Field Notes Introduction
I wanted to go over the Field Notes assignment with you in advance of introducing Unit 3, the ethnographic research essay assignment, as it’s essential for completing that essay, and you’ll need to do it well in advance of beginning to even draft. The Field Notes consists of your primary research for your ethnographic research assignment. This is where you immerse yourself in the community you’ve been studying; you may have already been doing this to complete the discourse community narrative and also to begin work on the rhetorical analysis essay. With all the observations you’ve been making, threads you’ve been skimming, the posts you’ve really been honing in on and examining for the essays you’ve already written or are writing, all of these observations should reveal certain patterns and behaviors to you about the members of the community that you’re studying. This behavioral focus–as I said before, Unit 3 really focuses more on certain aspects of behavior, certain aspects that might pertain to self-identified demographics about the site, things that might pertain to broader communication patterns that indicate something about the way that members prefer to interact with each other, and what that significance might be for the group–these are just some ideas about behavior that might surface in this essay–and you’ll really extract these ideas from the patterns you’re observing.
So these observations, this field work, you’ll divide into at least three field notes, each note being an entry of about 500 words, maybe more. Students in the past have sometimes exceeded that to be more thorough, and it can be more helpful to be more thorough. Specificity is of the essence here, as it always is. You’ll end up with writer’s block if your notes are overly broad and vague. So if you say something like “The same user posted two memes in a thread about distance learning,” when you return to this note, in order to write your essay, you might be confused by it, it’s not really giving enough concrete details for you to extract a significant pattern out of that you can analyze for an entire essay, whereas more vivid detailed notes with rich description, like “In a thread about distance learning where six different participants contributed, a user self-identified as male and posted 2 ableist memes that use images of mentally disabled children to indicate his intellectual superiority to students who have difficulty with online classes,” and you see how this is several phrases longer than that first broad statement, this gives you a lot more to latch on to, it gives you demographics, it gives you a means of communication, it identifies a problem with that or a tension with that communication, and it also identifies the kind of topic that you find that communication in. So if you find a pattern where that sort of behavior is occurring a lot, it becomes a problematic that you can examine as a behavioral dynamic within the community for this particular essay. So the more specific your field notes are, the more it will generate complex controlling ideas, and you need that complex controlling idea to really make progress with an essay like this. You may find that it’s easier while you’re observing to just take quick notes. So you may want to jot things down like the thread title, the user who is making the contribution, the date of the thread, possibly include the hyperlink for yourself or take screenshots, so that when you, you skim back to find it, you can find it. You may want to also include any other information that seems like it might be worthwhile to include even if you’re not exactly sure why, and it’s just your gut telling you that it might be important later. You may also want to note if there are specific users who tend to constantly or consistently speak in multiple threads, this too could be a pattern that you extract from it, you may want to note things like veteran or newbie status, you may want to note popularity of posts, number of upvotes or downvotes, if you see a particular trend in which posts get the most votes, or what kind of posts recur the most, or what kind of replies recur the most. And after you’re done all this observation, you can go back and craft more formal entries when it’s time to submit them. As you craft those formal entries, you can translate your initial observations which might look like messy bullet points or random screencaps into something that’s a little more reliant on academic language, so that it might be easier to simply take and place with modifications into the body of your essay when it comes time to begin drafting.
I’ve divided up the field notes by different kinds of questions. You can think about these questions as pertaining to different sorts of threads. So you’ll be looking at at least three threads and you want a significant number of comments per thread. If there are fewer comments on a thread, you might need to end up looking at more threads. You can also think about each separate observation as being bound by temporal constraints, so maybe like 30 minutes each minimum, and it may take longer, sometimes it does take longer to really see a pattern emerge. So plan for that. And some things to consider as you begin writing the field notes. For the first one, it’s going to be “due” in the middle of Unit 2, I believe you’ll be conducting your observations while you are drafting and revising, so make sure that you are setting aside enough time to do this kind of multitasking work. Make sure that you are not using the same thread over and over again for all three essays as this is not allowed. Make sure that you’re thinking about things like values, goals, ideologies, beliefs, desires and needs of community members and the community as a whole. How do these aspects connect with each other? How is power distributed among members (which goes back to an initial question we asked the beginning of the semester about hierarchy)? What does intimacy or friendship look like in this community? What does expertise look like in this community? And how do you suspect–and this leans slightly towards speculation, don’t run away with it–but how do you suspect members would behave with each other in a variety of online settings based on how they’re behaving in this particular online space? And so this is a question about members’ attitudes towards not just the topic of the community, but towards each other, and towards um varying levels of hierarchy in this community. So through all these field notes, you’ll look for connections between community values, and the spaces that community members inhabit, in this case, the subreddit that they move in. This will give the reader something to hold on to, a lens to read and understand your writing. And it will also provide them with an organizational pattern that’s designed to explore specific concepts related to the community.
Remember that in Essay 3, you’ll start to bring in secondary research. So after you have taken all your notes, and begun to consider which behavior patterns are the most interesting, problematic, or seemingly inexplicable–you know, if you look at it through the lens of your mainstream common sense, or your own experiences, some things might just seem confusing to you. But sometimes those are the things that are most significant to analyze, the things that are most important to make comprehensible to an outside audience. You could also consider the potential that a particular direction has in shaping your secondary research for the assignment, in producing an argument or controlling idea of consequence. So primary research will lead you into the secondary research part of Unit 2, no Unit 3. Um, so you’ll be working with articles from the library, and we’ll be discussing how to conduct library research, particularly online library research beyond simply Googling something, but rather using library databases to find peer reviewed articles. We’ll have a tutorial created for our class, specifically for this unit, by a librarian, about how to use various databases and various library resources as you conduct your secondary research. So as you’re shaping your primary research for your field notes, you may want to think about how it might help to bring in outside research later on to help further explain, explore or complicate your controlling idea. And you’ll conclude all your field notes with the identification of the pattern that you do find ultimately most intriguing and significant for studying your primary research.
So these field notes, for me, it’s me seeing your research process, seeing how you observe what you seem to think is important about what you’re looking at, how you start to organize it, and ultimately, where your research hypothesis might emerge. From the patterns, the multiple patterns probably that you witness, and which single pattern really calls to you, and how you think all of this will help lead you through secondary research and illuminate something about the community you’re looking at. By seeing all of this, I can help you shape your research as it emerges, both your primary and secondary research, as well as my usual assistance with formulating a controlling idea when you begin writing your actual essay. You’ll submit your field notes, as you’ll see on the calendar, not one by one but all at once, and you’ll submit all of that to our Slack #homework channel. Before that, if you want to kind of check in and see if you’re moving in the right direction between field notes, you don’t need to submit your work prematurely, you can just set up a meeting with me or contact me via Slack DM, and we can talk about whatever questions or issues are having. So I can help guide you through this primary research that you’re doing, we can pull up your subreddit, pull the threads that you’re really focusing on and brainstorm through it if that is helpful to you. But most of this is, it’s time, space–um the assignment is designed to walk you through the steps of preliminary research giving you the time and space to move towards a secondary research assignment. And I want you to have the freedom to sit with which you’re looking at to explore it on your own. Because it is really your exploration, I can’t direct you entirely in it, it’s your community that you’ve selected to look at, and at the end of it you look at everything you’ve produced, and I’ll help you decide if the thing you’ve settled on as your research hypothesis is the best or most fruitful direction for you to take your paper. As always, if you have questions or comments about this particular assignment or issues you expect that you’ll face you can shoot me an email or DM me on Slack or we can talk about it in one of our live sessions.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai