Living in Liminal Space

Annette Markham on the shifting ground of ethnography

Life online, pp79-83. This echoes what I wrote here.

I really like the structure of this book. With a lot more academic underpinnings added (as would be appropriate for a thesis as opposed to a book) it will be a useful one for me to keep in mind. I especially like the way she splits the text between 'conversationalised' transcripts and commentary (same font but a device on the page to separate them - I think a lot of fonts can be really messy and irritating to read - this was a problem I have been wrestling with). And her use of 'Interludes' between the chapters is a really good idea for me.

So she uses two fonts: Courier for the actual transcripts and a serifed font (Times or similar) for everything else. Apart from the device I mentioned (actually a centered asterisk) and italics for the reflections on the transcripts and events of the project that she's adding at the time of writing, there is no other 'play' with the fomatting, and I think that's a good way to go.

It's funny that I first read this book a couple of years ago, but it's only now I can really appreciate it. I sometimes think that my general stubbornness in life goes against me in academic work - it seems to take me a while to really internalise an idea and until I do I have trouble working with it. But once I've got it, it's there for good and it becomes an integral part of my thinking.

Added later: the textual separation will be useful for distinctions between what was going on at the time and my later reflection (which is essentially how Markham has done it). Gives depth and layering to the text.

Another ethnography resource

From Mathmagenic: Virtual Knowledge Studio  But it seems to be more techie then social science. Need to investigate it further.

Annette Markham's website

http://markham.internetinquiry.org/writing/index.html Lots of great stuff here about ethnography and the internet.
She doesn't seem to have a blog.

PESSA presentation

PESSA presentation

PESSA powerpoint

Richardson, 1999

How to judge the value of an ethnography

1. Substantive contribution. Does this piece contribute to our understanding of social life? Does the writer demonstrate a deeply grounded (if embedded) human-world understanding and perspective?
How has this perspective informed the construction of the text?

2. Aesthetic merit. Does this piece succeed aesthetically? Does the use of creative analytical practices open up the text, invite interpretive responses? Is the text artistically shaped, satisfying,
complex, and not boring?

3. Reflexivity.How did the author come to write this text? How was the information gathered? Ethical issues? How has the author’s subjectivity been both a producer and a product of this text? Is there adequate self-awareness and self-exposure for the reader to make judgments about the point of view? Do authors hold themselves accountable to the standards of knowing and telling
of the people they have studied?

4. Impact. Does this affect me emotionally? Intellectually? Generate new questions? Move me to write? Move me to try new research practices? Move me to action?

5. Expresses a reality.Does this text embody a fleshed out, embodied sense of lived experience? Does it seem true—a credible account of a cultural, social, individual, or communal sense of the
real?

Denzin, 1999

AN INTERPRETIVE ETHNOGRAPHY for the next century is one that is simultaneously minimal, existential, autoethnographic, vulnerable, performative, and critical. This ethnography seeks to ground the self in a sense of the sacred, to dialogically connect the ethical, respectful self to nature and the worldly environment. In so doing, it recognizes the ethical unity of mind and nature (Bateson and Bateson, 1987, pp. 8-9, 11). It seeks to embed the self in storied histories of sacred spaces. This epistemology presumes a feminist moral ethic, stressing the sacredness of human life, dignity, truthtelling and nonviolence (Christians, 1998, p. 3). After Behar (1996) and Jackson (1998), this ethnography works outward from those moments of existential crisis in the culture that affirm the truth that says humans must have “some say in the world into which they are thrown, that they must in some measure choose their own lives and feel that they have a right to be here” (Jackson, 1998, p. 3). This ethnography interrogates those interactional moments when humans come together in struggles over love, joy, shame, betrayal, those instances “when self and other are constituted in mutuality and acceptance rather than violence and contempt” (Jackson, 1998, p. 208). This is an ethnography that refuses abstractions and high theory. It is a way of being in the world that avoids jargon and huge chunks of data. Viewing culture as a complex process of improvisation, it seeks to understand how people enact and construct meaning in their daily lives. It celebrates autoethnography, mystories, myth, and folklore. This is a return to narrative as a political act, a minimal ethnography with political teeth. It asks how power is exercised in concrete human relationships. It understands that power means empowerment, the give and take of scarce material resources. It seeks performance texts that tell stories about how humans experience moral community.

...

We must learn how to enact an enabling, interpretive ethnography that aspires to higher, sacred goals. We can scarcely afford to do otherwise.We are at a critical crossroad.“We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other’s throats” (West, 1994, p. 159). But with West, we must ask, “Do we have the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance, love, respect, and will to meet the challenge” (West, 1994, p. 159)?"

Geez, Norm, I hope I have.

PESSA paper

Possible structure for PESSA paper.

Implications of doing ethnography online:
1. Ethnographer has traditionally 'gone' somewhere - online ethnography done on seat of the pants ALso (Markham, Hine) Spatiality issues in this study will be provided by disciplines. See March 05 entry, esp sites in which PhD is enacted.

2. Ethnographer has immersed self in community - community is only partly 'there'  (Rutter and Smith in Hine) Also relation between real and virtual  in Sanders in HIne. Issues of authenticity.

3. issues of performance, embodiment etc (markham) which leads to reflexivity issues

4. Issues of time - asynchronicity

Thoughts on reflexivity etc

It's impossible to think about online ethnography and reflexivity without thinking about issues of performance, embodiment etc. Markham's quote in last post make this clear.

So I could construct a piece in which I begin with my own experience and motivation, move to what the theorists of online ethnography say (with interpolations of my thoughts) and weave the ideas of performativity=expression+participation (hey, that's not bad) in.

I have a list of questions below somewhere; here's another: what does it mean to do ethnography online with invisible participants? to me, and to them.

Forte in Hine (2005)

Reflecting on how "visual stillness of a website...can be an entirely deceptively optical effect that fails to adequately represent the depth and extent of social ties, networking and exchange that leads to construction." (p93) Also talks about the meaning thaty lies between websites - which I suppose means the meaning of the relationships between the creators.

Could have been talking about blogs!  Intersting 'visual stillness. Not the way I feel about websites - I see them as portals, always already unendingly opening to somewhere else. The old joke about the end of the internet...

wants to "explore the social and cultural 'constructedness' of web sites...the patterns and processes of cultural practice that bring together individuals into online groups of producers, promoters and information consumers." (p93)

"Websites do not just tell stories; they contain stories within them about themselves." (p94) Brilliant. Abd blogs foreground these ideas by being continually (re)constructed. That's a tag line for my thesis: 'the stories that our stories contain within them about themselves'

It will be interesting to analyse the way that people create and decorate their blogs, and the changes in these over time.

Although many of the points made in this chapter have become historical witht he emergence of blogging, the folloiwng analysis of how the web of webpages succeeded is interesting the light of my proposed blogging community.

Forte's senses of collectivity (pp103-4)

1. common interests
2. related content
3. shared perspectives
4. shared symbols
5. boundaries
6. mutual advantage
7. regular exchange

All this means, so he says, that the 'authority' of the websites is found between them rather than in a central place. Interesting idea.

Rutter & Smith in Hine (2005)

"...as online ethnographers we need to be very cautious about the where that we are studying."  (p85)

"Like a telephone call, the place inhabited by the RumCom.local newsgroup is defined only by acts of interation and communicaiton. There is no 'place' in the virtual beyond the metaphor"

See previous notes about 'geography' of my study.

"...the play of absence and presence" and "what does withdrawal amount to when you have never really been fully 'there'?" p 88

I am reading about doing ethnography online, so it's kind of surreal to be reading and answering email while pondering on "...the play of absence and presence" and "what does withdrawal amount to when you have never really been fully 'there'?"