Using Distant Reading in a Social Welfare Practicum Course

Jamie Borgan, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Tuka Al-Sahlani, The Graduate Center, CUNY

This assignment illustrates how distant reading can be used to encourage critical engagement with key documents in a particular field or discipline (in this case, the National Association of Social Workers’ Code of Ethics).

Introduction

We, Jamie and Tuka, are Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (ITP) certificate students at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). The ITP program encourages interdisciplinary collaboration to explore issues at the intersection of technology and pedagogy. After Tuka facilitated a workshop on distant reading for the ITP program, we decided to informally collaborate to answer the questions: How do we encourage the use of digital tools in a wider range of assignments and fields? What is the utility of applying distant reading in fields other than literature, such as social welfare? Together, we developed an assignment that utilized distant reading to encourage critical engagement with a key document in the field of social work (the National Association of Social Workers’ Code of Ethics). Jamie applied the lesson on the last day of her Social Welfare practicum course as an exercise in synthesis and forward thinking, while Tuka served as an outside distant reader of the National Association of Social Workers’ (NASW) Code of Ethics and brainstormed ways to complicate the reading of the Code. While this exercise was specific to a social work course, it could easily be adapted to any course focusing on professional development and used to consider foundational documents in other fields.

Distant Reading with Voyant Tools: Tuka

Distant reading is the reading of a corpus or set of corpora in its entirety by zooming out of the text and identifying and analyzing the patterns found in said text. Distant reading is made possible by using a computational application to text mine, or transform a text into structured data sets. Text mining allows text to become quantifiable data, which in turn allows for critical analysis from differing and wider perspectives.

Initially a literary reading and analysis strategy, distant reading is adaptable to any field and any machine-readable text. Distant reading allows a reader or researcher to gain quick access to most and least prominent ideas with a scan of the text’s lexicon, relationships among ideas, and patterns within a given corpus or set of corpora. Moreover, identifying, evaluating, and analyzing such patterns works well in critically analyzing a text in a classroom. Readers, students, and researchers can critically question the text and brainstorm ways to complicate, challenge, or develop the text.

A valuable tool commonly used to distant read and text mine is Voyant Tools. Voyant Tools is a free, open-source, web-based text reading and analysis environment. It's designed to make it easy for users to work with their own text or collection of texts (including texts in languages other than English) in a variety of formats, including plain text, HTML, XML, PDF, RTF, and MS Word. With both visual and textual representations of the text data, users are able to both distant read and close read by interrogating specific patterns. Its user-friendly interface and helpful resource pages make it an ideal tool to introduce distant reading and text mining to readers, students, and researchers. It is a tool that students can learn to use in the classroom and may utilize in their academic or professional futures.

Background on the Course: Jamie

This assignment was conducted in a seminar course for Master of Social Work (MSW) students enrolled in Hunter College’s Silberman School of Social Work. Fifteen students participated in the seminar, which was conducted remotely. The role of the seminar is to facilitate a guided space for students to consider issues of professional development as they complete a required practicum in a social work agency. This includes consideration of ethical issues that arise as they complete their practicum. The mainstream profession of social work currently takes as its guiding ethical document the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Code of Ethics, with a stated aim to advance a “set of standards that guide the professional conduct of social workers” (National Association of Social Workers 2021). This Code of Ethics informs realms of practice and licensure, as well as the accreditation standards outlined in social work’s accrediting body, the Council on Social Work Education (Council on Social Work Education 2022).

Reading the NASW Code of Ethics using Voyant Tools: Jamie

Goal

The goal of this exercise is to engage students in thinking critically about the role of language in social work’s Code of Ethics, specifically around what kind of language is used when employing a discourse about ethics and values. Social work claims to be a values-based profession, with stated aspirational ethics codified in this document. By using Voyant Tools to distant read the NASW Code of Ethics, students are asked to consider the Code of Ethics as a textual document and critically analyze how language shapes ideas and practice.

Procedure

Set up: Using Voyant Tools, I uploaded a PDF of the NASW Code of Ethics. However, the words “social” and “worker(s)” dominated the analysis, so I coded them as stopwords using Voyant’s “Define options for this tool” dropdown menu. With the elimination of “social” and “worker(s)” from the analysis, the following word cloud or cirrus was generated:

In-class exercise (20–30 minutes):

1. Explain the tool and show students the Voyant image without background information: I shared my screen to show the image. (In person, it could be shared on a smart board or other screen.) Social work students are familiar with the Code of Ethics, as it is reviewed in their curriculum, but I didn’t initially tell them what document I had used. I asked them what document they thought was used to generate this image. After explaining that it was the Code of Ethics, I explained the removal of words “social” and “worker(s).” I further explained how Voyant Tools works and explained correlations between frequency of use and size of the word.
2. Ask them for initial reactions: I used the following prompts: What words stand out? Are you surprised any words are as large or small as they are? What does this tell us about the Code of Ethics? What does the Code focus on?
3. Deepen the inquiry by connecting what they see to their own interpretation of social work values to develop a critical awareness of the document: I used the following prompts: What words are missing? When you think of the value that most drives your practice, how is it represented here? Are there pieces of social work ethics that feel important to you that you don’t see?
4. Debrief: I used the following prompts: Did this exercise allow any new insights into the Code of Ethics? Are there any things you think need to be emphasized differently than they are? What’s missing in terms of language from the Code of Ethics?
5. Contextualize this exercise within larger conversation about the profession: I introduced some of the current critiques of the Code of Ethics (for example, not talking enough about social worker s’ labor conditions) and we talked about where that fit into this analysis. We also discussed the context of this document (i.e., there are other groups within social work with codes of ethics), as well as what it might look like to do a comparative analysis of the code of ethics of other professions using this tool.

Outcomes and Reflection: Jamie

While I conducted this as a large group discussion, this could also be done in smaller groups or with a mix of reflective journaling and group sharing or as an assignment completed out of class as a reflective response. Students were quite engaged in this exercise; each prompt generated critical reflection on the presence or absence of key terminology used in social work (i.e., “clients,” “confidentiality,” and “justice”). The order of the prompts also led smoothly from a reaction to the text image to connections to their own practicum experience, as well as the connections or discord between their interpretations of social work values and the textual analysis of the Code of Ethics.

The placement of this exercise at the end of the semester also proved to be beneficial. This was our last seminar, so we were also processing semester-long learning in practicum; distant reading the Code of Ethics at this specific juncture was useful in relating much of what was learned throughout the semester back to the exercise.

Since this class was taught remotely, a major consideration for a facilitator is the responsiveness of the tool on small-screen devices. One student who was connecting via her phone mentioned that the image was challenging to see because it was so small. Although I shared the link, the cirrus is compacted on a smaller screen, which limits the analysis. These issues are important to consider in different iterations of this assignment, especially if it is conducted virtually.

Suggestion or Adaptations: Jamie and Tuka

While designed as a shorter reflective and synthesis exercise to open discussion, the additional functionality offered by Voyant Tools lends itself to a deeper analysis of a document. For example, during our preparatory conversations, we discussed how the Context pane can be used to examine relationships between words to better understand the context in which terminology is used. We also discussed how this exercise could be done comparatively with professional guidance documents in other fields. In the case of social work, this could include nursing or education or with different professional associations within social work, such as the National Association of Black Social Workers or international codes of ethics. In the classroom, we concluded this exercise by considering how Voyant Tools could be used in their social work practice. Distant reading proved to be a useful way of entering a social work text from a different vantage point. It allowed students to engage with the Code of Ethics in its entirety and highlighted themes and patterns that might not be easily perceived using other reading strategies.

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