Assignment 3

The article that I have chosen for assignment 3 is:
“Making the Most of Your Video Trends in Patron Access and Resource Sharing” by Barbara J Bergman.
She used survey method for her research study. The steps and principles that she used for her study is very practical. Although this research is more towards academic libraries but her approach to find solutions for circulating the video collection could be used in any libraries. This research study made me to think about the methodology of my own research.
By reading this article I realized that choosing the right research method is more important than choosing a few different methods. Because even by choosing one method you can find different ways to approach the subject matter in the research study. Therefore the findings will be in more details to support the research statement, and also more reliable for the future study of the same field.

Nahid

New Assignment

I’ve chosen the ethnographic study on the role of the internet in social change in the Middle East to review, and I’m finding the explorations of different facets and applications of ethnography very interesting.  Shaffir and Stebbin’s articles demystified some of the methodology, especially on the issues of personal preparation for working in the field,  which my experience of the direct interview had brought well forward for me as I wrote in my previous post.  I found Stebbin’s reminder that the researcher needs to have a credible level of competence in the area of study, and Shaffir’s discussion of the role that modifying oneself or even dissembling to some extent, might play in winning the confidence of the subjects of study (people!), especially notable.  Whether the encounter is structured, semi-structured, or  informal, I am now acutely aware of how much difference the researcher’s knowledge of context could make to the direction and depth of the Q and A process.  Empathy also comes into it.  Which is where participation can change the character of the interaction in some fundamental ways, as Boellstorff also emphasizes in his observation that while it’s impossible to fully observe and fully participate simultaneously, it’s in that paradox that the best connection can be made. 

The van Dijk article’s exposition of critical discourse analysis and his dissection of how discourse control in policy debate functions to manage public views and the status quo in the maintenance of racism struck a particular chord with me.  Derrrick Bell (Faces At the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism)  has some amazing multi-layered and multi-disciplinary analyses in this area.  Critical theory and many other theoretical approaches tell us that power relations are a fundamental aspect of social analysis; the role of racialization in those relations can hardly be exaggerated and would be especially important in ethnographic studies of a wide range of topics and contexts, yet discussion of its role has been so successfully discredited or otherwise discouraged that in my experience it’s rare outside of specific forums dedicated to that discussion.

Now you see Trotsky standing next to the podium where Lenin is speaking...

Now you don't

I am still finishing my reading of Knight, but in the meantime I have posted these two images after being inspired by the discussion on p.104. It is useful to consider why Trotsky was removed from the second pic (e.g. by whom and to what end?). This story is very revealing.  Knight's comment that understanding the "context if production" and that "published images are carefully chosen and have been produced under certain constraints of creation [e.g. totalitarian regimes, my example] and the process of selection and editing helps researchers to attribute significance to the images" (104) is bang-on in my opinion and very insightful.

Being Honest with our Biases...

I had some issues with the Knight reading this week, especially with his discussion on the History field on pg. 110. When he stated that changes in literature happen because of changes in ways of thinking and not new information becoming available, I have to disagree. Personally, I believe that new ways of thinking and new resources work hand in hand. If we were never to find new sources then academics would continue to hash out the same problems in different words. It is because of new resources that become available, such as the opening of some Eastern European archives, that new ways of thinking are brought forth. They do not simply materialize from nothing.

I do understand what Knight was talking about when he was saying that modern scholars look at historical events, etc. through tainted modern discourses and might not take into consideration the lens through which they gaze at the past. However, I think this goes back to our discussion in class last week on knowing our biases when doing ethnographic research. I think the same needs to be done with historical research. As long as a researcher is upfront about their biases, then I can not see why new ways of thinking and research can stem from new resources.

In keeping with the title of this blog, I am a trained historian. Some of my animosity behind Knight's viewpoint may be because I take offensive to the implications. However, I still strongly believe that without new resources becoming available new ways of thinking would not come about and vice versa. To me they are interconnected and can not be viewed as separate and opposite entities as Knight does.

Some thoughts on anthropology and the technological species

Let me begin by posing a semantic question: Can we reasonably interpret what Star describes as the ethnography of infrastructure as an archeology of more contemporary artifacts? Is this question even worth asking? The reason I ask is that I feel Star’s ideas, which undoubtedly have a novel tone, are perhaps more established than the buzz around the Ethnography of Infrastructure would lead us to believe. Let me explain.
Homo sapiens have always been a technologically dependent species, and since the development of archeology, the technological extension of humankind has proven to be a fruitful way to interpret human culture and social relations. Is the ethnography of infrastructure not then, in essence, a continuation of this tradition? I suppose one key difference between the two children of anthropology (archeology and ethnography of infrastructure) is the focus on living versus past humans, which is a significant conceptual difference. However, the commonalities between the two in terms of their focus on technology and artifacts as the basis for interpreting human social life is too compelling to be ignored. Both the archeologist and ethnographer of infrastructure have a privileged detachment as researchers for examining social phenomenon (past and present). I will give two brief examples to illustrate my point:
First, artifacts from an aboriginal burial ground tell the archeologist a story of customs and rituals common to a tribe during a certain time-period. Second, the health care infrastructure in small-town Ontario tells the ethnographer of infrastructure a story of customs and rituals of physicians who need to cope with a lack of resources and networks. In both cases, and for arguments sake, those who are directly involved in the use of such technologies are less likely to produce a scientific account of their social implications. On the other hand, the ethnographer-archeologist is in a suitable position to examine such implications by means of the researcher’s own technological extension, namely the tools used for building an appropriate framework of analysis.

In Tom Boellstorff's case study on Ethnography and game studies, I found that he made a very important point about culture being something that is about relationships among things, rather than a thing in itself or a mere set of 'rules' that we live by. When he talks about game cultures, he says that these cultures can not be reduced to the rules of the actual games but instead proposes examining the relationship between the physical and virtual worlds by discovering how they play the games they play, how their life outside of the game affects how they play the game, where they play the game, etc. I found this case study to be relevant as a way for thinking about my own research. I would like to try to determine through my research how social networking tools like facebook affect offline communication. By taking Boellstorff's model, I could examine how people use facebook- do they use it at work, at school, on their smart phones? This would be a good way of examining the social networking cultures by looking to physical world aspects that determine behaviours, frequency of use, etc., on a social networking site like facebook.

IQ Tests

In Chapter 4 of Knight, he talks about the 4 characteristics that define a scale. The issue of validity stood out as being something that is taken for granted in many ways. We talked in class before about IQ tests. There is a debate about whether or not they have validity. They preference a certain way of thinking or learning and use that as the grounds for quantifying intelligence. If we accept this form of testing and evaluating intelligence then it would be meaningful to have a high score on the IQ test, but it could just as easily have no meaning if you don't believe that the testing framework has validity. In many ways this is what happens with our own school work. Our intelligence is being quantified, but from within a framework of evaluation. There are not exact (objective) right answers in the social sciences, but there are processes. Almost like if you got part marks for having done most of the steps right in a math problem but then come up with the wrong answer. There are certain criteria that must be met on assignments and these criteria can be assigned numerical significance.