I was pretty excited when I read this a few days ago (via pointer from one of Andrea Handl pages, but lost where exactly):
The central method, or bundle of methods, of this project is ‘thick participation’ (Spittler 2001), the radicalized form of ‘participant observation’ as brought to anthropology by Rivers (????) and Malinowski (1922, 1926).
According to Gerd Spittler ‘thick participation’ ” implies apprenticeship and practice, natural conversation and observation, lived experience and sensuous research. Because this powerful method is time consuming it is less threatened by its critics than by bureaucratic grant restriction.” (2001:1)
The project is ‘open research’ in several dimensions. My website and weblog simultaneously serve multiple purposes: they are my notebook, writing desk and multimedia online filing system, they maintain world/webwide communication about the ongoing project with fellow scientists, they present my project to a wider public, and — above all — both constitute a part of the communication and interaction with the members of “my cyberian tribe”. Website and weblog accompanying the project constitute a fusion between spheres, which normally are well seperated in anthropological research: field-data, informal scientific discussion, public-relations work, and a part of the field itself. This diverse groups have access to the same dynamic and interactive material, which contains some risks: What appears perfectly sound to e.g. a game-modder may seem awkward to a scientist and vice versa. My reputation in the modding-community as well as in the scientific community may be at stake — a fellow-modder jokingly already named me “teh intellectuale” (int. missp. for “THE Intellectual”).
This is maxmode-work-in-progress by Alexander Knorr aka zephyrin_xirdal (weblog). See also list of references (re: online ethnography and things around).
Few things:
- Nice to see that I’m not alone in bridging separated spheres :)
- Thick participation is something I’m going to look at. Unfortunately the reference seems to be in German.
- It’s great example of writing online. Wonder if I can find tools that would work for me – PhD wiki is a very tempting idea, but I’m not sure it would fit well between work in progress hypertext of weblog and linear documents I need for publications. I still write and edit bigger pieces in Word, not sure if wiki would be a nice addition…
Tags: blogging as research, ethnography, methodology, PhDArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/04/13.html#a1545; comments are here.
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