ethnography, goals, personal
In Reflections on December 1, 2009 at 3:31 pm
The past month has been an intensive foray into ethnographic research methods, based on some very fruitful participant observation notes at a workshop, and also learning the hard way that a one hour interview takes about 4 hours to transcribe properly. Emerson’s guidebook to ethnographic methods has been indispensable, and learning the process of coding, memo writing and analysis is making me very excited about writing the paper for submission next week. Themes are emerging, connections are being made, and the end result will be as much of a ‘surprise’ to me as it will be to my professor upon first read.
Although many of my fall obligations had been fulfilled, I still kept myself busy with frequent visits from friends, participating in events such as their scholarship awards ceremony at the Heliconian Club, and catching up with some of my community obligations. The Alumni Association of the Faculty has a holiday party tomorrow for students, and a deadline coming up for conference grant applications. The Sneak Peak Orchestra has a concert coming up in January that requires some music preparation, and I finally completed their logo design. What can I say, I think variety is a good thing.
ethnography, infovis, process
In music-esque, thesis on October 28, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Ethnographic research is difficult, in the way it challenges the more scientific approach to research. Instead of going in with a theory, as is typical of deductive reasoning in most scientific approaches, an inductive approach demands that we begin with observation. The identification process is not identifying a problem and hypothesizing a solution, but identifying an interesting phenomenon, and immersing yourself in it. This is pretty easy to understand. We do no go in assuming we know how Mendelssohn responded to his reception in England, nor can one go into a study of Kabuki theatre in Japan claiming to know anything. Yet in that context, music is the focus, supported by research into the social, historical and cultural contexts, vis-à-vis fieldnotes and general immersion (especially in ethnomusicology) into the musical world.
One of the things I recall from my ethnomusicology course, was a simple question: What do you do, while in the process of writing your ethnography, you encounter information that challenges or contradicts what you have been writing in your analysis? It’s not a trick question.
