Blog 7: Questions About In-Class Ethnographic Study

Post an answer to one of the 10 questions we created in class. Support each part of your answer with evidence from the data. Evidence should take the form of examples to illustrate particular content or forms and statements about the frequency of particular particular patterns.

Examples of frequency statements. (6 out of the 10 jottings did. . . ; in the notes as a whole, professor chandler is mentioned 26 times, 10 in jottings, 5 in head notes, 10 in remembered later, and 1 in observations )(not true - you would need to count this); or far-back statements accounted for less than half of the statements in jottings, but close to 90% of statements in observations (I made this up, it is not true - it is an example of how you should be using numbers to support your claims about what the data does)

1. How does understanding how the notes will be used (having a focus) affect the way researchers take notes?
2. What do these notes suggest about how beginning ethnographers take notes?

3. What do these notes show about what happened in our classroom event? What do they emphasize? What do they leave out?

4. How does the fact that everyone is taking notes ruin this data as a representation of "real" ethnographic experience?

5. What kind of experience do these notes present?

6. How do the observations progress (or do they) in terms of moving towards theories about what happened? Where do the first patterns appear? Are they developed? How/ where/ are they developed as we move through individual note takers' notes? Do note takers ever undo theories?

7. What does this data reveal about social dynamics in this class?

8. What do these notes suggest about what students learned about taking ethnographic field notes through this exercise (how do these notes compare to notes we read in class)? How or did this exercise "teach" broadening the focus of attention?

9. What is reliable? How can we tell what is reliable? What do these notes teach us about reliability?

10. What are the different patterns for representing experience in the different phases of note taking? What do these patterns tell us about how our class processed the experience? What do these patterns suggest about thinking patterns ethnographers might want to "be careful" about?

Can this data answer this question?

From the data collected, I believe that there is definitely enough information to draw some conclusions about how amateur ethnographers take notes. However, I don't think that an amateur ethnographer would usually take notes without direction or purpose nor without an example by an expert ethnographer. Still, in the cases where an amateur ethnographer is gathering information without prior experience on how to gather random, unfocused data and without thinking to have some kind of focus before hand, it is safe to say that the result would be similar to that which was presented in the data collected.

That being said, I think what the father of linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure said was accurate when he said that you cannot know what brown is if you don't know about other colors, just as you cannot know what one sound is without knowing other sounds [this is a rough paraphrase]. Thus, I don't think it's fair of me to make any kind of judgment about what an amateur ethnographer would write mainly because I have no contrast with which to compare. Therefore, all of my reasoning behind my first paragraph here hinges on unfounded assumptions and weak understandings about what is truly expert level ethnographic work.


General Similarities: [Amateur notes juxtaposes the Writing Ethnographic Fields Notes article]

1. Tried to capture all the information that seemed relevant, but there was no methodology to follow.
2. Wrote more about impressions than observations.
3. Details about interactions were limited.
4. We struggled with writing and interacting at the same time.

Also, what form to use for jotting.