The vision of an ethnographer physically going to a place, establishing themselves in the activities of that place, talking to people and developing deeper understandings seems so much simpler than ...
Transcription and reflexivity
Some sort of weird IPA chart ~ CC BY-SA Nickshanks, Grendelkhan, Nohat
For research projects that incorporate transcripts, the transcription process can feel like a necessary evil that you have to get through in order to move on to “real” analysis. Transcribing recordings yourself can be a revelation and a great way to get close to your data, but at the same time there’s a wall of tedium people hit, when transcription would be gladly traded for a less painfully tedious task, like maybe plucking your own eyelashes out using two playing cards as tweezers. (If you blink you have to start over, but at least you don’t have to transcribe anything.)
Even hiring transcription out can be tedious. Everyone seems to hit the tedium wall eventually, and transcripts trickle in slowly.
Last week I saw a list message from an anthropologist looking for someone to transcribe interviews with speakers of an Appalachian variety of English — which reminded me of a project I worked on that included interviews with speakers of a non-standard (and often stigmatized) flavor of American English [1]. One of the most interesting things about the project for me was seeing how ideas about language and representation surfaced during the transcription process.
What does it mean to be a participant observer in a place like Wikipedia?
The vision of an ethnographer physically going to a place, establishing themselves in the activities of that place, talking to people and developing deeper understandings seems so much simpler than the same activities in multifaceted spaces like Wikipedia. Researching how Wikipedians manage and verify information in rapidly evolving news articles in my latest ethnographic assignment, I sometimes wish I could simply to go the article as I would to a place, sit down and have a chat to the people around me.
Wikipedia conversations are asynchronous (sometimes with whole weeks or months between replies among editors) and it has proven extremely complicated to work out who said what when, let alone contact and to have live conversations with the editors. I’m beginning to realise how much physical presence is a part of the trust building exercise. If I want to connect with a particular Wikipedia editor, I can only email them or write a message on their talk page, and I often don’t have a lot to go on when I’m doing these things. I often don’t know where they’re from or where they live or who they really are beyond the clues they give me on their profile pages. Read More…
The Demise of the Ethnographic Monograph?
As ethnographic practice has spilled out into the broader world of design and policy-making, business strategy and marketing, the monograph has not remained the singular format for presenting ethnographic work. In the spaces I’m most familiar with, the design community and high-tech industry, it is the conference paper (see EPIC, DIS, CSCW, and CHI, etc), the technology demo, and within corporate walls, the PowerPoint slideset or edited video that have become established formats for delivering ethnographic outputs. There is great pressure in some subfields to offer clearly outlined implications and propose practices alongside (or instead of) the theory and holistic description of the more conventional format.
In light of the publication this week of my own ethnographic monograph titled Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana, I thought it worth considering the question: why should someone outside of the Academy read my book or any other of this genre?
Read More…
A Retrospective of Talks Given by Ethnographers at Lift Conference since 2006
Pic by Ed Horsford
Of all the conferences that are dedicated to discussions on technology and society, there’s one that has continued to consistently curate an amazing line of up speakers while maintaining an intimate environment for meaningful exchanges without any elitist barriers to participation – Lift! Since 2006, I’ve been following Lift because they continually have featured speakers who focus on the social side of technology.
So when Nicolas invited me to speak at Lift ’12 in Geneva, I broke my promise to not leave my field site for a year. I took a break for a week and it was well worth it because I got to meet people whose work I’ve been following for a while. I was also forced to analyze my data, which wasn’t a bad thing. My talk, Dancing with Handcuffs: The Geography of Trust in Social Networks, was about some of the ethnographic work I’ve been doing this past year in China.
After my talk, I had a chance to chat with one of the people I’ve been virtually brain-lusting for years, Nicolas Nova, ethnographer, co-founder of Lift, and Lift program curator. Nicolas found time to sit down with me to give a retrospective of past ethnographers who have given talks at Lift.
Oh and one of the best parts about Lift is that there are videos for each speakers! Each of the talks are around 15 to 20 minutes and they are pretty dense, so read this when you have a chance to ponder about the wonders of life and ethnography! Read More…
A sociologist’s guide to trust and design
Coye Cheshire at a recent seminar at UC Berkeley's BID Lab entitled "Trust, Trustworthiness, or Assurance? Considerations for Online Interaction and Technology-Mediated Communication" Pic by Heather Ford licensed under a CC BY SA 3.0 license.
Trust. The word gets bandied about a lot when talking about the Web today. We want people to trust our systems. Companies are supposedly building “trusted computing” and “designing for trust”.
But, as sociologist Coye Cheshire, Professor at the School of Information at UC Berkeley will tell you, trust is a thing that happens between people not things. When we talk about trust in systems, we’re actually often talking about the related concepts of reliability or credibility.
Designing for trustworthiness
Take trustworthiness, for example. Trustworthiness is a characteristic that we infer based on other characteristics. It’s an assessment of a person’s future behaviour and it’s theoretically linked to concepts like perceived competence and motivations. When we think about whom to ask to watch our bags at the airport, for example, we look around and base our decision to trust someone on perceived competence (do they look like they could apprehend someone if someone tried to steal something?) and/or motivation (do they look like they need my bag or the things inside it?)
Although we can’t really design for trust we can design symbols to signal competence or motivation by using things like trust badges or seals that signal what Cheshire calls “trust-warranting” characteristics. We can also expose through design the “symptoms” of trust – by-products of actions that are associated with trust such as high customer satisfaction. But again, by designing trust seals or exposing customer reviews, we’re not actually designing trust into a system. We’re just helping people make decisions about who might behave in their interest in the future. Read More…
Interviewing for Introverts
(Old School) Sony Voice Recorder ~ CC BY-SA Stilfehler
Interviews are one of my favorite things in the qualitative toolkit. They weren’t always.
Working at a research institute I’ve gotten to hear a lot of interviews, and they have pretty much always been fascinating — but I was uncomfortable with conducting them myself. I’m not exactly a social butterfly, and the thought of being an official interviewer asking official questions of research participants was a bit unnerving. You have to sort of lead (really more like guide) a conversation, and you may have to recruit strangers to participate, sometimes without being able to compensate them for their time. It seems like a job for an extrovert who loves talking to people. I’ve known qualitative researchers who were geniuses at talking to people (among other things), and have always envied them. But barring the right (or wrong?) combination of alcohol and setting, that’s not my skill set.
What I figured out eventually though is that interviewing is not so much about talking to people as it is about listening to them. Not to say that talking doesn’t play a role in getting to the listening — the Talking Geniuses (still jealous) do great work with their combined talking and listening skills. But being an introverted type can also be made into an advantage.
Below are some interviewing concepts that I’ve found useful to keep in mind when doing interviews, along with some practical suggestions that might work especially for those of us who aren’t gifted talkers [1].
1. Don’t put words in people’s mouths. In fact, talk as little as possible. A pause that’s a bit longer than a pause would be comfortable in everyday conversation can work wonders in provoking further insights from a respondent. It signals that you’re waiting for them to say more, and gives them time and space to think more deeply. (See? Awkward pauses aren’t a reflection on your social skills. It’s a research technique.)
On Opting-Out at the Airport
pic by ShoZu CC BY-SA 2.0
When I teach qualitative research methods the first assignment involves a participant-observation exercise in public spaces and I encourage students to disrupt those settings, at the very least by asking questions, but even better by participating in ways that provoke a response in others. For the very brave these may become what Garfinkel calls “breaching experiments” where behavior is strategically designed to go beyond the realm of acceptable or predictable. The idea is that one can reveal some of the inner-workings of social interaction in the way those subject to such behavior try to resolve and make sense of what is, essentially, senseless. I like to show this flash mob – Frozen in Grand Central – in my class to illustrate the point.
For a couple of years students chose to do participant-observation in a local DMV office (Department of Motor Vehicles) and we started to talk about what sort of site this was and how it differed from the bus stops, farmer’s markets, and public parks other students had selected. The DMV offered a space where citizens encounter their government, its rules and regulations, its efficiency (or lack thereof) and from their field notes this seemed to often generate a lot of talk between strangers about government.
I recently became intrigued by the idea of pursuing this thinking on my own, looking at where we as citizens encounter government most directly and apparently, but at the federal level. One way to do this was to reflect on experiences of airport security. I offer this here in this blog (with our particular thematic focus) as a way of thinking about how a research mindset might inform and enrich our own personal experiences and our conversations with one another. This is method meant not simply for scholarly write ups, or for applied spaces of design, policy, etc. but to sharpen our awareness in the way we go about daily life and reflect upon our own experiences. In this case it offered an opportunity to think about certain government regulations (relating to security and the war on terror) and our position as citizens pulled into this security apparatus. Read More…
Core 77 Spotlights Service Design Ethnographer, Panthea Lee
Image courtesy of Panthea Lee
Ethnography Matters hopes to interview Panthea Lee of reBoot with our own list of questions, but in the meantime, Dave Seliger of Core 77 tracked Panthea down A Better World By Design conference. For those of you who are not familiar with Panthea’s work, Tricia Wang wrote about Panthea’s Design Research essay a few months ago on Ethnography Matters.
We liked Panthea’s explanation of NGO’s perception of their own value in a community:
With a lot of these NGO’s, people assume they’re doing a lot of good work and then they design a program poorly or design a bad service and they put it out there and beneficiaries have to use it because they don’t have any other options. There’s no accountability.
Panthea then cuts through the hype of designing for “social change”:
Design for social change is a very “sexy” topic and you see a lot of design firms now going to the public sector and to NGO’s saying, ‘We’re designers, we’re here to help you!’ And they’re like, ‘What are you talking about? You don’t speak our language, you don’t know development theory, you don’t know our approach.’ It helps to know why things are the way they are today because so much of the time you see people jumping in and saying, ‘We’re going to design for change and things are going to be better.’
But what’s the context around why we have these problems to begin with? What has already been tried? I think design firms—well-intended, very talented—don’t always understand that and so I think governments look at them a little weirdly. With most of the people from Reboot, we come from those kinds of organizations and we know what we don’t know. I think that is an advantage for us.
Read the rest of the interview with Panthea on Core 77, A Better World By Design Spotlight on Panthea Lee of Reboot. And if you didn’t get to go the conference, Dave Seliver provides a roundup of each day of the conference a the end of the post!
Nymwars and Culture Clashes
Walking home from the downtown Oakland BART station a couple weeks ago I passed a young man standing on a street corner next to his bike. He was dressed all in black, and wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. Kind of like this guy:
Occupy PDX Anonymous ~ Image in public domain
I was freaked out and even vaguely offended by the mask, which seemed a bit hypocritical of me. I’m a big supporter of masks [1] of a sort online: the use of pseudonyms, multiple identities, and some forms of anonymity — and here was a guy wearing a mask linked to a group actually called Anonymous. So why was his ‘real life’ mask disturbing? In a chapter from Communities in Cyberspace, Judith Donath observes:
In the physical world there is an inherent unity to the self, for the body provides a compelling and convenient definition of identity. The norm is: one body, one identity. Though the self may be complex and mutable over time and circumstance, the body provides a stabilizing anchor… The virtual world is different. [2]
Maybe I was freaked out by an implicit violation of the body as “stabilizing anchor” in the physical world?
But there are so many forms of media that extend people beyond their bodies. People write books (sometimes under pseudonyms), circulate tales through oral traditions, and are captured on audio and video and in photographs.
There’s something unsettling about not being able to see someone’s face, though.
My reaction to the guy in the mask reminded of Google+ Chief Architect Yonatan Zunger’s recent comments on a change in Google+’s policy on pseudonyms. Following several months of backlash (#nymwars) against the lockout of G+ users suspected of using names they aren’t commonly addressed by in the “real” world, the policy was modified to prohibit names that aren’t “name-shaped”. Pseudonyms are acceptable, but the nym has to look like a “real name” (or “wallet name,” i.e., a name on official identification in your wallet) to Google [3].
Yunger explained this policy as an attempt to avoid “culture clashes,” writing:
Generally, if you know at least one person who has an unusual name, you’re likely to know a lot of such people; i.e., people with unusual names travel in tightly-connected clusters. That’s largely because these names tend to be tied to particular subcultures. The problem we’re really encountering here is of culture clashes: people from one culture absolutely freak out when they encounter people from a very alien culture.
Practicing Reflexivity in Ethnography (Part 3 of 3)
Sam Ladner, our guest blogger, started off the new year with a provocative question on Ethnography Matters, “Does Corporate Ethnography Suck?” where she described academics’ critiques of industry ethnography as second rate or illegitimate. In her second post, Sam proffered methods for the shorter cycles of industry ethnography. In this, her final post, Sam discusses how to maintain reflexivity in ethnographic practice.
Maintaining Research Quality Through Reflexivity
In his wonderful short book On the Internet, Hubert Dreyfus (2009) argues that online learning differs from face-to-face in one significant way: online learners are physically removed from the learning environment, making it hard for them to feel their discomfort physically. Dreyfus argues that this discomfort is a key aspect to learning; we must be uncomfortable to learn.
If discomfort is learning, then ethnography offers a wealth of learning opportunities! Ethnography necessarily entails becoming immersed in that which you study. This immersion presents a wonderful – if sometimes uncomfortable – opportunity to continuously improve research. Immersion means you are “out of your element” and a guest in someone else’s location, be it their home, office, garage, or local grocery store. You are going to make mistakes. But these very mistakes provide an opportunity for both corporate and academic ethnographers to reflect on their practice. Read More…
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