comment by Jessifer: I like that this sentence theoretically explains the movement from the "I" to the "we." I wonder if you could call that out more directly with a line like. "We (Peter, Karen, and Katherine) draw our stories together here in order to..."

Comment by Jessifer: The writing here is so lovely and precise.

Comment by Jessifer: There's a stylistic inconsistency in how each of these sections is presented. I feel like tidying the formatting so that each of these biographical sections has a similar form (and parallel structure) would help keep the reader from veering too far. Honestly, though, I'm loving the mash-up of forms, media, voices. That is working really really well. Just needs a bit more polish as you continue revising.

Comment by Jessifer: I find myself wanting this to be the lead-off sentence of the piece. It sets the stage in a way that helps the rest flow from this claim, rather than around it.

What is certain is that poetics in general, and narratology in particular, must not limit itself to accounting for existing forms or themes. It must also explore the field of what is possible or even impossible without pausing too long at that frontier the mapping out of which is not its job. Until now, critics have done no more than interpret literature. Transforming is now the task at hand. That is certainly not the business of theoreticians alone; their role is no doubt negligible. Still, what would theory be worth if it were not also good for inventing practice?

(Genette 1988, 157)

This closing section has a lot of wonderful bits in it. I think the artfulness of this piece earns you the ability to make a stronger claim in the closing section. Even if it is an impressionistic one. It could even be in the parenthetical describing this last bit of music. I kind of love the parentheticals that offer a bit more substantive commentary on the choice. They feel like productive tangents that brush against the text in a useful way.

So lovely.

I like that this sentence theoretically explains the movement from the "I" to the "we." I wonder if you could call that out more directly with a line like. "We (Peter, Karen, and Katherine) draw our stories together here in order to..."

The writing here is so lovely and precise.

There's a stylistic inconsistency in how each of these sections is presented. I feel like tidying the formatting so that each of these biographical sections has a similar form (and parallel structure) would help keep the reader from veering too far. Honestly, though, I'm loving the mash-up of forms, media, voices. That is working really really well. Just needs a bit more polish as you continue revising.

I find myself wanting this to be the lead-off sentence of the piece. It sets the stage in a way that helps the rest flow from this claim, rather than around it.

I find myself pausing here. I find stronger your emphasis on how critically-engaged practice-based research makes the work better. And I appreciate how auto-ethnomethodology allows different pathways into and out of the work. But this actually feels on the cusp of being regressive. It's a fact of academic culture, certainly, but there is something about practice-based research that transcends (for me) the conventions rather than just kowtowing to them. Think on this two-sentence close. I'm not sure if we need to be brought this far back to earth, as it were ;)

Yes, glad you're bringing this in. The other thing I have been thinking about as I read is Writing Machines by Hayles: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/mediawork/titles/writing/writing_book.html

Find myself thinking about Kenneth Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/uncreative-writing/9780231149907

Find myself hungering for a fuller anecdote here :)

Yes! Nice turn.

This whole section is very very strong. Really enjoying the trip you're taking me on as a reader.

Might be a stylistic choice. But I feels there's something strange about removing yourself from the claim here. You're talking about auto-enthnomethodology while removing the "I" from your own writing. Even if you don't bring the first person more fully into the whole piece (which I'm in favor of), it feels apropos to at least bring the "I" back to this section.

I wonder if you need this sentence. It feels so broad that I find myself nodding, but I also get pulled right out of the specificity of your previous claim. Would the section work if you just removed this sentence altogether?

Love. And glad this is called out in the formatting. The assertiveness of this propels me into the rest of the section nicely.

You start with a passive sentence, which pushes me further away as a reader. Can you move a main noun and action verb to your opening? Something like "Practice-related research confounds traditional distinctions (and hierarchies) that put our 'work' and the writing we do about that work on two ends of a spectrum." Doesn't have to be that, of course, but looking for a way you can reel the reader in to sit with all the nuance that unfolds throughout this section.

So much life in this bit. A flurry of fields I want to dive more deeply into.

You might consider being even more explicit/assertive. Something like: "Readers will, for all intents and purposes, write the text alongside the authors."

Love this.

This is where the energy really starts to amp up. I wonder if some version of this could be your opening. You can always back up and offer context. A claim like this that wonderfully pushes the discussion forward shouldn't be relegated to the backside of paragraph 3. :)

I love everything in these opening paragraphs, but I feel like I want a bit more of the author at the outset. I think this could all be the second paragraph, and the stage could be set more vigorously with a claim that draws me in.

What is certain is that poetics in general, and narratology in particular, must not limit itself to accounting for existing forms or themes. It must also explore the field of what is possible or even impossible without pausing too long at that frontier the mapping out of which is not its job. Until now, critics have done no more than interpret literature. Transforming is now the task at hand. That is certainly not the business of theoreticians alone; their role is no doubt negligible. Still, what would theory be worth if it were not also good for inventing practice?

(Genette 1988, 157)

This is a really clear breakdown of the different kinds of contributions a practice-related research project can make, especially in creative practice. As you say these categories are not mutually exclusive, and I think often the way they bleed is most interesting for creative practice research.

I think perhaps another aspect that is part of this conversation is 'intention'. This for me is the difference between the kind of research and contribution artists make as opposed to researchers (that use an art practice as part of their research). A researcher's intentions need to have a scope beyond their own practice. The intention also needs to have a trajectory beyond that singular project. When I say 'intention' I do not mean a clear set of guidelines and questions that unfold logically and rationally toward a clear point. I just listened to a lecture by Pia Ednie-Brown at RMIT University who named intention as a tension between the involuntary and the elicited. It includes both discovery and invention.

One possibility of the blog as a research method might perhaps be that it aids in the creation of what I have called elsewhere 'differential publications'. In my own thesis, which made use of a research blog as part of its practical methodology, I used a blog to specifically highlight the processual and collaborative nature of research. A blog allowed me to do this better than traditional print-based (or email-based) forms of communication could in that respect. Yet, it also remains rather limited in what it can do as a medium, and blogs still tend to have a strong authorial voice, and remain limited in their collaborative and multimodal possibilities. Also see: http://www.openreflections.org/?page_id=45

The research blog or blogging as a research method is an intriguing question indeed. But what makes a blog, or better said, the specific usage of a blog into a suitable scholarly 'method' -- for you and/or for others? A blog in itself is a medium/a publishing platform. A method then is a certain approach to a blog, how you implement it into research strategies. If you make the case for (a specific use of) a blog, what makes it a potentially more useful research method (for you and others) than, for example, methods based on the usage of other (print-based) media?

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