I’m reading through several books on ethnography, switching back and forth, thinking about all kinds of connections to my research. This post is a bit of reflection about research notetaking in ethnography and my uses of weblog in this respect.
I started to read from Life online: Researching real experience in virtual space by Annette Markham. I met Annette at AOIR 5.0 last year, but then I didn’t anticipated that her work would be that relevant for me (my del.icio.us shows* that I was browsing through her papers while preparing for the conference). This time I picked up the reference to her book from autoethnography chapter by Ellis and Bochner. Funny – how much you need the “right moment” to see things in front of your eyes – how much your current mindset becomes lenses that sift through the world around you.
Anyway, I got the book. I’m still getting used to the reflective ethnographic writing in it, so just two observations.
1. Having met the people behind the book makes reading experience totally different. I met Annette and talked to her briefly, but I also met one of her respondents, Terry Senft (later: found that book excerpt with Terry being interviewed by Annette is online). I have a sense of knowing Terry much better since I lurk in her blog (journal?) as well. I guess what changes the experience is not only the fact of meeting Annette and Terry, but observing them two interacting, sensing a close friendship between or knowing that Terry joins (joined?) Annette at Virgin Islands for half a year.
It’s like discovering the roots of the relation while having a sense of what it came to be… Like reading a book from the end… Funny – I experienced similar feelings while reading my own weblog yesterday, seeing older posts in the light of knowledge of now – ideas and relations that grew out of those seeds.
2. (which is supposed to be the topic of this post :) I realised how heavily Annette relies on her research notes: visibly, by including them next to transcripts, and invisibly, by (I guess) using them to reconstruct the process of interviewing as well as emotions and thoughts around it.
I tried to put myself into her shoes, thinking of how I would write about my research this way, and realised that I’m in trouble.
I have a lot written down or captured in one form or another, but this is definitely not enough to reconstruct my experiences.
[And now I decide to continue in another post :)]
* Of course del.icio.us is not intended to be used as a trace of bookmarking history – there is no way to get permanent link to a page showing that I bookmarked Annette’s homepage on 14 September 2004. Now the link is at http://del.icio.us/mathemagenic/people/3 or http://del.icio.us/mathemagenic/ethnography/2 or http://del.icio.us/mathemagenic/papers/10 – and all of these will change as I add more bookmarks on respective topics**.
** And while I was typing this I found out that there is a way to link to the evidence :) It’s the history of bookmarks for Annette’s homepage. Unlike other del.icio.us pages url pages are not separated by multiple screens (extreme example).
Tags: blogging as research, ethnography, methodologyArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/04/07.html#a1535; comments are here.
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