Interesting study. What type of coding approach did you use when analyzing the data? Or in other words, what types of themes did you find meaningful to note in the data? Did you begin with an a priori coding scheme or code inductively? Thank you.
Thank you for your question! I approached each text using a mix of a priori (deductive) and a posteriori (inductive) coding schemes. In other words, as someone who is both a practicing Jew and a tombstone tourist (i.e., someone who enjoys visiting and studying cemeteries), I was already familiar with commonplaces in Jewish cemeterial documentation before stepping foot in the B’nai Israel Cemetery. For example, I knew ahead of time to expect to see epitaphs like “ת נ צ ב ה”, an abbreviated quote from the Torah that reads something like “May his soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life,” or even that the deceased may be named in relation to their father (e.g., “Abraham Ben Pinkus” means “Abraham son of Pinkus”). In other words, I was already familiar with common themes that might appear in the cemetery, such as memory and community. However, despite being able to enter the space as a member of Gainesville’s Jewish community, I was not entirely familiar with the B’nai Israel Cemetery’s local variation on conservative Ashkenazi and/or Sephardic Jewish traditions. So, after photographing different headstones and related texts, I catalogued reoccurring symbols, abbreviations, and designs to understand what specific themes are being used and how these themes resonate with the space’s historical and cultural context. For instance, I would not have known before exploring the cemetery what icons would and would not be used in the cemetery, or what languages would and would not be used. Every cemetery is created and designed for its community as well as their context, geography, and history. I discovered that most headstones in this cemetery used both English and Hebrew text, and that the headstones that were written only in English were often newer additions (from the 21st century) and featured more prominent pieces of Jewish iconography. These findings influenced both the themes I studied as well as how I studied them which, paired with the area’s history as a haven for Jews fleeing religious persecution abroad, led me to see how bilingualism and/or cultural codes were and are used to highlight the community’s Jewish identity while also resisting assimilation through Jewish rhetorical coding.
As someone who focuses a lot on UX, I’m curious: what do you feel that lens adds here? I think you have a strong cultural rhetorics argument, but I think of UX as more a process of designing something. So, for example, conducting usability testing on a prototype or interviewing users of a product or service. Why not just focus on audience analysis, for example, which might fit better with your rhetorical approach?
Thank you for your thoughtful question! UX is, as you’ve indicated, typically thought of as a process for designing some artifact or product alongside its users. That said, because death is such a personal experience, gravestone design traditionally involves only two parties: the engraver and the family members paying for the gravestone. These two parties typically negotiate the gravestone’s design. In fact, some tombstone designers offer online tools to design and customize your ideal tombstone (see https://legacyheadstones.com/choosing-a-headstone-design). These texts are meant to be interactive agents in memorializing the dead. As such, they are often designed with others in mind, such as through the inclusion of a candle box for visitors wishing to light and leave behind a traditional memorial candle—the yahrzeit—or built-in vases for fake flower bouquets (it is typically considered bad form in Judaism to leave behind anything that will wilt or die). While an audience analysis of these technical documents is useful for evaluating who its intended audience may or may not be, it is less useful for thinking through the flow of cultural and technical activity that takes place between headstones and their users. When Jews leave pebbles and rocks atop headstones as symbols of remembrance—something we are invited to do through the inclusion of thick or flat surfaces built into our tombstones—we not only mark the stone as a cultural artifact by imbuing it with meaning, but we also become Jewish mourners through the memories or stones we leave behind. This activity of invoking or constellating different identities is, I believe, best captured through ideas surrounding UX, which often is concerned with user participation. In short, a UX lens best captures the transformative cultural moments that occur within cemeteries.
I enjoyed the oral part of the presentation! It added context without just duplicating the information. I was wondering, you mention that this research demonstrates “responsibility to facilitate community in documentation design” and that pulling in local communities works against the idea that document design is a neutral or invisible process.
So does looking at these artifacts offer specific strategies for designing the UX of other documents for the Gainesville population specifically or for Jewish audiences more generally? Or are the design features and lessons about community more deeply attached to that time (and so might no longer be relevant) or situation (headstone writing might be a radically specific situation).
Thank you for the compliment as well as your wonderful question! I would say that looking at these artifacts can give us specific tactics for designing user experiences for both this local community as well as this context (Jewish cemeteries). At the same time, we can also abstract broad-reaching strategies for designing more culturally responsive user experiences. Hence, I’ll try explaining my answer in three parts in terms of three different populations:
1) Gainesville’s Jewish Community: We might observe that it is important to create documentation that is accessible to English speakers (as most of the tombstones from the 21st century are predominantly written in English) while still drawing on key Jewish commonplaces. This includes but is not limited to cultural iconography (e.g., the image of Cohen hands or a menorah) and common Hebrew sayings (e.g., that the word “mitzvah” or “מצוה” is a good deed, typically used when we give “tzedakah,” a word commonly used to indicate both righteousness and charity).
2) Jewish Mourners:At the same time, when designing headstones, it is important to think about how we might honor the dead by invoking both the reader’s and deceased’s Jewish identity through the reproduction of cultural sayings, titles, names, or images. This might even occur through the creation of spaces that allow for community participation, such as the addition of a metal vase for users to leave fake flower bouquets in (it is typically taboo in many Jewish communities to leave real flowers or plants for the dead because they die, whereas the deceased’s memory should live on eternally).
3) Cultural Communities Writ Large: To create and/or engage a cultural community through user experience, it is important to situate specific commonplaces from the community in question in both your writing and design. These tie-ins to a specific, localized culture should demonstrate an awareness of that community’s particular history in the spaces and lands they inhabit. In other words, to effectively create or facilitate community through situated instances of user experience, we need to design documents that appeal to localized cultural commonplaces, histories, and practices. This, of course, also requires that we work with potential members of the community we are trying to facilitate and/or that we belong to that specific community.
jennifermallette
1 year ago
A wonderfully informative and engaging presentation–I learned a lot from you. The concept of socially informed documentation design is important, as is the finding that we should engage in documentation design as a cultural process and not hold up neutrality as the standard. In this case, it seems that the purposeful boundary setting (and establishment of in-groups/out-groups) is critical to creating community and maintaining these cultural practices. My question is more about specifics: how do we specifically enact this approach as practitioners/teachers/scholars? How do we push back when some ideas are that all communication should be open to all? How do we focus on the need for boundaries in many cultural spaces against the idea that these boundaries are somehow exclusionary? What are thus some implications for practitioners, teachers, and scholars?
That’s so nice of you to say; thank you!! Yes, I think it is important to create and maintain cultural insider and outsider groups to protect culturally sensitive information and foster a (healthy) group identity, stemming namely from the idea that the extraction of information from one context into a culturally foreign, possibly narrower context can be violent. Those are some brilliant questions; I’ll answer them in the order in which you set them out. a. Enacting this approach begins with the idea that one possible function of writing is encoding and therefore safe-housing information. From this perspective, we can create and honor rather than obscure and devalue cultural differences in several ways. Pedagogically, we might think about resisting the urge to evaluate student writing for its readability to the instructor. Instead, we might allow students to write for the cultural communities they belong to in their own tongue (whether that be a dialect of English, a different language entirely, or some multimodal construction). As scholars, we might sit in, honor, and theorize the spaces of difference that coded information creates rather than to instinctively move into decoding. Lastly, as technical communication practitioners, we might ask community members what they need from us (i.e., how we can help them) and codesign documents that meet those needs. Keeping information design local highlights rather than obscures differences, honoring a user’s cultural identity and heritage.
b. I would ask proponents of this idea, “Who does that benefit?” Historically speaking, it is the extraction of information from a community into more universalized languages or mediums that have worked at erasing cultural identities by whitewashing our differences. Although there are of course no hard-and-fast rules in ethics (information about COVID-19 for example should be available to everyone), the people in position to make information or communication accessible to everyone are often in positions of power. It might even be useful to share personal anecdotes of the harm that universal access can create.
c. We fully embrace that these boundaries are exclusionary. But we do so with the recognition that when peripheralized cultural communities create spaces for themselves, they are working to actively define themselves on their own terms and flourish. d. I think this question was answered in part “a,” but please let me know if you would like me to expand on what I’ve written!
These answers are so helpful. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with me! I’m thinking harder on that idea of local information design–and how I can get my students to engage with that more too.
jlabrio1
1 year ago
Thank you for your poster presentation here, Alexander. I believe this was a really interesting piece, and I appreciate your narrowed focus from your previous 2020 article to what you have here.
I don’t know that I have any questions that have not been already asked by previous commenters here, but I appreciate the breadth and depth of your responses. They have been really enlightening and have helped clear up some questions I had initially reading through/listening to your poster presentation!
Thank you, Alexander, for an insightful project. I appreciate your thorough analysis of a less studied genre, i.e., cemeteries of a cultural community. I’m wondering how you plan to bring this research forward and/or how you would apply the construct of “socially-informed documentation design” in other contexts.
Thank you! This research is the basis for my dissertation, which looks to situate assemblage as a key writing concept from technical communication and rhetoric and composition studies in the writing practices that occur within and around Jewish cemeteries to see how these cultural spaces influence our understanding of writing. I’m looking to take my comprehensive exam at the end of the semester, the written portion of which consists of a potential first chapter. So while I’m bringing this specific research forward, it may take some time to see exactly how I will be doing it!
As far as applying the “socially-informed documentation design” construct to other contexts, I believe my previous and present research on public-facing examples of technical communication outside the cemetery pick up on a key idea behind this construct: that technical documentation represents a space for cultural communities to explore and construct their identity through the creation of insider/outsider groups. In my research on a popular nineteenth century Jewish women’s magazine column for instance (see https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07350198.2020.1805576), I look at how an anonymous group of Jewish women employ Jewish rhetorical commonplaces to explore their intersectional identity as Jews, women, and Jewish women while also negotiating what it means to be a Jewish American woman.
Interesting study. What type of coding approach did you use when analyzing the data? Or in other words, what types of themes did you find meaningful to note in the data? Did you begin with an a priori coding scheme or code inductively? Thank you.
Thank you for your question! I approached each text using a mix of a priori (deductive) and a posteriori (inductive) coding schemes. In other words, as someone who is both a practicing Jew and a tombstone tourist (i.e., someone who enjoys visiting and studying cemeteries), I was already familiar with commonplaces in Jewish cemeterial documentation before stepping foot in the B’nai Israel Cemetery. For example, I knew ahead of time to expect to see epitaphs like “ת נ צ ב ה”, an abbreviated quote from the Torah that reads something like “May his soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life,” or even that the deceased may be named in relation to their father (e.g., “Abraham Ben Pinkus” means “Abraham son of Pinkus”). In other words, I was already familiar with common themes that might appear in the cemetery, such as memory and community.
However, despite being able to enter the space as a member of Gainesville’s Jewish community, I was not entirely familiar with the B’nai Israel Cemetery’s local variation on conservative Ashkenazi and/or Sephardic Jewish traditions. So, after photographing different headstones and related texts, I catalogued reoccurring symbols, abbreviations, and designs to understand what specific themes are being used and how these themes resonate with the space’s historical and cultural context. For instance, I would not have known before exploring the cemetery what icons would and would not be used in the cemetery, or what languages would and would not be used. Every cemetery is created and designed for its community as well as their context, geography, and history.
I discovered that most headstones in this cemetery used both English and Hebrew text, and that the headstones that were written only in English were often newer additions (from the 21st century) and featured more prominent pieces of Jewish iconography. These findings influenced both the themes I studied as well as how I studied them which, paired with the area’s history as a haven for Jews fleeing religious persecution abroad, led me to see how bilingualism and/or cultural codes were and are used to highlight the community’s Jewish identity while also resisting assimilation through Jewish rhetorical coding.
Thank you for that explanation.
As someone who focuses a lot on UX, I’m curious: what do you feel that lens adds here? I think you have a strong cultural rhetorics argument, but I think of UX as more a process of designing something. So, for example, conducting usability testing on a prototype or interviewing users of a product or service. Why not just focus on audience analysis, for example, which might fit better with your rhetorical approach?
Thank you for your thoughtful question! UX is, as you’ve indicated, typically thought of as a process for designing some artifact or product alongside its users. That said, because death is such a personal experience, gravestone design traditionally involves only two parties: the engraver and the family members paying for the gravestone. These two parties typically negotiate the gravestone’s design. In fact, some tombstone designers offer online tools to design and customize your ideal tombstone (see https://legacyheadstones.com/choosing-a-headstone-design).
These texts are meant to be interactive agents in memorializing the dead. As such, they are often designed with others in mind, such as through the inclusion of a candle box for visitors wishing to light and leave behind a traditional memorial candle—the yahrzeit—or built-in vases for fake flower bouquets (it is typically considered bad form in Judaism to leave behind anything that will wilt or die). While an audience analysis of these technical documents is useful for evaluating who its intended audience may or may not be, it is less useful for thinking through the flow of cultural and technical activity that takes place between headstones and their users.
When Jews leave pebbles and rocks atop headstones as symbols of remembrance—something we are invited to do through the inclusion of thick or flat surfaces built into our tombstones—we not only mark the stone as a cultural artifact by imbuing it with meaning, but we also become Jewish mourners through the memories or stones we leave behind. This activity of invoking or constellating different identities is, I believe, best captured through ideas surrounding UX, which often is concerned with user participation. In short, a UX lens best captures the transformative cultural moments that occur within cemeteries.
Thanks for explaining!
I enjoyed the oral part of the presentation! It added context without just duplicating the information. I was wondering, you mention that this research demonstrates “responsibility to facilitate community in documentation design” and that pulling in local communities works against the idea that document design is a neutral or invisible process.
So does looking at these artifacts offer specific strategies for designing the UX of other documents for the Gainesville population specifically or for Jewish audiences more generally? Or are the design features and lessons about community more deeply attached to that time (and so might no longer be relevant) or situation (headstone writing might be a radically specific situation).
Thank you for the compliment as well as your wonderful question! I would say that looking at these artifacts can give us specific tactics for designing user experiences for both this local community as well as this context (Jewish cemeteries). At the same time, we can also abstract broad-reaching strategies for designing more culturally responsive user experiences. Hence, I’ll try explaining my answer in three parts in terms of three different populations:
1) Gainesville’s Jewish Community: We might observe that it is important to create documentation that is accessible to English speakers (as most of the tombstones from the 21st century are predominantly written in English) while still drawing on key Jewish commonplaces. This includes but is not limited to cultural iconography (e.g., the image of Cohen hands or a menorah) and common Hebrew sayings (e.g., that the word “mitzvah” or “מצוה” is a good deed, typically used when we give “tzedakah,” a word commonly used to indicate both righteousness and charity).
2) Jewish Mourners: At the same time, when designing headstones, it is important to think about how we might honor the dead by invoking both the reader’s and deceased’s Jewish identity through the reproduction of cultural sayings, titles, names, or images. This might even occur through the creation of spaces that allow for community participation, such as the addition of a metal vase for users to leave fake flower bouquets in (it is typically taboo in many Jewish communities to leave real flowers or plants for the dead because they die, whereas the deceased’s memory should live on eternally).
3) Cultural Communities Writ Large: To create and/or engage a cultural community through user experience, it is important to situate specific commonplaces from the community in question in both your writing and design. These tie-ins to a specific, localized culture should demonstrate an awareness of that community’s particular history in the spaces and lands they inhabit. In other words, to effectively create or facilitate community through situated instances of user experience, we need to design documents that appeal to localized cultural commonplaces, histories, and practices. This, of course, also requires that we work with potential members of the community we are trying to facilitate and/or that we belong to that specific community.
A wonderfully informative and engaging presentation–I learned a lot from you. The concept of socially informed documentation design is important, as is the finding that we should engage in documentation design as a cultural process and not hold up neutrality as the standard. In this case, it seems that the purposeful boundary setting (and establishment of in-groups/out-groups) is critical to creating community and maintaining these cultural practices. My question is more about specifics: how do we specifically enact this approach as practitioners/teachers/scholars? How do we push back when some ideas are that all communication should be open to all? How do we focus on the need for boundaries in many cultural spaces against the idea that these boundaries are somehow exclusionary? What are thus some implications for practitioners, teachers, and scholars?
That’s so nice of you to say; thank you!! Yes, I think it is important to create and maintain cultural insider and outsider groups to protect culturally sensitive information and foster a (healthy) group identity, stemming namely from the idea that the extraction of information from one context into a culturally foreign, possibly narrower context can be violent.
Those are some brilliant questions; I’ll answer them in the order in which you set them out.
a. Enacting this approach begins with the idea that one possible function of writing is encoding and therefore safe-housing information. From this perspective, we can create and honor rather than obscure and devalue cultural differences in several ways. Pedagogically, we might think about resisting the urge to evaluate student writing for its readability to the instructor. Instead, we might allow students to write for the cultural communities they belong to in their own tongue (whether that be a dialect of English, a different language entirely, or some multimodal construction). As scholars, we might sit in, honor, and theorize the spaces of difference that coded information creates rather than to instinctively move into decoding. Lastly, as technical communication practitioners, we might ask community members what they need from us (i.e., how we can help them) and codesign documents that meet those needs. Keeping information design local highlights rather than obscures differences, honoring a user’s cultural identity and heritage.
b. I would ask proponents of this idea, “Who does that benefit?” Historically speaking, it is the extraction of information from a community into more universalized languages or mediums that have worked at erasing cultural identities by whitewashing our differences. Although there are of course no hard-and-fast rules in ethics (information about COVID-19 for example should be available to everyone), the people in position to make information or communication accessible to everyone are often in positions of power. It might even be useful to share personal anecdotes of the harm that universal access can create.
c. We fully embrace that these boundaries are exclusionary. But we do so with the recognition that when peripheralized cultural communities create spaces for themselves, they are working to actively define themselves on their own terms and flourish.
d. I think this question was answered in part “a,” but please let me know if you would like me to expand on what I’ve written!
These answers are so helpful. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with me! I’m thinking harder on that idea of local information design–and how I can get my students to engage with that more too.
Thank you for your poster presentation here, Alexander. I believe this was a really interesting piece, and I appreciate your narrowed focus from your previous 2020 article to what you have here.
I don’t know that I have any questions that have not been already asked by previous commenters here, but I appreciate the breadth and depth of your responses. They have been really enlightening and have helped clear up some questions I had initially reading through/listening to your poster presentation!
Thank you! It is incredibly difficult to put my research and cultural identity out into the world, so I sincerely appreciate your feedback!!
Thank you, Alexander, for an insightful project. I appreciate your thorough analysis of a less studied genre, i.e., cemeteries of a cultural community. I’m wondering how you plan to bring this research forward and/or how you would apply the construct of “socially-informed documentation design” in other contexts.
Thank you! This research is the basis for my dissertation, which looks to situate assemblage as a key writing concept from technical communication and rhetoric and composition studies in the writing practices that occur within and around Jewish cemeteries to see how these cultural spaces influence our understanding of writing. I’m looking to take my comprehensive exam at the end of the semester, the written portion of which consists of a potential first chapter. So while I’m bringing this specific research forward, it may take some time to see exactly how I will be doing it!
As far as applying the “socially-informed documentation design” construct to other contexts, I believe my previous and present research on public-facing examples of technical communication outside the cemetery pick up on a key idea behind this construct: that technical documentation represents a space for cultural communities to explore and construct their identity through the creation of insider/outsider groups. In my research on a popular nineteenth century Jewish women’s magazine column for instance (see https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07350198.2020.1805576), I look at how an anonymous group of Jewish women employ Jewish rhetorical commonplaces to explore their intersectional identity as Jews, women, and Jewish women while also negotiating what it means to be a Jewish American woman.