David Bloome (2011) in his web post, “Five Ways to Read a Curated Archive of Digital Literacy Narratives,”  from “Stories that Speak to us: Exhibits from the archives of digital narratives,” suggests that as readers of narratives, we seek to understand each narrator’s rhetoric, seeing each story as having a claim and a warrant; the narrators appear to be calling the reader to assess the validity of the argument. However, Bloome writes: “While the dominant way of reading scholarly works is in terms of an “argument” structure, we need to be careful about such readings because perhaps we may give too much power to and have too much faith in “rationality,” and we may overlook other ways of reading”(para. 5). On his web page, Bloome offers five different lenses to approach a narrative. The Emic approach may help to avoid this pitfall.

 

The Emic Approach

 

Approaching the narratives from the emic framework, as suggested by Bloome (#5 para. 3), one might consider how each narrator structures the composition through personal history, argument, body language, and intonation. In other words, the artists utilize both visual and auditory literacy to convey meaning. Author David Fettermen explains the emic approach:

 

An emic perspective is fundamental to understanding how people perceive the world around them. Qualitative researchers often begin by asking people open-ended questions about how things work from their perspective. This allows an individual to frame the concept, idea, or situation and then elaborate on it. This provides a more accurate depiction of the individual's “mental map” or cultural understanding. (p.250)

 

       From the lens of the Emic approach, one can see, in these five narratives, that the tellers do not just convey the story, their telling influences the rhetoric. Some of the artists display what Selfe calls “rhetorical responsiveness,” risking themselves to communicate the importance of literacy, drawing the reader in (Sect: Rhetorical Responsiveness, 2011, paras. 9, 11). Their willingness to unveil the passion of their art cannot help but make meaning to the reader.