Introduction

I became the makerspace coordinator at our library because it was closed after COVID and I felt just nerdy and creative enough to bring the service back. This was a large project and I spent a lot of time speaking with other librarians and visiting other libraries. I researched, purchased, and learned equipment that would be available in the library. I arranged the space, set up guidelines, created marketing, and made plans. We opened the space and I was really pleased with how positively it patrons responded to it. That was rewarding, but I was really surprised by how social the space became. I was seeing situated learning develop in front of me.

Lately I’ve been thinking more about how the physical space, the furniture, and the properties of all the different tools contribute to this learning. Tools, materials, places, technologies are so deeply interwoven into learning. Yet, as Sørensen (2009) says, we so often see them as instruments of learning. In a culture and economy that rewards outputs and results, we tend to reduce the richly nuanced experience of working in a space with particular tools to the product, the output (even when we recognize that product as learning). There’s much more to it, I think. These tools can take part in our learning in obvious and subtle ways that we can fruitfully observe and analyze. Depicting some of those intentional designs that shape learning is this section from a video about library renovations and affordances for collaborative learning.

I’m leaving this earlier part of my writing (originally posted as part of a class update for ERAM 557) in the work. Why? This work is about shifting meanings across time. Though this introduction points in directions that I didn’t ultimately pursue, it does contain the seeds of what it is becoming. I’m examining the situatedness of the meanings that we make and have in common. I’m focused on the library that I work in. I’m concerned with how the material world affects those meanings and situations. The final work seeks to outline a method of understanding the change of attitudes held by different groups when thinking about their use and meanings of a library after a natural disaster.

Were this a non-interpretive work, I would have put forth a hypothesis about the alterations and changes of these groups conceptualizations of the three spaces I identified in the previous paragraph - physical, information, and social. I want to, however, avoid that, and work to listen to the stories provided by my colleagues in the library. I’ve learned to be careful to avoid putting participants into an interview that constrains their answers to pre-conceived beliefs that I have as a researcher (Dwyer & emerald, 2017).

I’ve learned, also, in the last two classes, how hard it is to confront yourself in research. Each area of inquiry and each new theory can feel like a differently shaped box that I need to squish myself into, at least temporarily, to gain understanding. And, as anyone who’s had to squish themselves into something that doesn’t fit right can tell you, there’s often displeasure in this and self-doubt. “I’ve read Making Sense and Adding Sense. At least most of it! And I still feel like I’m putting a train-shaped set of ideas into my seashell-shaped self.”

Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis would hate this transmission-like metaphor of learning, I think. Hopefully, they’d see the struggle and recognize that aspect of my work. So, I include this artifact of a draft as bit of palimpsest to show how the work evolved - another echo of meanings changing over time. Curiously to me, time is not a dimension of the transpositional grammar - but change happens over the medium of time. In Adding Sense (Kalantzis & Cope, 2020) those dimensions cut across form and function, but time is always present as well.

I’ve got to get onto the rest, but I’m sharing this Bluesky post from John Darnielle below as a dose of humility.

Fig. 1: Bluesky post by John Darnielle: https://bsky.app/profile/themountaingoats.bsky.social/post/3loc4p6rkps26

I need to offer some notes on the making and the reading of this work. The interpretive methods appear in a later section, but they are used in the next section, "The Fires".

I've chosen different narrative methods to work through ideas of shifting meanings over time for the identity of the library where I work as a librarian. The active method in this version of the work (the one being presented as the project work for the ERAM 557, Spring 2025 class) is an auto-ethnographic one. For writing that in the auto-ethnographic mode I will be indicating the shift to this narrative form of writing with italics. I've also changed the names of any co-workers, library patrons, or other Altadena community members for privacy.

The other narrative mode that I will be discussing is narrative interviews. Unfortunately, due to time and workplace constraints it was impossible to complete the real work of interviewing, transcribing, and interpreting the interviews. Therefore, half of this work on interpretive methods is my writing on the changing meaning of the library for myself over the last five months. The other half presents a strategy for completing the interviews with fellow staff, community members, and local organizational leaders. I hope to begin work on that yet undiscovered research during the rest of this year. 

On January 7th, I called out of work. My wife and I were home sick after finally come down with COVID. I got texts from coworkers towards the end of the day saying that our library director was closing the building early because the windstorm, strong but not remarkable during the early part of the day, had intensified greatly in the afternoon. A power outage was likely. Another text just two hours later was foreboding: “Paloma can see the fire in Eaton canyon from their house,” and I looked out our bedroom window, but nothing was really visible, just a thin branch of smoke from where we were in Monrovia, California.

Of course, many of us already know the shape of the rest. The Eaton Fire, stoked by those powerful winds, would grow to over 10,000 acres by the next day. Over the next week, more than half of the structures in Altadena would be destroyed by fire and dozens lost their lives. Looking at the map of the damaged structures is remarkable. First, the destruction is dense. Second, and not as easily understood by non-locals, is that the map of damaged buildings coincides nearly perfectly with the map of Altadena. Other areas suffered from damaged buildings and lost property, Sierra Madre and parts of Pasadena most notably. Altadena, however, was completely blanketed by the fire. Amazingly, the two library buildings in Altadena had only the most minor damage.

Over the next two months, from January to March, library staff took on new roles and performed new duties at alternate sites across the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles County. We worked in supply distribution sites, child care facilities, parks and recreation facilities, and inside of other library systems. After remediation, we returned to work in our library building and began identifying needs and opportunities to work with/for the Altadena community.

Library as Boundary Object

Star and Griesemer (2015) have produced the idea of the boundary object, a concept that gives a name to that class of things (whether physical or abstract) that are coherent enough to maintain a stable identity despite being useful to multiple groups having varying conceptions of them, and interacting with them for different reasons. A particular library would be a great subject for researching through this concept. For example, libraries could be places of quiet and solitude for one group, and, for another, serve as a necessary source of information and technology resources. Many library users see the library as a social space of community collaboration.

I will be exploring the ways that our library, as boundary object, shifts, changes, and performs new roles across crisis events. To do so I will create a plan for conducting interviews with fellow staff members, library users, and community leaders for the purpose of learning how their conception of the library may or may not have shifted since the Eaton Fire. This will be an ethnographic methodology, as described by Marvasti (2010), as the research addresses a situated physical space and the social participants in that space and I will share an understandings with my colleagues.

The interviews will form a resource for narrative inquiry. Clandinin & Huber (2010) describe three commonplaces, or dimensions, that frame narrative inquiry:

1. Temporality “points inquirers toward the past, present, and future of people, places, things, and events under study”
2. Sociality “refer[s] to the milieu, the conditions under which people’s experiences and events are unfolding”
3. Place is the “specific concrete, physical and topological boundaries of place or sequences of places where the inquiry and events take place” (pgs. 436-437).

When reading the above outline of narrative research, I knew that I had to investigate using this interpretive method. This work will connect very deeply on a personal level to myself and my research collaborators. There’s a specific time, place, and milieu across this research that makes the method well-suited to working with complex events like the one that we have shared.

Fig. 2: Burned homes in Altadena 2025, photo by author: https://flic.kr/p/2qYQdVD

It’s curious how the features of academic writing can so easily seen to obscure the give and take, the decisions and reconsiderations, of the actual writing of the academic artifact and the subjectivity involved in the process. Objectivity, often still, is king. Debate and interpretation are to be performed by the academic work and its readers not visible as patches of reflexivity within the body of the work.

To that I would say - look at your most fragrant and potent cheese or a favorite fermented treat. Patches of contrary modes of existence can elevate our hybrid creations. As fungi and bacteria complicate and enrich the basic foods they live on, the personal and the subjective develop research into something more interesting, more rewarding to consume, and more connected to the world.

I’ve presented that a research plan for investigating the changing conceptions of the Altadena Library District would take on a narrative, interview-based research form. Before outlining the plan, the interpretive method will be explained.

What is interpretive research?

Interpretive research could perhaps be more easily described in terms of what it is not. The interpretive paradigm is not positivist - it does not need claims of objectivity or acts of empirical measurement in its methods. Therefore, interpretive research is not what we commonly call quantitative research - which would, at least, demand empirical methods of measuring with numbers. So far, so good, but how does interpretive research differ from qualitative research?

These three concepts - quantitative research, qualitative research, and interpretive research - are different enough to not allow me to put them all on the same shelf. Quantitative research differs form interpretive as mentioned already (it’s domain is numbers, not language). Yanow and Schwartz-Shea (2009) show how we can tease out differences between interpretive research and qualitative across three lines of reasoning (the following is summarized from Yanow and Schawrtz-Shea):

Methodological: practices of research from European and American origins with similar ontological and epistemological characteristics were described together as ‘interpretive’ in a bit of conceptualizing by naming.

1. Methodological: practices of research from European and American origins with similar ontological and epistemological characteristics were described together as ‘interpretive’ in a bit of conceptualizing by naming.
2. Pragmatic: As a way to distinguish ‘meaning-focused’ qualitative work from research that heavily focuses on representational evidence like surveys and interview methods.
3. Linguistic: As qualitative research got its name in comparison to quantitative, interpretive research, distinguished linguistically from qualitative.

That said, Schwandt’s (2015) distinctions are not as clear to me between qualitative and interpretive. Take the following examples.
Schwandt on Qualitative:

To call a research activity qualitative inquiry may broadly mean that it aims at understanding the meaning of human action. Perhaps the clearest use of the adjective is to distinguish between qualitative data—nonnumeric data in the form of words—and quantitative data—numeric data.

And on Interpretive:

However, the terms interpretivism, interpretive (or interpretative) social science, and the interpretive turn carry a somewhat narrower or more specific meaning. These terms all signal a fundamental difference between the two sciences: the natural sciences explain the behavior of natural phenomena in terms of causes, the human sciences interpret or understand the meaning of social action.

I see these two definitions as meaning much the same thing. Is that due to them both being compared implicitly to number-based inquiry results? I can see some distinction that calls back to Yanow and Schwarz-Shea: interpretive work is about social meaning.

Back to the beginning. Interpretive research is what then? My understanding now is that interpretive research is fluid, recognizing that meanings are influenced and shaped by context - social context, material context, researcher participation. Interpretive research is also complex (vs complicated) and can change or develop in response to researcher discoveries in unexpected ways. Interpretive research has ontological interests which serves it well in a project that looks to gather descriptions about what a library is and how it’s distinctive character stabilizes or shifts over time.

The video embedded below (starting at the 9:52 mark) from Degree Doctor explains via example how interpretive work is about entering into the world-understanding of others.

All my instincts and analysis tell me that this interpretive way of working research is the right one for the type of situation that I’m trying to describe and research. I do harbor concerns about interviewing and interpreting the stories of my colleagues. This is a shared experience and discussion originating from me could foreclose or shape certain possibilities of communication for others. Hampshire et al. (2014), however, make the argument that surfacing these relations openly provides context that can inform the reader of the research.

Fig. 3: Bill Cope, presenting intepretation: https://youtu.be/DowpoW8cQzA

Figure 3 shows a still from Bill Cope explaining the relationship between representation, communication, and interpretation. The image encapsulates the connections between interpretive research and interview-based narrative research. In this image we see Bill Cope, discussing one of the functions or the transpositional grammar that he has written two books on with Mary Kalantzis. Through the lens of the transpositional grammar that they developed we can understand interpretation as a function that changes meanings across agency. An internal representation is spoken aloud (another transposition) and “the listener in this example re-represents what they hear based on the context of their own experience and interest. This is interpretation” (Cope, 2020) .

Reconnecting this conceptualizing with the previous understanding of interpretive methods, a richer understanding of interpreting narrative interviews. While they ask the researcher to invest themselves into the experience of their research subjects, the consequences are more than communication. They are re-presentation and they also have to allow for the fact of shifts in meaning coming out of the interpretive move. These shifts are quite powerful. As Kalantzis and Cope write, “Transposition is a likelihood, an impatience, a risk, a danger, a possibility, an opportunity, an impossibility, a shock, a hell, a utopia” (2020).

Kalantzis and Cope’s vigorous language describes a method of making sense of the world that is powerful and affective. In many ways I want that, not only for myself but for the subjects of this research. One of the things I’ve noticed since the library reopened is that people want to enact agency in their lives once again. Cast out of their homes and communities many folks want to do something whether that’s to gather in a shared space, volunteer to help others, or take time away from the stresses of loss and grief to practice art or crafting. The transpositional grammar is as active as they are - will sharing meaning via interviews be a possibility, an opportunity, a recovery?

Shifting focus to the method of narrative interview research we see that it is grounded firmly within interpretive research paradigms, those that recognize that meaning is socially constructed and not objectively discovered. As Dwyer and emerald (2017, p. 12) note, "the evidence you gather may or may not themselves be stories or narratives" but the interpretive frame allows researchers to approach interviews as co-constructed meaning-making encounters.

These encounters can also end up having unique kinds of meaning transpositions as well. Wang and Yan (2012) note that interview manuscripts in research are "heavily edited before they are published," highlighting how interviews published forms and formats often obscure the complex interactions that produced them. Editing itself represents an interpretive act that frames the narrative presented to readers.

Herzog writes about how the social space and physical context of interviews is another site of meaning creation and social construction. In Herzog’s telling, the physical place of interviews becomes "one of the most concrete expressions of this process of boundary crossing," (2012, p. 10) highlighting how even practical aspects of research design carry interpretive significance. Herzog was writing about how choices in interview locations could have political or power dynamics. While my own interviews are unlikely to be as fraught with these dynamics as the examples of Israeli/Arab relations in Jerusalem, I will need to be mindful of where interviews take place.

Considerations for Respectful, Trauma-Informed Narrative Research

In recent years librarians writing for industry focused publications have both called for and noted the development of an orientation of trauma-informed care in libraries (Dudak, 2023; Tolley, 2020). As libraries have become more frequently called upon to attend to the needs of traumatized patrons and enact emotional labor, library workers are at risk of vicarious trauma that changes their outlook on the world (Tolley, 2020). If local conditions indicate the need for trauma informed care, as noted by Eades (2019), library workers will need to practice the six principles of such care:

1. safety;
2. trustworthiness;
3. peer support;
4. collaboration and mutuality;
5. empowerment, voice and choice; and
6. cultural, historical, and gender issues.

Therefore, in my own narrative research with colleagues I will need to use tools from the narrative based research methods that respect stories and align with such trauma-informed principles. This requires careful attention to methodological and ethical considerations. Entering into research with colleagues as subjects or co-subjects means that important conditions about our shared context needs to be addressed and revealed. Hampshire et al. emphasize that "treating the interview as an ethnographic object means acknowledging and foregrounding the social relations and context in which narration occurs, not just the narrative content" (2014, p. 226).

This does seem to be a significant challenge to realizing a fully fledged version of this project. I’m thinking of how best to foreground relations and realities that could affect responses and conversations. For example my status as a librarian in our library means that I’m ‘above’ some people in the organizational chart, but below others. Will these positions compromise or alter the responses that I might receive? I also want to be mindful of how my coworkers varied cultural backgrounds might change how they answer questions asked of them by me, a white man.

Researchers should adopt techniques like Holloway's "free association narrative interview method," which aims "to elicit deeply felt and difficult emotions, possibly conflictual, as well as taken-for-granted issues like identity and identifications" while "imposing as little as is possible of their own" interpretation (Dwyer et al., 2017). This approach begins with broad questions like "tell me about your experience of..." allowing participants to set the agenda and control their narrative. Another important aspect of interviewing is resisting the urge to fill silence and thus cutoff talk that may take time to develop from the interview subject. In the video from the University of Derby they discuss leaving room for silence.

Additional methods are also available. Dwyer, et al. suggest a “range of other story gathering techniques: walk-a-long interviews (that create a conversational space that may well be responsive to the space you are walking through) photo elicitation (either historical photos—say for life history research or asking participants to respond to photos they have taken) and digital storytelling” (2017, p. 13).

Parts of this advice seems hard to follow - imposing as little interpretation? That’s the methodology. The meaning then of this kind of research, returning to the transpositional grammar, is to interpret in a way that aligns with the subject’s unique background and experiences. Further, it hardly makes sense to ask questions about the library as boundary object. They don’t need a concept to try and understand while grappling with the profundity of their experience. That is my work as the interpretive researcher.

Analyzing & Concluding

Having developed the interpretive framework that informs the interview process, I want to finish with a sketch of how to use the transpositional grammar from Kalantzis and Cope as a pathway to understanding the meanings made by my colleagues. This is exactly the kind of use that the framework was created for as it will aid in interpreting the various “possibilities for meaning, the patterning of which is shaped by their material media: text, image, space, object, body, sound, and speech” (Kalantzis & Cope, 2020, p. 5).

I need to back up a bit and restate what this project is truly about.

Using an interpretive method of narrative interviews, I will explore how conceptions of the Altadena Library District’s library have changed since the Eaton Fires of January, 2025. A boundary object is an object or construct that retains a stable meaning across multiple understandings and utilizations by different groups. The analysis of interview materials and artifacts will be interpreted to determine if, and how, the stable meaning of the library for these groups has shifted over time. That analysis will be informed by the transpositional grammar framework.

The interview plan

In order to complete this project, the following strategy will be followed.

• Interviewees will be recruited with an invitation to tell their personal story of working at the library from before the January 2025 Eaton Fire through the present.
• Interviewees will be notified that all responses will be recorded and that, in any publication, that their identities will be obscured via a system of aliases.
• An invitation to meet with the interviewee will be offered outside of library spaces as step towards promoting feelings of independence from the workplace. The interviewee will have the option to select their preferred interview space.
• At the time of the interview, the interview subjects will be presented with the objective of the study (to research shifting perceptions of the library and their role as library workers over the time of the Eaton Fire) and be reminded that the information provided will be incorporated into academic research that may be published.
• The interview will take place, keeping in mind practices designed to center the speaker and acknowledge shared contexts and social conditions. For example, I should clearly state any power discrepancies that exist between myself and the interview subject.
• Once the interviewee has completed their story to their satisfaction the interview is complete.

Analysis via the transpositional grammar

The analysis stage of the project will proceed in the following manner.

• Audio recordings will be transcribed. This is a necessary step for any reproductions of spoken language in a textual medium.
• Meaning statements will be filtered according to: Pre-fire vs post-fire and Meanings about the library and library work vs meanings unrelated to the library and library work
• Meaning statements will be analyzed using the questions about the functions of meaning in the transpositional grammar.

The meaning function questions are depicted below in Figure 4. Answering these questions will provide a kind of meta-meaning of the interviewee’s statement. These meta-meanings can be compared across the time dimension (before/after fire) and according to group (library staff/library patron/community leader) as eventually all these groups will need to be included.

Fig. 4: The Functions of Meaning: https://newlearningonline.com/transpositional-grammar/infographics

It’s important to remember that the transpositional grammar works across different modes of meaning making. These are audio interviews, as being considered now, and audio meanings should be included in all their unique qualities. Figure 5 explains the differences between audio and text representations in the transpositional grammar.

Fig. 5: Text and Speech compared in the tranpositional grammer: https://newlearningonline.com/transpositional-grammar/infographics

A last little space for meanings

I’m quite disappointed really that 8 weeks (especially in this time) was not enough to conduct a series of interviews. Beyond that, an analysis of meanings would have been a truly substantial undertaking. My belief is that this method could be incredibly valuable for interview analysis. The idea of meta-meanings could be a useful tool for research that intersects with the idea of the boundary object. In Making Sense Cope and Kalantzis are always reminding the reader that the transpositional grammar is about patterns of differing coming out of a project that asks “Can we develop a grammar of the patterns of differing, rather than a grammar of similarity? What is the scope of human difference? What are the limits of our mutual understanding?” (2020, p. 10). Star and Griesemer’s idea of the boundary object is another concept that seeks to trace around, between, and across meanings that hover, vibrate, and resolve into patterns of significance. The concept and the method complement one another.

After the fires, my understandings of the library changed most powerfully in one way. I realized how closely library work needed to be tied to the local. No matter what professional best practices may be in vogue at any particular time, the work of the library and the librarian must be in service to the needs of the people tpeople whoze it. These words would never have been objectionable to me before, so what’s different? These are the kinds of things that troubled me when driving home after the library first re-opened after the fires. Figure 6 shows a typical view that I experienced on such drives.

Now I see how many nodes of meaning and connection are local. The fire and its aftermath surfaced them in razor shrazor-sharp Altadena grows up into the high foothills of California shrubland in the San Gabriel Valley - a library is ecological. Altadena neighborhoods were constructed in tight, sidewalk-less development in the postwar era because it is unincorporated and lacked citizen oversite - a library is political. Historically, Altadena has been an enclave of black culture, black business, and black creative work - a library is cultural. Our library connects to all these qualities and characteristics and in all the combinations that come together at any particular time. The library, any library, is becoming, all the time, becoming.

Fig. 6: Eaton Fire damage in Altadena, CA: unpublished photo by author