Week 3: Vibe Scholarship - Applying AI to Close & Distant
Reading
Week 4: Reading Spivak with AI & Writing for Humanities and the
Sciences
This week
What I had planned, and what we’ll do
Conceptual Discussion: “What Do I Know?” Towards A Sociology of
Knowledge
Framing Language: “Carry” Your Reader
Frame up your Literature Review
Common Pitfalls of
Literature Reviews
Length - some reviews extend to 15k, 25k, 30k words. This is too
long!
Conversely, no signposting - straight into “X said this, Y said
that”
Issue of the “so what” question. Why does the reader care, or need
to know this?
Having sympathy for the reader / reviewer / examiner…
“Gap” not justified by the preceding review. The review must read
like a (legal?) dossier of evidence about the claim of
gaps
Styles may differ (e.g. Spivak (1988) and Zhang et al. (2025))
We’ll continue to focus on…
Concise writing (AI as concise writer – from prose
to (prosaic) poetry)
Structure and metadiscourse -
guide your reader through the evidence (AI as roleplay - lawyer?)
Evidence-based argument: gaps must be discovered
(AI as lawyer)
If it helps…
A literature review concludes with an argument for
existence of gaps
This argument must be proved: corroborated by the
evidence supplied in the review
This is hard to do and difficult to learn!
Structuring Your Literature
Review
Pick a principle: - General > Specific – can
confirm but also contrast (“General theories of
pedagogy suggest… However studies of adult language learners
also show…”) - Chronological (“By the 1960s, discussions of AI had
already become more muted…”) - Thematic (“The concept of ‘attention’ is
used in roughly similar ways in machine and human learning…”) - Spatial
(“Studies in Asian universities show that …; in contrast, findings from
North American universities suggest…”) - Developmental (“First I will
present an outline of the mind/body problem. I then move on to look at
critiques of the very distinction itself…”) - Other models? - Nested
Categories (chronology then thematic, etc)?
Some Guiding Notes
Specialization: Can work well when you want to convey a
sense of narrowing down a focus: Education > K12
> Math learning > Algebra > in rural Mid-west schools
Chronological: Can work well when you want to convey a
sense of progress
And how your work extends that progress
Thematic: Can work well when you want to convey a sense of
overlaps, intersection and
gaps
And how your work discovers and fills one of these gaps
Some Guiding Notes (2)
Spatial: Works well when you want to convey a sense of
cultural, spatial or geographic difference
And how your study attends to a location or zone not previously
studied
Developmental: Works well when you plan to build your
argument through a sequence of positions / thinkers / ideas
And show how you will blend, contrast or critique all of these
positions / thinkers / ideas
Nested categories
3 themes - each with their own history
Or: General > Special - special might involve
chronological and spatial differences. “General
pedagogy theories developed in the early/mid-twentieth century of
pedagogy suggest… More recent studies suggest national and local
cultures play a greater role. For instance, Indian scholars of K12
learning have shown…”
How do I Decide?
Often iterative:
Go forward to discover the gap
Move back from the gap to discover the
structure
Experiment with different structures
Mock up your structure (more on this soon)
Metadiscourse / Signposting
Assume your reader does not know the
literature
A literature review is often pedagogical - teaching
the reader about a field, in order to persuade them about the gap your
research fills
Helps you in authoring - does Y really follow from
X?
Be prepared to write / re-write this metadiscursive text often -
especially early, as you experiment with structural principles
(chronological etc)
Making It Explicit
Cannot be too explicit about your structure:
Introduction (future tense):
“In this literature review I will…”
(or if you prefer) “This review will…”
Conclusion (past tense):
“In this review, I have discussed literature relating to…”
(or if you prefer) “This review has…”
Along the way:
“In the last section, I discussed…. In the next, I will…”
Can be blended through connective language. “While the preceding
studies illustrated how use of AI in education has been studied
extensively, less has been said about how AI contributes to the
student/teacher relationship. Some exceptions include studies by X, Y
and Z…”
Develop a Repertoire of
Metadiscourse
Ask AI for suggestions…
“Give me examples of metadiscourse for a literature review”
Or “Give me a table and distinguish between metadiscourse used in
(a) scientific and (b) humanities discussions of literature”
Play as “Metadiscourse
Detective”
Go to:
https://ai.studio/apps/drive/1rKenX37bOW6E6u8xri1H1giuVqvoNi45
Play “Identify Metadiscourse”.
“Change Mode”, then play “Add Metadiscourse”
Group work:
Make Your Own Literature Review Game
Discuss and develop one key challenge with developing a literature
review. Could relate to structuring, metadiscourse / signposting, or
anything else.
Go to:
https://ai.studio/apps/drive/1rKenX37bOW6E6u8xri1H1giuVqvoNi45
Write a prompt that builds a game or app that helps practice or
address the key challenge.
Test and iterate!
Share and write-up results…
Sociology of Knowledge
Study of academic / scholarly societies
Navel gazing? Perhaps. But relevant for all academia because it
helps us calibrate our writing (tone / citations )
We’ve already touched on this
Two Cultures (Snow) – Humanities and the Sciences)
But also: what are financial /
political drivers of research? What are the conceptual
or ideological frames? What are the standards for
evidence or truth? Compare Spivak
(1988) to Zhang et al. (2025)
Sociology of Knowledge: Key
figures
Karl Marx (19th century): How do material conditions
influence thought?
Emile Durkheim (1912): The Elementary Forms of Religious
Life
Sigmund Freud (1930): Civilization and its Discontents
Karl Mannheim (1929): Ideology and Utopia
Thomas Kuhn (1962): The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions
Berger, Luckmann (1966): The Social Construction of
Reality
Bourdieu (1977): Outline of a Theory of Practice
Michel Foucault (1966, 1969): The Order of Things, The
Archaeology of Knowledge
David Bloor (1976), Knowledge and social imagery
Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar (1979), Laboratory Life
Edward Said (1976), Orientalism
Gayatri Spivak (1987), In Other Words
Judith Butler (1990), Gender Trouble
Sociology of Knowledge:
Common Points?
Thinking is not independent of conditions of
life
What are “conditions”?
Class (Marx), race, gender (Said, Butler, Spivak)
Social facts - fads & fashions (Durkheim)
Ideology - what fundamental beliefs structure or make possible our
thinking (Mannheim)
Paradigms (Kuhn), epistemes (Foucault), habitus (Bourdieu):
background forms of knowing and being
Related to unconscious bias (Freud)
Why does this matter?
Often asked to account for your positionality
Hard to do! What is your unconscious bias? What are you
conscious of being unconscious of?
If you knew, it wouldn’t be unconscious!
Irregular verbs:
“I think critically and independently”
“You think according to the influences of your
economic class and upbringing”
“She / He / They think as unaware and naive victims
of ideology”
Questions about an
academic community:
What is its jargon? Do you want to reproduce,
challenge or modify this jargon?
What are its standards of evidence? What does it
find persuasive? What are the key
questions it is asking?
How stringent are its expectations about method,
citation, formatting?
What are its markers of distinction and
discernment – “tickets to the game”?
Conversely: what seem to be the things not to
say?
Image
How can you
develop this tacit sense? Options:
Treat it like a research project - study academics like an community
Read journals
Attend conferences
Observe faculty
Join committees
Read or scan ‘campus’ novels & drama
Maintain a reflective journal
Share your own research, ask for feedback
Ask AI to play the role of an academic in a field
Relationship to Literature
Review
Write with your audience in mind
But - very important! – not as though you are already “in the
club”
Take a reference to Spivak. You might know your audience is likely
familiar with Spivak’s work. But of course you don’t say:
“As we all know, Spivak argued that”
Instead it is as though your audience forgot Spivak’s point and you
gently remind them: “Spivak argued that…”
But then you might twist this familiarity: “In the age of AI, it
might seem Spivak’s arguments regarding grammatization have dated.
However,…”
So a literature review can translate your own sociological research
into some careful phrasing that both reassures and
surprises your community
Homework!
Structuring and scaffolding your review
Revisit the recipe from week 3
Prepare 3 variations of the literature you have collected:
Chronological
Thematic
Nested / Blended (can be any combination of options)
For each: develop 3-6 headings that shows how you might organize the
literature you have collected so far
Add this to Week 5
Ask AI to do the same thing with your article collection, and write
3-5 sentences evaluating how useful you thought its results were
