Accounting for fieldwork in three areas of modern geology: A situated analysis of textual silence and salience

While researchers have long pointed to “incomplete information” accompanying various parts of the research article (Latour & Woolgar 1979, Gilbert & Mulkay 1984, Lynch 1985, Berkenkotter & Huckin 1995), silences surrounding the research account have been gaining the explicit attention of discourse analysts only recently (Huckin 1997 and 1999, Swales 1998 and 1999, Dressen 1998). Recent work has shown that textual silence abounds in academic disciplines such as geology, where most details from the fieldwork mission seem to disappear from the published account (Dressen & Swales 2000). Indeed, a number of diachronic studies have demonstrated an increase in authorial discretion in the research account over the past 150–200 years (Bazerman 1988, Salager-Meyer 2000), and in this, geology is no exception.; In order to identify and explain textual silence in modern geological field reporting, this study undertakes a situated genre analysis of a corpus of 103 recent articles (1995–1999) from three subdisciplines in geology. As a socio-historical analysis, it establishes the place the practice of fieldwork has come to occupy in the geological research community over time. A linguistic analysis of the corpus then identifies a specific Field Account part-genre in the geology research article, and further reveals the linguistic and discoursal strategies by which authors may discreetly give details of their fieldwork and work to establish their credibility and field competence. Which field details are considered communally relevant is next determined through the analysis of the various “recontextualizations” (Linell 1998) of one field study, through the convention-driven distillation of the study's field results. The appropriateness and relevancy of only certain field details is further established through a series of text-based interviews with three expert geologists. Here, using Bourdieu (1984) and Engestrom (1991), we see how the researcher-writer maneuvers between “the said” and “the unsaid” in each text instantiation, taken as a site of need-based and innovational interaction between individual actors, the collectivity, and the institution. Finally, a discussion of the implications for training junior geologists in research writing closes the study.