123 Meme: Tracing Genres through organizations: a sociocultural approach to information design

Yet another blog meme, courtesy of folks at Chronicles of Dissent (by way of Threat Level). This time I’m supposed to grab the nearest book, open to page 123, go down to the 5th sentence and type up the 3 following sentences. Not sure why, or if someone is going to be patching all these together into some kind of mash-up, but I’ll play along… [From 123 Meme: michaelzimmer.org]

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“And I constructed mesoscopic analyses, chronological accounts, through a qualitative and simple quantitative examination of the twelve participants’ session in terms of their local activity systems and the genres they used. I describe each of the three analyses in more detail below.” In Tracing Genres by Clay Spinuzzi. I just picked this book up form a used bookstore online.

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and I’m just reading it now, but… overall it is written from a rhetoric understanding of genre more than an organizational analysis of genre, it seems to me. That’s interesting though and it makes some interesting corollary points.