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Re. Case Justification for Internet Research
by Maura Conway 19 Feb '04

19 Feb '04

Joseph, Could you please post the complete reference for Snow and Trom's "The Case Study and the Study of Social Movements" to Air-L. Many Thanks, Maura Maura Conway Teaching Fellow School of International Relations University of St. Andrews St Andrews KY16 9AL Scotland Tel.: +44 (0)1334 462939 Fax.: +44 (0)1334 462937 E-mail: mc52(a)st-andrews.ac.uk

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Re: [Air-l] re: ethnography
by Jonathan Marshall 18 Feb '04

18 Feb '04

Danny Butt <db(a)dannybutt.net> writes: > The model is: > > 1) There's a question, framed in an academic context, which I as a > researcher don't have the answer to (the answer is therefore exotic) Well i guess it beats being in the office with all your answers all ready :) I'd say that without ethnography you frequently do not know what the 'real questions' are. Your questions are likely generated by the office, without modification. Thats why the ethnographers tended to be a bit sus about the 'armchair theorists' - who i'd defend in another context :) > 2) The answer is held by others, who will surrender it (or > something like > it, but altered by my "experience") under observation So we should not observe anything other than our selves.. ? My self is pretty uniformative to me, i'm afraid. Further, the answer may not be *held* by anyone... Thats partially the point. Although the answers provided by other people, may be interesting and informative, and may provoke thought and investigation, but i don't get this without talking to those other people. I'm not that creative. or am i missing something here? > 3) I will, more or less depending on my positioning, take > responsibility for > this answer's circulation in an environment where it will be > "meaningful" but not controlled by those who held the answer. yep like all social research, unless its a 'partnership' of some kind. and even then its probable that different groups will get different kinds feedback and uses. The work can serve more than one function. At the moment i read you as seeming to be seeing societies as monliths, rather than as possibly having competing values and factions. There may be no *one* outcome anywhere. > All I'm asking for from those privileging > ethnography as > a research method is some sensible dialogue around those issues, > and being > honest about what we want. Well no problem there, but it would be nice to have it from others about their research methods as well. > The point I'm pressing becomes more obvious if I outline another > way of > conceiving of cross-cultural research: > > 1) There are issues identified by people who are excluded from > knowledge infrastructures (and associated academic salaries) such > as Universities > > 2) A researcher is engaged by those people as a way of gaining > access to > particular forms of knowledge, money, and representation that > might address these issues > > 3) Reporting on the "results" of this quest for knowledge, money, and > representation goes back to the people (but there may also, for > "ethical or > pragmatic reasons" be a report given to the institutions which are > the home of the researcher). That can happen in ethnography too, you know :) indeed it is closer to what you would expect from ethnography. Something like it arises during most ethnographies (not in mine' i confess, although my advice has been asked on oaccassions) I see heaps of research projects which don't have these features and which are not ethnographic. why single out ethnography? It seems to be a hell of a lot easier to get approval to do research were people sign forms allowing you to inject posions into them, than it does to produce ethnographic work which might embarass some unknown reader not connected to the research. (This is a personal bitch, here of dubious relevance :) But in any case this point is not about research methods or tools, this is about the responsibilities of the researcher. And if you have no interaction with people, how is this kind of application going to arise? If you have some interaction and its relevant then you are approaching ethnography. Again you need to know the conflicts of the society, otherwise you may simply be aiding one side in a power struggle and thinking you're pure. > I would say: the desire for no problems is the problem. But no one is saying that ethnography is without problems.... But we might be trying to find out where it has problems not shared by other methodologies - or not worse in other methodologies. > As Haraway puts it, ethnography should not be seen as a "method" > to be > "applied" but a way of being radically open to the forces > structuring a situation. sure.... But isn't that what the ethnographers are saying? > My perception - which is significantly influenced by > ongoing conversations with those not defining research situations - > is that research > situations are generally dominated by our basic assumptions as > researchers,and the only way of really dealing with this is to be > as clear as possible > about what these assumptions are (which is to say, if you're > confident about > the benefits of your research for your subjects, and your immunity > from the > historical forces that shaped your methods, you probably need to > spend some > more time in the library before heading out). Same with all social research or research on humans... > I don't know if anyone cares about this stuff and I've got that > feeling like > I misread the dress code for the party, so I'll finish up there. No but i'm a bit puzzeled as to why its ethnography in particular that calls forth these strictures. jon UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F DISCLAIMER ======================================================================== This email message and any accompanying attachments may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, do not read, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message or attachments. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this message. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender expressly, and with authority, states them to be the views the University of Technology Sydney. Before opening any attachments, please check them for viruses and defects. ========================================================================

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Case justification for Internet research
by Joseph W. Roberts 18 Feb '04

18 Feb '04

Hello all- I have been having trouble finding literature that examines how to justify a particular case within the context of internet research. I am finishing my dissertation on how a particular social movement (the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights/Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia) uses CMC to generate support and action for its message against the Saudi government. I have suggested that the case is a synecdochical or revelatory case (using Snow and Trom, "The Case Study and the Study of Social Movements") because the case reveals specific evidence of a strategy for social movement action. In other words, the use of CMC by the movement is important and is overlooked in existing discussions of media-movement relations. I have one reader who is skeptical of this logic. I would appreciate any suggestions. Joseph W. Roberts, Ph.D., ABD Instructor of Political Science E-Mail: nospam.roberts000(a)earthlink.net

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RE: [Air-l] Re: ethnography
by Nafus, Dawn 18 Feb '04

18 Feb '04

Dear All, I'm new to this listserv and have been enjoying the fact that there is actual debate rather than just announcements. So my two cents will take the form of raising a new twist on the issue-- on this 'unintended effects' business. One thing that's going on with UK researchers is a major research council is considering (or have they made it mandatory now?) requiring people to deposit their 'qualitative data' into a bank to be used by other researchers. Depositors can put restrictions on other users' access to the data, but it's to encourage data recycling. Part of me likes the idea of opening the books, so to speak... I believe that there is a student at (Kent??) that is blogging his fieldwork which seems an admirable way forward. Nevertheless, this 'depository' strikes me as HUGELY controversial, not only for reasons of informant confidentiality, but also because it requires some consensus on the part of depositors to agree on what 'data' is and does--not something we could say exists even within disciplines. Ethnography raises a special point with regard to this, because it's always meant to be more than transcripts. The ethnography is not even the fieldnotes, or even the being there itself, it's (in my book anyway) the dialogue between the categories the researcher thinks she's hearing and the categories meaningful for the audience she's writing for(maybe I've deconstructed my own craft to the point of oblivion! It's always a bad idea to say ethnog is this or that...esp. on a first posting). This is what gets published anyway. This qualidata project seems to multiply the 'unintended effects' by asking in what way can 'data' be circulated as a stand-alone entity. But then again how much 'intention' do authors really think they have in the first place? In our texts, perhaps, we can represent context but I work in contexts like Maxmilian where any 'representing' I do is more marginal than the people I 'represent'. Does anyone see any merit in 'depositing' data, and would depositing data actually make you think twice about the kinds of textual representations you make? I so much prefer to share rather than deposit...but that's idealistic I suppose. You are welcome to my fieldnotes, but I reserve the right to share a cup of coffee with you first:). An example of what disturbed me. I went to a one day workshop on this sort of thing. There are a number of projects already in place, outside the goal of making a megadatabank. Interestingly though, in one (http://www.icbh.ac.uk/icbh/witness/welcome.html) the transcripts of elites sitting round a table were considered narratives in and of themselves. They are complete, un-break-apart-able pdf documents, which readers are meant to read through. They usually do. Another project on everyday life in the Edwardian period generated much discussion about how to do the metadata (http://www.qualidata.essex.ac.uk/edwardians/about/introduction.asp) Ordinary Edwardians had to be searchable. The decisions on the metadata did not bother me--what bothered me was that ordinary Edwardians could only stand for pieces that needed to be added up (searched, categorized, etc.), while elites' speech only had to amount to itself. I'm not one to harp on everyone's voices getting heard (to whom? For what? I usually find myself asking), but still there's a mathematics here that just doesn't seem right. Sorry I can't put my finger on it more than that. Maybe it's the attempt at standardizing scales of knowledge when these two projects clearly show there is no agreed scale. Hopefully someone else can do better... Dawn Dawn Nafus Senior Research Officer Chimera Institute for Socio-Technical Innovation and Research University of Essex Adastral Park Martlesham Heath, Suffolk IP5 3RE http://www.essex.ac.uk/chimera/people/dawn_nafus.html

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re:My first survey
by Eero Tarik 18 Feb '04

18 Feb '04

Frank wrote.... "Doing research on gender myself, it always annoys me when there's only a binary choice for gender on a survey. Is it so hard to include an "other" category there?" Frank, being a person who likes to laugh and be happy, I was going to label the gender selection "sex" and then have three options - "male", "female" and "love it" but I feared this might be seen in some quarters as sexist humour and therefore refrained, and it might have spoilt the serious tone of my internet research work. As for a university server adding more legitimacy to the survey. Perhaps for some, however my little survey is doing just fine and pulling them in by the hour hidden away on my ramshackle website. I was able to get this up and running in 24 hours - imagine how long it would take to go through a university and get this approved and online??? One day when my baby survey is ready to graduate from Little to Grand and become the GIUS, then perhaps I will allow a university to grace the GIUS pages with a logo :-) This all is conditional upon me thinking up a second question for the survey - all ideas welcome. see ya Eero Tarik

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Re: Oops there goes the thread RE: [Air-l] Re: first post (An Internet Withou...
by Steffasong＠aol.com 18 Feb '04

18 Feb '04

Frank, You wonder how your students have become so much younger than you all of a sudden? :-)My students are about TWO decades younger than me and I am finding the same thing that you are finding. This semester I have five sections of students- about 125 students. In an informal poll last month I discovered that only about 1% know anything about usenets, discussion lists, etc. As you can see from the sig file, I am from the States. Most of my students are not internationals. What do you think is the reason for their lack of Internet savvy? I am perplexed. Stephanie Bennett Department of Liberal Arts Division of Humanities--Parker 380 Nova Southeastern University 3301 College Avenue Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33314 "People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

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RE: [Air-l] Re: first post (An Internet Without Space)
by Slater,D 18 Feb '04

18 Feb '04

That's a problem to get our teeth into. My own feeling is that we've got false alternatives here: it's not a matter of either imposing northern theory on 'them' or else taking their accounts as 'truth'. I tend to think of ethnography as dialogic (or even dialectical) - as in Gadamer's 'fusion of horizons'. I've never been able to articulate it very well, but as Rhiannon says, we as researchers are always part of the frame, trying to understand the people we are talking with, and hoping to make that understanding mnore and more sensitive and complete, but we never escape ourselves, nor should we. At best, the ethnographic encounter - like any really intense conversation - shakes us up and changes us (and in some cases, 'them' too). You *respond* to experiences, you don't accept them at face value. (though I'll confess that I've often found my biggest problem is indeed getting overenthusiastic about the people I study) I'm not sure whether or not I would call myself a poststructuralist. What I do know is that I have lived and developed my ideas during the era of poststructuralist thought and in dialogue with it. You could simply say I've learned from it, in the sense that you develop your ideas in a context, in discussions. Same goes for my conversations in Ghanaian households or chatrooms or whatever. I'm also quite comfortable to disagree with the people I research, or think they are wrong, or that they are doing something other than what they think they are doing. After all ethnography is not interviews. It cannot be ethnography until what people say and what they do, and the tensions between the two, are brought within the same frame (not to prove them liars or deluded, but to flesh out *practice* in toto). Moreover, I've always felt it was a mark of deeper respect for people to believe that everyone is intelligent and autonomous enough to be argued with, and to believe that they can be wrong! I hope they treat me that way too. Just one other thought along these lines - my last few projects have all involved working with local researchers. Their job is very difficult as they are both part of the 'community' and at the same distanced (often by class and education, but mainly by the stance required by the research). Ethnographyt is definitely a dialectic of closeness and distance, and while I am worried by my distance, they are actually plagued by their closeness. I've come out of this feeling that there is a lot to be said about the older anthropology of strangers coming to learn a culture (given plenty of safeguards around issues of power, etc). Anyway, I'm mainly trying to say that I agree with Rhiannon, except in seeing all this in terms of alternatives rather than a rather unstable dialogue. Don _______________________________________________ Don Slater Reader in Sociology, London School of Economics Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE Tel: +44 (020) 7849 4653 Fax: +44 (020) 7955 7405 http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/slater ______________________________________________ -----Original Message----- From: Rhiannon Bury [mailto:welshwitch75@rogers.com] Sent: 12 February 2004 15:11 To: air-l(a)aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-l] Re: first post (An Internet Without Space) I too enjoyed Don's thought-provoking post and wholeheartedly agree with the main point that we can't just come up with theories about "cyberspace" with no context of use (1990s "cyberbabble", heheh, I've have to remember that one). That said, I'm uncomfortable what seems to be the resurrection of the old theory/practice binary. Like Lori and Radhika, I do ethnographic work, but I'm also a poststructuralist. I certainly understand Don's concerns about imposing "northern strands" (I think those were his words) of theories in non-western contexts. But, what is the alternative? Taking participants' experiences and accounts as unadulterated "truth" that we have "discovered" through our research? Our own stories and that includes our theories, are always part of the frame. As Deborah Britzman say, ethnographic accounts are "overinvested in second hand memories." As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I use Foucault's conceptualization of the heterotopia. It was my data that led to me to work with this notion, not the other way around. Yet, the participants would not necessarily describe their "spaces" as heterotopic and might think it's just a bunch of academic whooey for all I know (but just be too polite to say so.) Rhiannon radhika_gajjala wrote: > ditto. > > (I may even take this rant to my research methods class;-)) > > r > > At 2:44 PM -0500 2/11/04, Kendall, Lori wrote: > >> Woo! I greatly enjoyed Don Slater's post on this issue and >> particularly the >> rant about ethnography. (No big surprise to anyone who knows me, I'm >> sure!) >> >> Lori >> ________________________________________ >> Lori Kendall >> Assistant Professor of Sociology >> Purchase College-SUNY >> lori.kendall(a)purchase.edu >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Air-l mailing list >> Air-l(a)aoir.org >> http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Air-l mailing list > Air-l(a)aoir.org > http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l > _______________________________________________ Air-l mailing list Air-l(a)aoir.org http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l

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My first survey
by Eero Tarik 18 Feb '04

18 Feb '04

Dear AIR people, to get a break from all the theory and assignments I have decided to create my first Internet Research project, an online survey. This project has nothing to do with the units I am presently studying, but I thought it would be a useful break to do something practical. It is my first experience using php (I had to give myself a crash 24 hour course in php code), so for those who are experts in this area there are still behind the scenes issues I am trying to work out - like security and to prevent people using the survey from outside my domain. According to my web hosts I am on a Linux server and therefore couldnt use an Access database nor could I use MySQL without coughing up more money. As a result of these limitations I have chosen to send the data by email to myself as well as loading it into a text file on my server and this is then loaded into a spreadsheet for analysis. A few hundred people have used it so far and the results are already interesting. It has only been tested on Windows machines and using IE and Netscape so far. If any of you experience difficulties using other equipment and software I'd be happy to hear from you. So if you would care to attempt my first online research survey please feel free to give it a try and offer your opinions. And if you'd like to send all of your students along as well, the more the merrier :-) the address is... http://www.tarik.com.au/university/forms/LIUS.html Whilst some might consider the question to be frivolous, to me, its important. regards, Eero Tarik Adelaide

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Re: [Air-l] Re: [CITASA] origin of gibson quote
by Barry Wellman 17 Feb '04

17 Feb '04

Folks, The Gibson quote hunt is mostly over. Ren Reynolds and Ellen Pozzi both pointed me to an NPR Talk of The Town (US radio) broadcast in which William Gibson uttered the following sentence: "As I've said many times, the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed." This is hard. This exists. It is citable. However, note the "As I've said many times,..." which means there should be earlier citations. Although I've stopped looking. Here's the coordinates as supplied by Ren: NPR Talk of the Nation 30 November 1999 Timecode: 11min 55sec Link: discover.npr.org/features/feature.jhtml?wfId=1067220 I found a different URL, from Ellen's info: www.npr.org/rundowns/rundown.php?prgld=5&prgDate=30-Nov-1999 Thanks to all those who contributed to the treasure hunt, even those who insisted on the false Economist leads. (Economist was just attributing to Gibson himself, without interviewing WG). Barry _____________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 To network is to live; to live is to network _____________________________________________________________________

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Re: [Air-l] Re: ethnography
by Jonathan Marshall 17 Feb '04

17 Feb '04

Danny Butt <db(a)dannybutt.net> writes: > Paul > Willis' "Notes on Method" in Culture, Media, Language (1980) is a > goodsummary - it's a dangerous move to pretend the researchers' basic > assumptions can be overthrown by "experience". And the potential for > debilitating neo-colonial effects is (in my experience) much > greater in this > ethnographic mode than in sending out some surveys which > communities can more easily ignore if they obviously don't fit. Surely this depends on how the surveys are administered :) Even when only a few people particupate in a survey they can frequently be used by researchers to extrapolate about the rest of the 'community' - even to assume there is a community - without any check from closer ethnographic investigation. This is still a form of neo-colonialism. A way of simply imposing your categories on people with no means for them to tell you this is crap - or why it is crap. Its a research monologue. There is obviously a history of power in any kind of research - and i'm not so sure that ethnography is more prone to this than other forms of research. What research does operate outside a social field of some sort? Ethnography confronts you with this fact, as you try and negotiate within it or around it. If you have done ethnography you might know that people can make it fairly uncomfortable if they do not want you there, or they think you are imposing badly on them. > I also see many situations where well-intentioned > ethnographic work > causes grief for both the community of study and the researcher. And the same is true of non ethnographic work. > It's worth > holding in mind a) the inextricability of the ethnographic mode > with the > colonial missionary project and b) the likelihood of unintended > consequencesover intended ones, and the very different positions > of power which are held > in the ethnographic encounter. Linda Tuhiwai Smith's "Decolonizing > Methodologies" takes up the argument forcefully and should be required > reading for anyone considering this kind of work. Sure, but equally ethography is the only western social research (i say western to allow there may be other traditions i'm not familiar with) which has historically operated with much awareness of the problems of translation. The idea of incomensurabilty, unintended social consequences, misreading, the capturing of the researcher by social faction, positioned analysis, the failure of good intentions to be enough, and so on largely arises from ethnographic work, or its appropriation. Likewise fieldworkers actually have some hope of finding out some approximation of what the interests of the people they study actually are. They are also less likely to impose categories decided in some office somewhere else - because they don't work *here*. The whole history of disputes about social structure and kinship and so on in anthropology should be some kind of illustration of that. It also needs to be stated that in many cases early functionalist ethnography was phrased in the way it was to try and prevent colonial powers from simply imposing their own categories on people. The idea being that if socities meshed then it would be foolish to disrupt them. This is not simply neo-colonialist conservatism. The project may have been semi-futile and imperfect but it is doubtful any other proceedure would have been much better. I don't know of many ethnographic studies of how best to get people to work, for example, but there is plenty of that in sociology. > But the bottom line for me is > that if the > goal is to improve the world, and not just ourselves, we need to > find a way > of negotiating between the needs and desires of those under study > and our > own desires for knowledge - and the power imbalances between > these. Is there a way other than ethnography, which involves dialogue, and the alteration of research parameters in line with that dialogue which has any chance of succeeding here? It is difficult to get the strangeness of 'others' (*not* the monolithic post-modern 'other' which neglects difference in a big way), but living with people, being partially dependent on them, is one way of *starting*. > the bottom line is that Don > comes and > talks to us about Ghanaians without them necessarily being > present. Don't we all? nearly all the time? Most anthropology departments i'm aware of at least expect people to write ethnographies in consultation with the people. My stuff is always online, for the group i write about to read or to decry before its published, to use a trivial example. I don't say i get approval from everyone - that is not always possible, but at least there is some possibility of discussion, and i *will* rewrite. > The > effects of the circulation of this knowledge in western academia (and > related appendages e.g. into development policy), away from explicit > dialogue with the research subjects, can have a far greater impact > on the > subjects' community than their dialogue without us present can > have on us. This is why some of us have insisted that you cannot disregard the presence of corporate capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy etc, when doing your analysis. With ethnography you are more likely to see how such forces already impinge on things, rather than to pretend the internet is isolated from them. > No first world ethnographer ever lost their job for their > informants not > being happy with how they are represented, Not true - but for obvious reasons i'm not going to discuss these cases here. Sometimes ethnographer's have lost their lives, or their 'reason' as well. > but there are plenty of > examplesof such impacts (and worse) happening in researched > communities due to > research publications (e.g. in this part of the world, Cook's mapping > practices). Are mapping practices ethnography now? > My simple point is this: the "benefits" of research projects to > those under > study (or, in too many less-reflexive cases, to "the world") are > routinely treated as self-evident by researchers, yet the > experience of those being > researched is more often a betrayal of trust, loss of control, and > unintended consequences. This again has nothing to do with ethnography as such. All these things can happen without ethnography, and are probably more likely to do so. > Research is a powerful way of telling > stories, and > the key issue from my POV in methodological concerns is not "which > method"but "how are the power relationships here being circulated > through my methodological choices?". Fair enough :) but ethnography tends to bring you face to face with these issues in a way in which other techniques, to my knowledge do not. It is all very well to argue ethnography is not perfect, and i certainly agree, it can't be - this is what doing ethnography has 'taught' us - but perhaps you need to suggest an alternative research strategy which does not have these problems. jon UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F DISCLAIMER ======================================================================== This email message and any accompanying attachments may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, do not read, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message or attachments. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this message. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender expressly, and with authority, states them to be the views the University of Technology Sydney. Before opening any attachments, please check them for viruses and defects. ========================================================================

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