The internet is a many-splendored thing, and its advent and success has vastly expanded the reach of your average ethnographer. Information that we could once only access in face-to-face interactions can now be collected remotely, from across an ocean, across continents, across time and space. This is a great opportunity to learn more about people, … Continue reading »
Tagged with ethnography …
Quantitative: Why You Need Stories
I want you to take a look at these visualizations. These are all charts depicting what skill a Plant Wars player is training, as well as how many stat points they receive as a result of their fertilizing of their plant. (There is a direct correlation between the amount of fertilizer used and the stat … Continue reading »
What Ethnographers Do: Interview Guide
Part of the documentation we assemble before every project is an interview and observation guide. It’s supposed to serve as a checklist for supplies, as well as a guideline for how to conduct the interview. It includes the information we are trying to get at, as well as the questions we’re using to do so. … Continue reading »
What Ethnographers Do: Data Management
One of the greatest challenges for ethnographers is what to do with all of the data we collect. In addition to the physical notebooks full of scratch notes, we also have lots of digital data–from audio recordings of interviews to photographs taken during observations to the field notes we write up after an interaction with … Continue reading »
What Ethnographers Do: Field Notes
Field notes, for the ethnographically uninitiated, are detailed descriptions of field work (interviews with and observations of people). Contrary to what the name suggests, field notes are not actually taken in the field while we are interviewing and observing people. Rather, while we are in the field we take scratch notes. In our scratch notes … Continue reading »
Ethnography and the Bleedy Edge: How to Deal With Useless People
In an ideal world, we would only work with people we wanted to work with. Teams would be perfectly composed of people with complementary skillsets and compatible personalities. Everyone would be honest about their committment to a project, forthcoming about other demands on their time and energy, and considerate of the needs and feelings of … Continue reading »
Field Note Experimentation
The least enjoyable part of being an ethnographer, my class mates and I have discovered, may be the writing up of field notes. The notes we take in the field, which we actually call scratch notes, have to be translated into something that is reasonably coherent and human readable. Pictures have to be added in … Continue reading »
Making Numbers Talk: Something Exciting in Design Ethnography
I have always refused to be constrained by the conventions of a genre, discipline, or society. Fitting neatly into such a compartment cramps my style, harshes my zen, and squashes my favorite lampshade hat. As a result, my journey from quantitative researcher to qualitative researcher has not been without frustration. In general, both communities seem … Continue reading »
And Now for Something No One Will Want To Read (Or, Design Ethnography: Like Anthropology, but Less Conflicted)
Design Ethnography: Like Anthropology, But Less Conflicted Academic anthropology is the unholy love child of natural science and colonialism, and is burdened with the resulting identity issues that one might expect from such a union. It is a discipline “severely divided and deeply troubled in its self-identity… torn and fragmented, [anthropology] has lost its professional … Continue reading »
