Imagine you were an ethnographer attending Astro Hack Week. Write a quantitative research question for a study you might conduct. Now write a qualitative research question.
Turn to your neighbor and discuss:
- How would these research projects look different?
- What kind of data would you collect?
- How would you interpret the data differently?
Discliplinary Conventions
- What is considered a relevant research question?
- What kind of arguments are made?
- What kind of data is collected/produced/presented?
- How is collaboration valued?
- When/how is data shared?
Disciplinary Genres
- Is text written in active or passive voice? Personal pronouns?
- Are subheadings chosen based on academic conventions?
- What kind of evidence is presented to persuade the reader? Statistics? Anecdotes?
- In what ways are research methods explicated?
- How and with what sort of detail are objects of study described?
- What role do poetics and metaphor play in the text? Can you identify emotion?
- What reflexive moves (self-reflection) does the author make? How do they elaborate their standpoint in/through the text?
What is ethnography?
- Study of human cultures
- Culture often defined as “semiotic”
- Ethnographers aim to interpret the underlying meanings of surface actions and expressions
- Make the “familiar strange”
- Often characterized as interpretivist and qualitative
- Typically involves extended, immersive fieldwork
- Has historically been a solo discipline
- Qualitative data rarely shared
Methods of Ethnography
- Participant Observation
- Observing interaction and behaviors “in the field”
- Interviewing
- Engaging in semi-structured conversations with informants
- Archival Research
- Curating and interpreting historical documents and artifacts
- Discourse analysis
- Interpreting the cultural meaning interwoven in texts and speech
What is thick description?
- Describe in the “thinnest” terms possible what is happening in this image.
- Thick description moves towards interpreting its cultural meaning.
- Example drawn from a famous 1973 chapter by Clifford Geertz: “Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture.”
Practicing Thick Description
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Image source: XKCD, https://xkcd.com/1838/
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
Fieldnotes Assignment
- Submitted via your GitHub portfolio
- Must be >300 words
- Must include and define one Knowledge and Understanding concept
- Must be about a data environment encountered in the past two weeks
- Must not only describe, but also interpret a data environment
Recommendations
- Discern something very small - the smaller the better - for your first field note.
- Examples include one headline, a poster, one line of code, etc.
- Stick with prompts and concepts that we’ve already learned (e.g. discourse, epistemology).
- Review the rubric on GitHub
Thursday’s Reading
- What are Biruk’s research questions?
- What does Biruk make known about her assumptions/beliefs/values as she begins to interpret data?
Image source: XKCD, https://xkcd.com/1838/
Image source: Beiers, Sophie. 2020. “Tips & Tricks from the Newbies of Rstudio::Conf2020.” ACLU Tech & Analytics (blog). March 13, 2020. https://medium.com/aclu-tech-analytics/tips-tricks-from-the-newbies-of-rstudio-conf2020-5ccc780ba0e7.