Critical Vignette
Learned Vol. 7, Issue 1
Defining1 your terms is one of the most infuriating and necessary steps to doing academic research. We have to do this because words mean things. In fact, words mean too many things. Take a simple sentence like, "Tom got lunch." Really? How? Did Tom buy his lunch? Was it gifted to him? Did he pick it up from one area and take it to another? Did Tom steal his lunch from someone else? What a scamp!
The point is, when doing research making sure that the audience knows exactly what you mean by any given term is critical. It makes your research readable and viable. And, as I alluded to before, it's a huge pain in the ass.
In my research this past year, my team and I have been using a research tool known as the vignette. Only vignette is only a middlingly old word (from the mid 1700s) but it's taken a bit of a meander through the centuries to arrive at a far different place from where it started. And even then, its most current definition is not exactly how we're using it to collect data.
In fact, it turns out that vignette gets used in three distinct contexts these days. Let's start with (arguably) the most common, the one found in Instagram and Tik Tok, the vignette filter. Vignette started out in English as a decoration for pages in books. Artists would add a border of vines around the text or illustration of a given page and these gradually became known as vignettes. Then, in the words of Etymonline:
[the meaning] transferred from the border to the picture itself, then (1853) to a type of small photographic portrait with blurred edges very popular mid-19c.
That sense persists, I think, in the filters built into camera and social media apps. What's new, perhaps, is that the meaning is shifting to include video and other related forms (like gifs2). So, from books to photos to apps the meaning gradually shifts from a border to a page with a border to a photo with a border and now a video with a border. Said border also shifts from decorative vines to a darkened, blurred edge. But none of this has anything to do with the actual text of the page, right?
Our second context is literary. Wikipedia has the most comprehensive definition I could find (as usual):
a short and descriptive piece of writing that captures a brief period in time. Vignettes are more focused on vivid imagery and meaning rather than plot. Vignettes can be stand-alone, but they are more commonly part of a larger narrative, such as vignettes found in novels or collections of short stories.
I mean, yeah, not much to add3. Except to say that the exact word count of a vignette varies wildly. Depending on the source, a vignette should be as few as 300 words or as much as 1,000. And the word count is important because of our third context, the one that started this whole essay, academic research.
Word count in research is critical4. The length of your article is strictly controlled by the journals that may publish your article. As such, many inquiries are made: does the word count include the abstract? The references? Appendices? Indices? And are there separate word counts for each of those? This, in turn, is critical for shaping your article. If you're using a research tool like a vignette, how many words is it going to be and then, where are you going to put it in your final paper?
Is it short enough to be included in the body of the paper itself? Should it be relegated to an appendix? Should it be published separately and referenced in your paper? And, based on all these factors, can you actually call it a vignette?
A lot of interesting work and assessment of the vignette as research tool comes from Rhidian Hughes who has defined them as:
text, images or other forms of stimuli which research participants are asked to respond
He further clarifies (in other papers) that vignettes are useful because they collect a person's emotional response to a situation. Also, crucially5, vignettes used for this purpose are hypothetical situations as opposed to case studies which are real-world examples. Which means, are vignettes just hypothetical scenarios?
Yes. Basically.
The word arrives at more-or-less the same destination as vignette but from a wholly different origin and pathway. Scenario starts out as a short piece of theater, a way of abbreviating lengthy works. It gets brought into our modern parlance in the 1960s when it is used to describe different hypothetical situations relating to nuclear war. And then, to bring it back to academia, it begins to be used to describe exactly the same thing as vignette, with the same benefits. From a paper by Jeonghyun Kim:
they are intended to reproduce a trust situation and facilitate an exploration of subjects' responses to those hypothetical situations.
But remember, defining terms is critical in academic research. So, which do you choose? Vignette or scenario?
For me, and this is just me, I prefer scenario. Scenario is rooted in acting rather than reading and for the research I'm doing, I want participants to imagine themselves in the scenario. I want them to see themselves in the story and a link, however subtle, to an idea of performing rather than merely taking in is, well, critical.
Illustrations for this volume of Learned are created by me using either DALL-e or MidJourney. If this use of generative A.I. bothers you, subscribe. If enough people do, I’ll hire an artist. Promise.
Gif. Hard g. Fight me.
Steve Brust uses vignettes to amazing effect in his novels, especially the Vlad Taltos ones. He puts them at the front of chapters and you don't think much of them until the conclusion of the novel when you realize that all those vignettes have set you up for an emotional gut punch that leaves the story lingering in your mind for days. Or months. Or years.
Not as critical as defining your terms, but...
Yeah, I know, everything I talk about in this article is critical and crucial. Sorry, but this shit stresses me out a bit. Getting it right is hard. But crucial.