the RQ and the YK

As a photographer and a writer my research questions (RQ) are typically begged. This solicitation comes from within, something visceral, a solar-plexis response to an impetus, an artifact.

Designer Richard Seymour in a recent Ted Talk describes the moment as "stupefying," and I think he's right. When something has an affect on us, stupefying or otherwise, I think it begs the question, the research question, at the very least, why.

I'm more partial to "How is it that..."

How is it that the final sequence to American Beauty brings me to tears regardless of how often I've watched it?

How is it that just seeing my yellow kayak (YK) decreases my heart rate?

How is it that in our fervor to keep under God in the Pledge of Allegiance we've overlooked the significance of the word that follows - indivisible?

All of these are artifacts and all of these pull at me for different reasons. In wanting to know those reasons we intuitively develop research questions. So, all we're doing here is putting a name to it, calling out a method of natural human inquiry and qualifying it through rhetorical analysis.

The method was first formalized around 500 b.c. by Aristotle. The method works on the premise of the RQ. These questions typically focus on the tenets of the communication process and/or the transactional model.

The process has a rhetor, an audience, a situation and a message.

The transactional model has a sender/receiver, context, and a message along with a few other aspects like noise and effects.

While none of these can be discounted in the process of finding meaning, or better, shared meaning, the situation, aka context, are what drive most of my rhetorical analyses. They also drive my creative content. Take a look at this analysis on designing the photograph for the playbill and posters for the Facing East.

We also bring context to the situation which impacts the way we perceive and critique rhetoric, making all this wonderfully subjective.

As Harold Hill might say, the hours I spend in my yellow kayak are golden. The adventures there establish a foundation upon which I ask my research questions when it comes to why I find my zen in a big yellow banana. By definition, then, any object or item, lyric or verse, image or etching, sculpture or screen, word or wisdom becomes a qualified artifact if it has drawn from you something stupefying.