We spent the first part of the meeting talking over the focus for our collection. The "focus" is what we will use to make our separate pieces work together to explore a (new) idea. At this point, I am assuming each chapter will have:
a methodological focus (on how doing ethnography is changed when both "writing" and "culuture" have been transformed by digital technologies),
a content focus (on ethnographic (thick) descriptions of the identities, social practices, social relationships, material circumstances (including interfaces) and cultural formations as experienced by the groups you are studying)
and a focus particular to your study (this focus will emerge as you work through your data = it will be "your point", "what you discover" etc with respect to what you discover as an important feature of your group; for Robyn this focus is looking like it will be gender, for Mark, it may be the nature of feedback practices + affordances, and so on).
Methodological focus. I reviewed what I see as the overall methodological focus, as it emerges from James Clifford and George Marcus re-casting of ethnography as "writing culture" - with the emphasis on writing. By "writing" these ethnographies as multimodal we are opening new ground for ethnography both as a process and as a product. Think about how mediated methods for collecting, analyzing, and representing data are re-casting the idea of "writing" culture. Other researchers have begun to deal with the idea of mediated "culture" - but the idea of online culture as continuous with material world culture (as discussed by Leander) remains an emerging concept.
For your methodological focus, you will write about the mediated nature of:
data collection (for example, in terms of interviews it makes possible doing chat interviews, Skype interviews, or by casually turning on your phone and how this fundamentally changes researcher/participant relationships and the kinds data it is possible to collect; new media also make possible, screen captures, screen casts, informal videos, self-captured videos, participant voice-overs of video they have created, documentation of a networked presence etc)
data analysis - new media make possible various practices for collaboration between researchers and participants, including synchronous review of data for participants who are not in the same place, the use of visual tools, search and counting tools, . . . think about this one some more
data presentation (many of the items listed under data collection and analysis only edited, creatively displayed, annotated, cut & combined, re-mixed versions of the data so that it can make visual, aural or interactive representations of your points).
=> do some writing about your methods. Describe what you will do. Think about how you might capitalize on new media ethnographic pratices = as described in Ito + Leander, and as you invent them as you go along (such as Robyn's informal interviewing with her phone, and her screenshots of the unfolding events of the season) and how the mediated nature of our project opens up new possibilities
Arrival stories. This discussion included talk about the form that ethnographies take, and we talked for a while about the "arrival story" where the author describes first impressions of the culture s/he will study, characterizes/acknowledgeds her pre-conceptions, expectations (before the study), biases, and discusses her/his interest in/connection to the community(why did you choose this group? what is your interest/reason/motivation for studying it?, etc)
=> do some writing for your arrival story. It does not need to be polished. Observe your expectations, now, at the beginning of the project. What do you expect you will find? How do you think of the group? Hit the bases for arrival story - but don't worry about making it a story just yet. Just get the feelings down while you are in process. You can edit them later.
I am going to put up another post to cover our discussion of references and the link to the site.
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