What we did yesterday.
Defining the field. We started with discussion of the prospectus, which began with my presentation on the texts that served as a basis for the ideas we are developing. I'm afraid that was sort of like a flash flood - with so many ideas whooshing by all at once that there may not have been time to take in all that I was saying. I have been intensely immersed in reading "digital ethnographies" - from all their various perspectives and I am pretty sure that trying to pull out what I found most important in a ten minute, more or less impromptu overview was probably not such a great idea. So this post gives an in writing overview of changing definitions of "the field" and discusses what we started to talk over as a constructive ethnographic approach to a field for our project.
Defining an approach to analysis. Discussion of New Literacy Studies use of Bourdieu and Jennifer Trainor's ethnography of racism at an all-white school as examples of ways we might look at our data.
New perspectives for multimodal ethnography: changes in ethnographic narrative, practice, and relationships. After this discussion we talked about some of the ways that multimodal ethnographic representation will change: ethnographers' relationships to participants and readers relationships to "reading" - among other things - and how practices for data collection and representation will need to change in light of those changes. Much of this discussion was based in your experiences collecting data so far - and was wonderfully useful in helping me think about how to write the introductory section to the book (I think I need a new chapter!) Some of this material is reviewed here.
Overview of book chapters. We then briefly reviewed the descriptions for your chapters - and I am hoping each of you will continue to work on what is posted there. Please send/post revisions and I will keep an updated version of the over. Luis indicated we will keep working on a title, Maria really needs to help me get up to speed on hers as I kind of just ran out of energy when I got to hers, Mark's has been added from his blog, . . .?
For next week:
We concluded with a discussion about what we wanted to do for the next meeting, and what you would be working on during the week. The agenda includes:
- "show & tell" - where you continue to collect data and will present what you have "so far" with particular attention to problems/questions (so that I can incorporate what you are running into in the introductory chapters! - this is almost like an ethnography of doing ethnography!)
- go over/ask for references to frame your work (I am hoping to send each of you some possible sources- also, see sources on ethnography/multimodal ethnography posted here)
- discuss the (revised) prospectus and provide feedback
- review of updated overview of chapters
- Check in with timeline to make sure we are on board for this "plan" (maybe each individual researcher should suggest a more personal version of this timeline - since eg Nikki & Joe will not really be creating their ethnographies until after the prospectus is reviewed - probably March).
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