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.

In one transcript a person who spoke a non-standard variety was presented as saying “would of,” while another person who spoke a standard variety was presented saying “would’ve”. Although both orthographic representations sounded the same to me on the audio, the transcriber chose to present them differently.

The linguistic anthropologist Alexandra Jaffe writes  that non-standard orthographies “always dramatize power and status differentials between language varieties and their speakers” [2]. “Would of” is regarded as an error in standard written English, and perhaps a transcriber interpreted the non-standard speaker’s language as lacking. A transcript written with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) might correct for that bias, but would also be more difficult to produce and to read.  So much is (understandably) left out of the typical content-focused transcript — gestures, pauses, intonations. Transcribers make a lot of choices about what is important to include and how to represent it.

Jaffe also writes that “non-standard orthographies can graphically capture some of the immediacy, the ‘authenticity’ and ‘flavor’ of the spoken word in all its diversity” [1]. So while transcription practices emphasizing difference can risk pathologizing language, standardizing what is different can obscure identity, meaning, and beauty. The use of habitual “be” by some English speakers, for example, has a particular meaning that standard usage doesn’t capture well.

Much as other kinds of ethnographic analysis involve ascribing meaning, transcription choices can be about the meanings we ascribe to different kinds of language representation. A few months ago I gave an interview subject a transcript of her interview, something I haven’t done very often. The person who was interviewed worried that she sounded uneducated in the transcript because she felt it contained many instances of the words “like” and “’cause” (short for “because”).

Her interpretation had not occurred to me. If anything her speech was one of the closest approximations to standard written English that I had ever encountered in an interview. But when speech is presented in writing, perhaps “like” and “’cause” aren’t always evaluated according to the norms of speech. I went back  and changed “’cause” to “because”, and took out a whole bunch of “like”s.

Although transcription is sometimes regarded as trivial, it can be a kind of analysis, and can carry many of the risks and uncertainties of translation between different languages. For researchers working with communication via relatively new text-based media, questions of orthography can become both simpler and more complicated.  Maybe a text message could be thought of as a kind of self-transcription? People composing text online choose how they will be represented orthographically, but taken out of its intended setting, a text may read differently, and need some recontextualization and translation.

[1] Do You Speak American?  Sea to Shining Sea. Official American | PBS. (n.d.).

[2] Jaffe, A. (2000). Introduction: Non-standard orthography and non-standard speech. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4(4), 497–513.

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.

Another issue unique to the online platform is that the identity of the researcher online is often critical to their getting access to people. I’m guessing that when I contact someone for an interview, the first thing they would do would be to look me up (first on Wikipedia user profile and then perhaps via a Google search) to see whether they want to reply or not. For my 2011 Egyptian Revolution article work, I’m expecting that people are going to be careful about who they talk to. They need to be able to trust that I’m going to hear their story and do it justice.

It seems that, in the often-polarized world of Wikipedia, positioning is the most critical aspect of my identity. People want to know whether I’m a Wikimedia Foundation groupie or an independent activist or an academic researcher or a journalist/blogger. The global Wikimedia community is a highly politicized space, where power is being continually negotiated with (or wrested from) one another and so people want to know where I stand on important issues.

The complication (which I think is also beneficial for my research) is that I have been all of those things in the past six or seven years. I’ve been a Wikimedia Foundation advisory board member, I’ve offered public critique (and praise) of the foundation, and I’ve written about Wikipedia in academic publications and the press. That means that my role and perspectives can seem complicated or obscure.

Another key question regarding the participant observation issues is around how much editing do I need to do in order to get a true understanding of what is happening on the platform? And should I be editing the pages that I’m studying? For the moment, I’m realizing that more editing is actually helpful – not only because it enables me to understand the process of editing as a newbie but also because it shows I’m committed to getting an insider’s perspective, something I think Wikipedians really value. Wikipedia editing is so complex and time-consuming that I think many researchers don’t do the hard work and so are missing some of the insider lingo and information about relationships that forms a critical part of being a participant observer.

I’ve come up with three principles that I’m following in this research.

1. Transparency. It is really essential that researchers make participants aware of their role and identity in the space. On Wikipedia, I’ve done this by indicating my research intentions on my Wikipedia profile page, but I’ve also had to communicate my position and role in other Wikimedia spaces such as internal mailing lists. I’ve done this by articulating this as a story about my own evolution. I recently wrote in response to a question about my position: “I’ve moved in recent years towards a career as a researcher, specifically an ethnographic researcher because I felt like the free and open movement needed some critical thinking as we evolve globally. That means that I don’t always (publicly) agree with what organisations like the WMF do or say, but it also means that I’m committed to being a part of how this movement evolves, particularly with regard to the place of Africa and other developing regions in that future. I just believe that the best way for me to do that is to come from a really informed place rather than as a pure advocate, believing that informed critique is often one of the most helpful things for growth.”

2. Empathy. If you do the hard work and become a true participant observer, you can’t fake this. I was recently struck by how empathetic Tanya Luhrman sounded in an interview about the personal relationships evangelicals develop with God (‘When God Talks Back’). Even when she was talking about how some Christians put an extra cup of coffee out for God as they had a conversation (or went on a date) with God, she displayed none of the mockery or derision that usually accompanies these kinds of statements. I’ve also noticed in myself how much more empathetic I have become for editors after my initial opinions after I did a deep dive into the dynamics of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution article. Empathy is really critical because it doesn’t require you to take sides and enables greater trust between participants and researchers.

3. Collaboration. Ever since I read the Anderson et al piece that talks about data as conversation and an opportunity for research participants to talk back to the data, I’ve been thinking more about the opportunities for participants to feed back into the research process. For now, this has meant that I send early drafts of my papers to those I’ve interviewed for them to feel happy about the way in which they have been represented. I’ve had some wonderful, illuminating conversations as a result of this practice and it means that I have also developed trust among participants, even if they don’t always like what I have written.

This is definitely still a work in progress, so I’d love to hear from others about challenges they’ve encountered working online and any principles they’re developing to become trusted researchers in their chosen spaces.

Featured pic by jacsonquerubin on Fickr. CC BY NC SA 2.0

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?

It’s fairly easy to point out why an ethnographic monograph would be less apparently useful outside of the somewhat insular Academic practice of reading monographs in order to write them. The “single, specialized subject” is what defines the term mono-graph. Its format – a book-length treatise often written up with the kind of technical language needed to operate adeptly and efficiently within theory – can demand quite a time commitment from its readers. The benefits and outcomes of this commitment are uncertain. Readers don’t necessarily find a neatly outlined method they might employ, a set of instructions about how to design something or what policies to enact. The single, specialized subject also raises the annoying, nagging question about in what way such a work is “generalizable.”

On reading ethnographic monographs to save time (and money)

It takes time to read a book of any sort (certainly more than watching a movie or a presentation from a slideset) but especially one written with a certain amount of rather dense or special-purpose language. However, it takes vastly more time (and money) to do the work that produced said book.

Though specialized, there is a comprehensiveness to an ethnographic monograph that can offer incredibly useful shortcuts for those carrying out shorter-term, outcome focused fieldwork in the same or similar sites. It can be a key reference point for attuning your attention to cultural phenomena, aiding recognition of key cultural elements, helping you with enough background to be able to ask better, more appropriate and insightful questions. It is certainly much cheaper than contracting out your research to the author of the book or another regional expert. It is cheaper than doing the fieldwork yourself. And far cheaper than investing in a design, policy, or business strategy that fails in ways that some more general knowledge about the implementation context would have made obvious. My hope is that any outside organization (whether an NGO, government, or private company) planning some sort of intervention or program in Ghana would find value in my book as a way of priming their attention and expectations and challenging a few assumptions even though I don’t offer design advice or policy recommendations.

A ‘single’ and ‘specialized’ subject? Yes, but not only.

Announcing my book title “Invisible Users: youth in the Internet cafes of urban Ghana” an old friend joked about a book he was writing on “youth in the Internet cafes of suburban Ghana.” Point received about how such specialization can appear slightly (or not so slightly) ludicrous.

But as the film critic Roger Ebert noted (sometime, somewhere, though the source escapes me) that no good movie is only about what it is most apparently about. Rather, it says something insightful about larger human themes – existential dilemmas, types of interpersonal relationships, particular emotions, or universal experiences.

Famed anthropologist Clifford Geertz once described the specialization and sitedness of ethnographic work favorably as, “another country heard from.” However, an ethnographic monograph is usually more than that, it is about something bigger (trends, concepts, theories). A good one (like a good movie) should make this apparent to its readers. Mine is about theories of the user and how models that privilege developer-user interactions and forms of direct user feedback leave a resounding silence about the agency of those who acquire technology through informal means (such as the global second-hand trade). It is also about rethinking the boundaries we draw around who is a user and what practices constitute use, by looking at scrap metal dealers, church sermonizing, and youth clubs. It is about marginality and theories of materiality.

The very best ethnographic monographs, the ones that end up widely read regardless of whether the subject or site is specifically relevant to the reader or not manage somehow to transcend the ‘single’ ‘specialized’ subject. To name a couple of (very different) favorites – Sharon Traweek’s book Beamtimes and Lifetimes (about the culture of high-energy theoretical physicists) and Nancy Scheper-Hughes book Death Without Weeping (about mother love, child-rearing and poverty in Bahia, Brazil).

I remember from my time working in an industry research group that the books we read were not always strictly ethnographic monographs or academic works, but also included well written works of journalism. When read in conjunction with fieldwork planning, they accomplished a lot of the groundwork that helped familiarize us with an, at first, totally unfamiliar site. Drawing sharp boundaries about what is (an ethnographic monograph) and what isn’t is, I think, not the point here.

Why do you read ethnographic monographs? Which ones do you think transcend their subject and site?

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.

Reputation: implicit and explicit

Knowing who to trust can be helped along by reputation cues – something that has become increasingly popular as a way to gauge competence on the Web today. There are two ways to build for reputation: implicit mechanisms, where we expose different variables relating to a person’s contribution, for example “number of edits” versus explicit mechanisms where we ask others to rate people based on their experience working with them.

Implicit reputation design is challenging, says Cheshire.

“It means that we’re guessing “likely associates” of particular behaviors or outcomes. For example, in online Q/A forums, we know that showing one’s tenure on the site (“member for 5 years”) and/or number of contributions (“4353 posts”) can imply lots of things. But out of context this could be (either) a 5-year spammer or a 5-year expert who is fairly active.

Explicit reputation systems are often seen as a solution to this challenge since it means that real people are filling in missing context by giving an up/down rating on the person or content. But, this in turn creates a collective action challenge since you need people to take the time and effort to do the ratings – which is why we often want to find a way to use the earlier ‘implicit’ information in the first place!”

Cheshire believes that this problem of finding consistent, reliable correlates of trustworthiness from implicit information really depends on the context of a particular online environment. And this is at the heart of Cheshire’s work: discovering how people assess another person’s future behaviour in different online environments.

Do they rate competence higher than motivation, for example? In an experiment, Cheshire and his colleagues asked participants to choose which goods and services they would buy when faced with a series of differently worded advertisements. To improve the accuracy of the results, they said that participants could invest $5 of the money they were getting to participate in the survey ($10) in choosing the most trustworthy seller.

They found that competence matters more when buying a used good (such as a camera) and that motivation matters for buying services (such as website design) where a longer-term relationship is required.

Designing for interpersonal trust

When it comes to designing for interpersonal trust, three key features are essential, says Cheshire:

1. Repeated interactions between parties over time
2. Acts of risk-taking
3. The presence of uncertainty

In a study to work out different levels of trust between individuals based on levels of uncertainty, Cheshire and his colleagues found that as uncertainty goes up, the potential for trust to develop does too. The paradox of building assurance structures such as those that guarantee risk-free interactions on eBay, for example, is that they decrease uncertainty and thus the potential for interpersonal trust. In other words, designing for “trust” can actually decrease the potential for trust!

Betrayal (when someone says they will do something and then doesn’t follow through) is something often attributed to systems. But again, these are actually issues of credibility, reliability and security because the systems do not betray us, but people who build, maintain, and support them might, says Cheshire. When designing crowdsourced platforms like Ushahidi or Wikipedia, this becomes a really important to distinguish. We need to design the system to be secure and to enable participants to make good decisions about who to trust, but we can’t magically ensure that people will trust one another through that system.

Cross-cultural differences in trust and trusting

Cheshire also found that cross-cultural differences matter when it comes to trust. Looking at the same trust game in the US and Japan, they found that players could choose how much to entrust to their partner, as well as whether to return anything entrusted to them. Individuals were partnered with either the same fixed-partner or a new, random partner on every trial. They found that Americans took more risks and trusted their partners more than did the Japanese– even in the random-partner exchanges. They also found that the opportunity to choose the level of riskinvolved in trusting another helped improve the level of mutual cooperation for both American and Japanese participants.

In new research just completed in Romania and the US, Cheshire found that regional/societal differences do exist and can be rather large but that the experience of building trust can essentially erase the effect of region or disposition to trust. Developing systems that enable trust to be built among people is really essential to his work. In the end, Cheshire is driven by the need to understand how trust can be repaired.

“My interest in trust began over ten years ago when it became very clear to me that assessing trustworthiness and building trust with other human beings are fundamental aspects of human social interaction, community-building, and collective action in all offline and online settings. Going forward, my work is now focused on detailing what happens to interpersonal trust when individuals move from more secure, reliable, and certain interactions to environments that lack such assurances. Ultimately, I want to gather empirical evidence from many different sources to detail how individuals build trust through experience in uncertain environments and, perhaps most of all, repair trust when and if it fails.”

Featured image: “Trust Fall” by extraface on Flickr. CC BY NC SA 2.0 

(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.)

Yes, you have to say things sometimes, but you don’t have to say a lot. Often just saying “Hmm” will provoke an interviewee to expand on an idea or offer up new information.  “Can you say a little more about that?”, repeating an interesting word mentioned by the respondent in a questioning tone, briefly re-stating what the respondent just said to make sure you’re understanding can also all be interview gold.

2. Try to avoid positive or negative feedback. Listening to lots of interviews about people’s experiences with illicit drugs gave me a clearer idea of why this can be a good guiding concept. If an interviewer says “That’s wonderful” in response to someone’s description of a recent attempt to quit using a substance, the respondent may react by emphasizing quitting attempts and downplaying current use, for example. There’s no getting around the feedback loop between an interviewer and a respondent, and that loop can be an important part of analysis, but avoiding positive or negative feedback as much as possible can often produce information that is less aligned with the interviewer’s biases.

3. Expect to be surprised. But don’t expect anything else. A difficult part of the notion that interviewers should avoid positive or negative feedback is that not getting much feedback can make some people shut down. Also lots of people use expressions with a positive inflection like “That’s great” as conversational support.

For me the word “interesting” can be a good compromise — partly just because it’s a word I say too much anyway. What’s not interesting? But “interesting” can also be a way to let people know that you want to hear more without expressing a judgment about the content of what they’re saying, and without imposing “common sense” expectations about what people are saying or how they’re interpreting it. If I say someone’s attempt to quit using a substance is “great,” I might not learn that, for example, quitting made the respondent realize all the things they enjoy about the substance and that they never want to quit using it again.

4. Respondents are the experts on their own experiences. You are just there to listen and learn. It can be helpful to say something at the beginning like “I might ask some questions that seem really dumb or obvious. That’s just part of the interview process. You’re the expert, and I want to try to understand how you see things, in your own words.” You don’t necessarily have to ‘lead’ an interview.  Sometimes what seems like a tangent in the moment ends up being the most meaningful part of an interview.

But yeah, you do have to guide people, and manage how much you need to cover in a limited amount of time. In an interview where the interviewer and respondent can see each other, body language can work really well for this. Although introverted or shy people may not always be great with body language, it can be more manageable when you understand your role as primarily listening, and the spotlight is not on you. One visual cue that I use in interviews is hunching down and making myself visually lower than the respondent. They’re the expert. When I need to jump in and it’s hard to find a good pause, I sit up straighter, maybe shuffle around some papers. This usually produces a pause and I can jump in without it feeling like a jarring interruption.

5. Recruiting complete strangers can totally work. When I’ve needed to ”get out and meet people” for a recruiting effort, I have found that handing out flyers in person has worked best for me. (A) I don’t have to give a spiel. (B) The people I’m encountering don’t have to waste time trying to figure out whether/how to engage with the possibly crazy person’s spiel, but can just read the flyer if they feel like it (assuming literacy or language differences aren’t an issue) and then let me know if they’re interested. If you’re a smile-y sort of person, smiling can help, or just generally looking approachable. You don’t necessarily have to be the life of the party who has mastered circulating and networking though. People may find it easier to approach you on their own terms.

So that’s what’s working for me for the moment, but I’m still learning and always interested in thoughts/suggestions/tips, if you have any to share. And I guess the obligatory follow-up to any set of guiding principles meant for humans is:  Break them (in an ethical way) when you need to.

__________________________

[1] I’m not sure which things came from where anymore — probably some things are from multiple sources, but a lot of these suggestions are gleaned from advice from researchers like Tamar Antin, Jenna Burrell, Juliet Lee and Roland Moore (thank you!), and/or from written sources like:

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.

After it started to become apparent that I could no longer entirely avoid the full body scanner at US airports by simply choosing a line without one, I decided I’d have to think more seriously about whether I was willing to go through one on a regular basis. So I decided to try opting out. I did so for the first time in January at the Detroit airport and then decided I’d make it a habit, but also that I’d start writing careful field notes after each opt-out experience.

Additionally I posted about this on Facebook where I noted, “Opting out of the body scanner went smoothly at both Tampa Bay and Portland airports over the break though with some really interesting subtle differences in TSA agent interactions…” which generated some interesting reflection in the comments section from other researcher-friends about their own experiences. Below I draw from a few of these Facebook and Twitter comments in relation to my own experiences.

What I wanted to keep track of were the interactional dynamics that followed when I requested to ‘opt out.’ I wanted to (first of all) observe the consistency or lack of consistency across airports in opt-out procedures and how slight differences might produce variations in whether the experience felt more or less comfortable, efficient, embarrassing, or punitive. I wanted to see how I was responded to by TSA agents. I wanted to see what kind of response (if any) my opting out generated in other travelers. Since opting-out is a legitimate choice and a non-arbitrary action, this doesn’t quite qualify as a “breaching experiment” but nonetheless has the flavor of the non-routine and intentional public act that might make visible some of the views and attitudes of others in the space.

Apart from the actions I was taking, I decided to take a stance of neutrality (to the extent possible). I requested to “opt out” but volunteered no explanation. I tried to keep a way-of-being through the process that was cooperative and unemotional (and so I attempted to appear neither fearful nor angry nor defiant).

These are my evolving findings based on just four experiences (to date) of ‘opting out’ in the Portland, OR, Tampa Bay, FL, Las Vegas and Atlanta airports. In two instances I was traveling with my husband (who in one of those instances also decided to opt-out) while in two I was traveling alone.

Consistency of application: While the procedure was pretty consistent and efficient in all my experiences, the one area of blaring inconsistency was the arrangement of the pat-down area in relation to the public. For example, the Tampa Bay airport wins the award for most public and (and for me, most embarrassing) pat-down spatial geography. While usually the pat-down was carried out somewhere a little bit off to the side where you were still in public view but not on display, this pat-down took place on a direct and visually uninterrupted line from everyone coming out of the security screening. Anyone who bothered to look up after collecting their belongings would see you there patted and prodded by your TSA agent. Airports varied in terms of whether they had you face toward or away from the public. At Tampa Bay, they had me face the public during my pat down. This arrangement from my perspective verged on a form of public shaming. The agent in that instance also neglected to offer me a private screening (as they did in the other instances).

Brief conversations with TSA agents: while professionalism would presumably dictate a certain reserve and official demeanor among agents relating to “the public,” agents (being human beings after all) managed to insert some little conversational comments along the way that gave me some sense of how they regarded those who requested to ‘opt-out.’

Skepticism: “you do know it’s not an X-ray machine right?” I heard from the TSA agent in Tampa Bay. From conversations with others who’ve opted out (including my husband who flies every other week) this seemed to be the most common way that TSA agents expressed a slight bit of redirective pressure on those who opt-out by suggesting you might not be properly informed.

Expressed Annoyance (both verbal and nonverbal): Though I did not experience this myself, I saw notes online (in the wake of my own Facebook announcement about opting-out) from a few people who experienced more direct disapproval from agents about their opt-out decisions. One friend noted on Twitter, “Awesome, #TSA agents quizzed me asking why and then mocked me with chicken noises when I opted out of the full body scanner at #PDX.” My own mother opted-out provoking a TSA agent to roll his or her eyes which she noted “doubled my resolve!”

Foot dragging?: one friend on her first attempt to opt-out was left waiting so long that she gave up and went through the body-scanner machine so as not to miss her flight.

Efforts to put at ease: “You can opt out” a female TSA agent responded encouragingly in response to my request (which, I should note, was not posed as a question). One TSA agent assigned to do my pat-down repeatedly called me “sweetie” and as she passed over my stomach said, “tickle, tickle!” At the end of the process she told me to ‘have a nice day!’

Other passengers: my request to opt-out has never influenced the same decision in anyone around me. From comments on Facebook it appears others who opt-out are more persuasive. My stance of neutrality may not draw enough attention to be influential or it might just be that the other passengers around me aren’t concerned about this new security process or are still too nervous to be a nonconformist or experience the extra-thorough pat-down.

Procedural confusion: “Are you next?” a tall older man asked me as I stood off to the side waiting for a female TSA agent. In another airport a man joked, “You aren’t in trouble are you?” to which I replied cheerily, “No!”

Quiet Acknowledgement: After opting out in Las Vegas, I overheard a man who was behind me in line and went through the full body scanner comment to his friend, “She opted out.”

So what can we take away here? Perhaps that small things can make a difference. Airports have some slight bit of leeway in making this alternate option more or less friendly. Individual agents also have some leeway (and take it). There is, at this point, no emerging pattern to suggest that conservativism or liberalism of a region is reflected in its airport security. Though federal government may intend to accomplish standardization of these kinds of procedures nationwide, instances of being governed can vary in tone.

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!

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.

In this incarnation, the G+ name policy is not about the behavior of people using pseudonyms:

We thought this was going to be a huge deal: that people would behave very differently when they were and weren’t going by their real names. After watching the system for a while, we realized that this was not, in fact, the case. (And in particular, bastards are still bastards under their own names.)

Instead, the policy is about how people who don’t use pseudonyms react to those who do:

I don’t have data which I’m at liberty to share, but we got very strong feedback about this one, especially from less technical users, and also very disproportionately across genders: women liked handles a lot less than men. (This is somewhat reflected in the populations which have the highest density of handles: e.g., people who are old-time Internet users and whose handles date back to usernames).

Would like to see that data. The Geek Feminism wiki on Who Is Harmed By a “Real Names” Policy points out several ways in which relatively marginalized groups, including women, can be harmed by real name mandates. But maybe some women, or subgroups of women who tend to use G+ accounts, dislike being circled by people using handles?

In any case, by squashing one kind of cultural expression, Zunger’s justification posits wallet names (or rather what Google thinks wallet names look like) as mainstream, and other kinds of names as marginal practices that Weird People should stop freaking out the Normals with.

Contemplating the freak out factor in both the real world and online brings to mind a couple things.

One is that context — that thing ethnography is always insisting on — matters. For example, in a post on Jezebel about people posting youtube videos seeking feedback on their looks, a few commenters mentioned online “anonymity” as the driving force behind commenting cesspools (youtube). But nearly everyone on Jezebel and throughout the Gawkerverse uses pseudonyms. Just to make things a little messier, someone who commented negatively on anonymity also nostalgically recalled childhood prohibitions on using his/her own real name online. Maybe the issues at play here can’t be reduced to whether one likes handles or not.

And with that mask thing — a small child in a Halloween costume would have elicited a different reaction. But in downtown Oakland, a person dressed in black and wearing a Guy Fawkes mask signals alignment with the black bloc faction of Occupy Oakland, and black bloc has some negative associations.  Not unusual to see some people dressed similarly during a protest, but a little jarring in isolation.

Part of the motivation for the uniform clothes and masks is to avoid being singled out by police both in person or on camera. Maybe we should all be wearing masks actually. We’re surrounded by cameras, facial recognition can work reasonably well, and we’re all swimming in tons of imminently linkable data. When I talk to my relatives in person, my colleagues at work can’t overhear me, but if we have the conversation online in a publicly searchable space, then my colleagues could overhear. So no matter what I do with my name, the norms of disembodied interaction don’t fit within the norms of embodied interaction.

And although there’s a lot of talk about how people online should use their real names just like they do in real life, when I interact with someone in a store or on a sidewalk, I’m not wearing a name tag, and I don’t expect the person I interact with to be able to surface all my other interactions in the material world — but if more of the data I’m shedding all over the place becomes available and linkable, that could be different.

If the body is an anchor that unifies an individual’s varied self presentations, only the person inside that body has full access to all of its performed identities — unless one lives under constant surveillance.

Notes:

[1] Check out Masks: Exploring Identity in Virtual Spaces, by Heather Ford & Alex Smolen

[2] Donath, J. S. (1999). Identity and deception in the virtual community. Communities in cyberspace, 29–59.

[3] Practically speaking, this does not seem any different from the old policy, right? Oh well.

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.

Uncomfortable Immersion

In her ethnography of the Inuit, anthropologist Jean Briggs (1970) became the “adopted daughter” of an Inuit family. In her isolation and culture shock, Briggs found her temper to be short, which for the Inuit was considered both childish and rude. During one incident, she got angry at nearby White Canadians who had broken an Inuit canoe. Much to her surprise, the Inuit did not approve of her righteous anger, but in fact socially ostracized her for an agonizing 3 months. Only after a local priest revealed her original defensive intentions did the community grudgingly welcome her back.

How do we know about this awkward and disillusioning experience? Because Briggs herself writes about it in her ethnography Never in Anger. After having lost her temper publicly, she was ashamed of her transgression and the effect it had on her fieldwork.

It may seem that Briggs’ experience was an “ethnographic failure,” but in fact, this was a triumph. Her honest admission about her experience took courage. She used this failure to understand the culture of her participants, instead of simply giving up and moving back south. She reflected about her position and how she differed from her participants. She thought about her assumptions that lead to her mistake. She thought about the shame she felt.  In the process, she came to deeply understand the Inuit’s conception of emotion. Briggs was practicing “reflexivity” or the act of looking back at oneself in the role of “researcher.” This kind of systematic reflection was a radical departure for social scientists. It was feminists and our own Canadian Dorothy Smith who drew attention to our “standpoint”: where do you stand? What can you see from that perspective? What can you NOT see?

I myself had a similar (if less dramatic experience than Briggs’) in my corporate ethnographic practice. I was interviewing a participant about his professional practice and the challenges that he had experienced over the years. Toward the end of my visit with him, he mentioned a company that had pulled out of a partnership with him – the very company that had sponsored my research. I told him this and he became visibly upset and now asked to end the interview.  I left the participant’s office and immediately called my colleague to discuss the experience. I had made a mistake. What could I learn from this?

Learning From Mistakes: The Post Mortem

My colleague and I employed one method of reflection: the post-mortem. We discussed the ethical implications. Had I exposed this man to harm? Had I failed to give informed consent? We concluded that no, I had not. I had not broken any ethical commitments, but I did gather important insight. I had never disguised the corporate nature of my work to this participant, but had hoped to hear the participant’s untainted view before revealing my client’s name. Upon revealing the client, I got even more insight. In the end, I reported to my client that participants’ opinions of their company were often based on experiences with people and not based on mere “marketing messages.” Their people could elicit good or bad experiences to potential customers. This was an important finding, one borne out of my discomfort with upsetting a participant.

The Written Review

Another method ethnographers can employ is the written review. Ethnographers can “write their experience” and work through some of the ideas and feelings that emerged through their emotional experiences in fieldwork. This can be done in a deeply academic way as McCorkel and Myers do in their rigorous questioning of their own past research projects (McCorkel & Myers, 2003). Or it can be done in an informal way through blogging about the experience (with appropriate anonymity controls), or by writing emails to your immediate research team. If privacy is paramount, ethnographers can write privately in a journal. Any written method will work, as long as the ethnographer works to actively reflect on his or her emotional reaction to the mistake, and what role their cultural differences may have played in creating the mistake.

The Shame Attack

In her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, social work professor Brené Brown suggests that the “shame attack” can only harm you if you actively hide it from yourself and others. She tells her readers to actively “name the shame” by telling others about what happened. She coaches readers to recognize the signs of the shame attack – the flushed cheeks, the racing heartbeat – and to see that this is an opportunity to learn about oneself. A corporate or academic ethnographer can use this concept to improve his or her own practice. The constant reassessment of one’s own practice should be a ritualized and consistent event, either through regular post mortems or writing.

It may be uncomfortable. It definitely takes courage. But reflexivity is an opportunity to improve research findings and ultimately, your own practice.

Featured image by ecotist on Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives 2.0 license