Slow Talk #2: A Thematic Conversation about “Intellectual Experience”

Oliver Ding

Published in

TALE500

7 min readMay 26, 2023

How to turn “Intellectual Experience” into “Developmental Resouces”?

The Slow Talk project is a collaborative project between Activity Analysis Center and TALE Center.

TALE stands for Thematic Analysis Learning Engagement. I launched TALE as a new Knowledge Center on Jan 1, 2023. It aims to run the Thematic Engagement project with the following mission:

Telling the story of innovation, thematically!

The Slow Talk project is launched as a possible theme on Jan 23, 2023. Inspired by a friend of mine, I decided to use “Slow Talk: From Controversy to Collaboration” to frame a thematic space and run a knowledge curation project in order to achieve “improve communication” and “enhance understanding”.

The ARCH Framework is a knowledge resource of the Slow Talk project. Based on the ARCH Framework, I developed a working definition of the theme “Slow Talk”.

On Feb 22, 2023, I published the first “Slow Talk” case study. You can find more details in Slow Talk: The ARCH of Thematic Engagement.

Today I will share the second case study: A Thematic Conversation about “Intellectual Experience”.

A Conversation about Intellectual Experience

Last week, I had a chat with a friend of mine. The primary theme of our conversation is “Intellectual Experience”. It refers to the following question:

How can we turn “Intellectual Experience” into Developmental Resouces for Advanced Life Strategy?

I used the method of “Mapping Thematic Conversation” to make several diagrams about our thematic maps. The diagram below represents our theme network around “Intellectual Experience”.

A Method called Mapping Thematic Conversation

A theme is a meaningful keyword, and a theme network is a set of connected meaningful keywords. In order to discuss the theme network behind a conversation, I developed the model below.

Initial Theme/Primary Theme: Initial Theme refers to a meaningful keyword that triggers a conversation while Primary Theme refers to a primary theme of a conversation.
Focus: A person’s Situational Theme Network
Landscape: A person’s Relevant Theme Network

“Focus” is about situational conversations. For example, a conversation around a post on Linkedin, a discussion around a Twitter thread, an email conversation, etc.

Once a person particulate in a situational conversation, a set of themes from his/her life/work themes would be activated. These themes become a person’s Focus. We can detective a person’s Focus (Situational Theme Network) from comments, messages, etc.

However, it is not easy to see “Landscape” which refers to a person’s Relevant Theme Network. A person can’t say many themes in a situational conversation, but he/she always thinks about more themes than what he/she could say. Landscape (Relevant Theme Network) refers to a set of themes that have a direct connection with the Situational Theme Network.

In other words, we see a person’s thematic thinking and speech as a whole which has two parts:

Focus (Situational Theme Network): speech in the situation.
Landscape (Relevant Theme Network): thinking in the mind.

If Landscape (Relevant Theme Network) is in the mind, how can a person know another person’s Landscape?

Social network services platforms share a set of design patterns such as Profiles, Posts, Messages, Streams, etc. These patterns offer various ways to allow a person to know other people.

Profiles: a person may use some keywords to describe his/her life/work interests and significant experiences.
Posts: a person may actively share ideas and stories by publishing posts. In this way, he/she builds a dynamic autobiography in which we can find his/her life themes.
Messages: while Profiles and Posts are public, Messages are a private communication channel. In a private conversation, a person could unfold more relevant themes for others.

A deep thematic conversation requires each other to take two moves:

Move from My Focus to Your Focus
Move from Focus to Landscape

The first move aims to achieve a good situational thematic conversation on the surface. The second move could build a deep relevant thematic conversation.

Based on a deep thematic conversation, two people can build a great mentionship which refers to mentioning each other relevantly and accurately.

This is a small step to building social capital, at least for professional workers. You can find more details about the above diagram and the method in Slow Talk: The ARCH of Thematic Engagement.

The “Oliver — Grace” Thematic Conversation

Grace is not the real name of my friend. I just use it as a fake name for the case study.

The primary theme of the Oliver — Grace Thematic Conversation is “Intellectual Experience”. See the diagram below.

Focus: Situational Theme Network

The primary theme “Intellectual Experience” is the center of our conversation. It is also connected to our situational theme network.

Oliver’s Situational Theme Network:

Activity Analysis
Creative Life Curation
Advanced Life Strategy
THEORY — PRACTICE
Education

Grace’s Situational Theme Network:

Career Development
Educational Management
Cross-culture Leadership
Educational Entrepreneurship
Life Transitions

Grace’s Landscape

The diagram below lists several themes that form a theme network about Grace’s Relevant Theme Network.

Life Narrative
Sociology of the Family
Developmental Motherhood
Abduction method
Biographic-narrative interpretive method (BNIM)

Do you notice the difference between Grace’s Focus (Situational Theme Network) and Landscape (Relevant Theme Network)?

Grace’s Focus indicates her present career situation while her Landscape refers to her past career history. Several years ago, she was a Ph.D. student in the Sociology of the Family. At that time, she applied the BNIM method and the Abduction method to study developmental motherhood. In general, Life Narrative is her primary interest.

However, Grace’s current job is about managing educational institutions. She is not satisfied with her busy daily schedule.

Oliver’s Landscape

My Relevant Theme Network includes the following themes:

Ecological Practice Approach
Creative Cognition
Supportance Theory
Theoretical Sociology
Platform for Development

What’s the difference between my Focus and my Landscape?

I didn’t directly talk about the Ecological Practice Approach. However, Grace is one of my friends who watch my journey of developing the approach.
Creative Cognition is related to the “Creative Life Theory” project which includes “Creative Life Curation” and “Advanced Life Strategy”.
Supportance Theory is a member of the Ecological Practice Approach.
Theoretical Sociology is a major theoretical resource of the “Creative Life Theory”. I talked about it and its founder with Grace many years ago.
The Platform-for-Development framework is an application of Supportance Theory.

In the past several years, I worked on connecting THEORY and PRACTICE. On the PRACTICE side, I consider knowledge creators as my primary audience. My practical frameworks are all about supporting knowledge creators.

Emerging Theme

Emerging Theme is a really useful concept for applying the Themes of Practice approach to discussing Life Discovery and Personal innovation.

Unlike other themes, Emerging Themes are hard to name and detective by normal people.

We can use “I’m seeking to experiment with…” as a trigger to explore something new.

This is the beginning of the journey of Life Discovery. At this time, we have some ideas about our aspirations, but we don’t have a name for them. In other words, we don’t have a possible theme for our journey.

Why don’t we have a name for the journey?

When someone calls us and gives us a challenge, most of the time we don’t have a ready solution immediately.

If the challenge matches our deep life aspirations, the call will become a meaningful creative trigger that guides us to a new journey.

For example, Mani Vannan’s asked me the following question on Jan 22, 2023:

Hi Oliver, Which of your models will you use to improve communication and enhance understanding?

It inspired me to rethink my knowledge frameworks. In the past several years, I worked on theories about Activity, Relevance, Affordances, Concepts/Themes, and Anticipation. I didn’t directly work in the field of Communication Research.

However, I made some knowledge frameworks about thematic controversy, collaborative projects, slow cognition, etc. Mani Vannan’s question encouraged me to curate these frameworks together.

I didn’t have an existing thematic space about it. I had to make a new one.