Critical Vignette, Again
Learned Vol. 7, Issue 1, Redux
After the glorious crash-and-burn of Volume 6, I decided that Volume 7 would be the perfect time to start writing that book that I kept talking about. Only what happened was that my academic research took off in a way I couldn’t have anticipated, resulting in several presentations and papers that took up all of my time. So, once again, Learned suffered in sacrifice for my other pursuits.
Was it worth it? I dunno. The academic pursuits are definitely interesting and ongoing, but I do regret that they collided with my personal efforts so hard that I was unable to keep up with the weekly deadline for an essay. And, in the end, Volume 7 got cut short just like Volume 6 had.
But, we rally. In the course of what few issues I was able to get out during the year, we looked at the nascent impact of AI on education, an area my professional academic research overlaps with. We also experimented with a new subsection of Learned called Pitchmark. It turns out there’s not as much overlap between the Learned audience and a music audience as I had hoped.
Volume 8 of Learned begins in just a few days. What lessons can I take from the crash outs of Vols. 6 and 7? I’m not sure, other than don’t get overwhelmed and start missing issues because that leads to missing months which leads to missing half a year’s worth of issues. Will this year be better? I hope so. I’ve planned it better.
We’ll be looking at words that are both created by and influence academia and we’ll be talking about some of the problems that have been cropping up, especially recently. I hope you’ll come along with us.
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.
2025: I’m still conducting research using the vignette method. This year I’ll be looking at Japanese students’ preferences for when and how much Japanese they want their non-native Japanese speaking teachers to speak. The assumption is that they’ll want as much as possible. However, the critical factor here is that Japanese people, by and large, are not used to hearing non-Japanese people speak Japanese. That could lead to confusion and misunderstanding whereas if the teacher had just spoken in English, it might have been avoided.
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?
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot - when we teach vocabulary, we have to teach it in context. The trouble is that some words have a lot of different contexts and so, it’s important to teach all the different ways a word can be used. But, conversely, if a given context is not important right now, it’s hard for the learner to remember. So we only teach the word in context. But words have lots of contexts…you see the issue.
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?
Word count is something I think needs to be reconsidered. When journals were all print, word count determined how much it would cost to make the journal and thus word counts needed to be minimized in the right places. However, almost everything is published digitally these days. I think we need to re-think word count in favor of thoroughness.
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.
In the first footnote, which you can see below, I made the first statement about how much AI is used to create Learned. Based on the reaction, I moved away from using AI in latter issues. Unfortunately, when it comes to AI, the genie is out of the bottle. We’re rapidly reaching a place where not using AI will be willfully disadvantaging yourself in your studies or your work. I’ll talk more about this in this next volume.
Learned, Volume 8, Issue 1 comes out Thursday, April 3rd Tokyo time. Hope to see you there!
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.