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After our third session
Posted 4 years ago, 13 comments
I've changed the schedule a bit. Instead of case study, we're going to take the next two sessions to continue our conversation about ethnography. In Tuesday's session, we're going to examine several examples. On Thursday, we're going to use these examples to talk about validity/reliability/generalizability and issues of "goodness" for ethnographic work.
The readings for Tuesday (instead of Monday because of the holiday) are available at:
http://mas790.media.mit.edu/schedule#ethnography2
Please post your comments by Tuesday at 3pm. In particular, please note which two examples you chose to read (more information about that available on the class site, linked above).
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SUCHMAN
it's funny that these problems that seem obvious were struggled with then and continue to be struggled with now. they are
addresesing the question of how technologies work in the context of the full functioning intended environment. it seems
appropriate to use ethnography since each "machine" has a different history, and each use-setting has many intricate
details, and more importantly a situation that allows the use of the machine as a process to become situated. this
situation which is made up largely of people and how they interact is a small or medium sized culture.
BELL
gosh! what kind of technological assistance for childcare would they like to see? (i do, however, respect that childcare is
carried out by women according to their UK study and for that reason needs special scrutiny as to why it hasn't been allocated more technological effort).they're addressing a question of what to do about domestic work with respect to technologies. specifically, they're proposing a way of approaching the problem through what they call "defamiliarization". After reading the strategy makes sense to me, but it didn't immediately. In this way seeing the stories behind the idea helped me to come around to the point of view. I couldn't tell if the stories come from meta-analysis or from direct observation, but it seems like both, because much of the metadiscussion self-references their own studies.
SHAHANI
it occurs to me in reading this that the comment made in class last week applies in some ways to this study. it seems like this study preceeds any quantitative study that would be done (not only preceeds or exists so as to preceed, but does seem to make such a future study more possible)
Are there standards or best practices in the research community for how to present the results of an ethonographic study? Venkatesh rattles off a set of observations, then pulls a couple of suggestions out of his, er, hat for technologies that would address some of the missing elements in the environment. I think the logical leap from observation to proscription is awfully far; if we are going to suggest interventions, how do we go from observation to model? This seems essential for the 'goodness' of a proscriptive study.
My bad for posting late in the day! However, these examples are great.
Commentary: To address one of my questions from the other day; it appears that what differentiates ethonography from other disciplines that analyze social and cultural dynamics is an emphasis on methods. Methodology provides guidelines, but is also an art. The complex factors operating in any given environment are likely to be unique and it is a collection of guidelines (dare I say 'design patterns') help the researcher design an approach and methodology that addresses a given question. Reading the abstracts and articles it strikes me that the central emphasis of ethonography is language. While action and behavior are critically important, language provides the primary vehicle of access to the internal world. Behavioral observation, linguistic observation, and interviewing are all different ways to sample the internal world of goals, motivations, mental models, etc that govern behavior. The goal of sampling can be to characterize, or build a model of, internal state. It can also simply be an act of observation; finding a coherent way to present the structure of behavior in a community or an individual.
Venkatesh, "Tech in the Home"
Nice illustration of multiple techniques: interactive interviews, structural descriptions of the home, and 'fly on the wall' observations of behavior in this home environment. Also has a balanced view of the mutual informativeness of qualitative and quantitative techniques.
How does the researcher's formulation of the domain (e.g. cultural, physical and technological 'spaces') influence the structure of the research. Does this not put the model before the methodology (temporally speaking) rather than allowing observations to inform models? I don't think this is a serious problem in this paper, but it raises and interesting question about whether, or how much, one exercise discipline to avoid to much pre-conception. Perhaps this is part of the art and learning language for discussing the lense of the researcher as we previously discussed.
Silverstone:
I read, Making by making strange: Defamiliarization and the design of domestic technologies Genevieve Bell, Mark Blythe, Phoebe Sengers; as well as, The home of the future: An ethnographic study of new information technologies in the home Alladi Venkatesh
One potentially significant benefit with ethnography is the ability to study things in their natural environment. It seems like ethnography is better suited for "field" experiments. Do people use ethnography in laboratory situations?
Bell et al:
(questions about the narrative)
(questions about the whole)
what does the word "actual" mean in terms of "actual scientificness?"
so-called "labor saving" is definitely not equivalent. each machine has a complicated effect on your life from the noise it makes to the way you interface with it to the type of result you get by using it instead of using another method. For example, a microwave breaks up some nutrients in food that an oven doesn't. A washing machine could be more likely to overwash clothes rather than washing them relative to how dirty each garment is. A microwave sends out radiation waves into the environment around it. A washing machine vibrates and makes gurgling noises. Have you ever tried washing your clothes by hand? i once tried my whole hamper.
http://wakeupsilver.blogspot.com/2006/02/hand-washing-clothes.html
it was probably much easier when people stuck to two outfits. which is funny sort of cause having the washing machine also means we can have more clothes. so have we really saved labor or have we increased our capacity to have things with the overall labor staying similar?
Actual scientificness is an artificial distinction to some extent. Regarding the question itself, it has to do with recipes if that's not really clear. Bell et al. make some claims about the scientific cooking movement (deceptively juxtaposed with the scientificness inserting into cooking itself) that I find interesting. In particular, I wonder if the availability of measuring technology, or perhaps the arrival of the "precision culture" has caused people to believe that perfection (in a brownie) can be quantified, or if it has simply a side effect of the fact that it is easier to write a book with real measures (what's a pinch of salt when I have fat fingers?) and that we don't normally get recipes from grandma so much in our nuclear-family-oriented society anymore. For reference, I do cook and my mom never told me to put in "2 cups of diced eggplants" in my favorite fried eggplant dish. However, describing the recipe as my mom did approximations and an exemplar eggplant would probably not work if I codified it in text.
In a more general sense, I am not planning to go all dogmatic on it here, but I think that there is a perceived scientificness. I feel that actual and perceived are in fact the very same, and conversely that that which is not perceived to be scientific is not accepted to be scientific even if there is a methodology to it. This is often the case with ethnography, as noted in today's readings. The accessible prose and historical account belies the method behind the writing to the naive observer. However, I am questioning the use of scientificness as an appropriate of fully-backed (or even highly possible) causative factor in the evolution of recipes (or anything else).
I came from one of those places that didn't have convenient washer/dryers all over the place, and I have washed more than a few full loads by hand. We also had an in-house maid at a later point. That is why I asked that question. To your point though, you don't reduce the number of clothes much, but to be honest, my clothes were generally cleaner and much less damaged that they are when using the fabric manglers we call washing machines around here (they went out of fashion everywhere else about 15 years ago and were replaced with gentler, more efficient horizontal drum units).
Sorry for the late response :-)
Listening to a Long Conversation: An Ethnographic Approach to the Study of Information and Communication Technologies in the Home
"Work with one family would feed into that with another. Things learnt from one would be incorporated into the methodology in time to include it in the study as a whole." p.212
I am reminded of concepts like top down vs. bottom up approaches to problem solving. I took a class on extreme programming once in which the instructor contrasted their more adaptive design process against one that depends on adherence to an iron-clad specification drawn up at the beginning. Ethnography then would seem to be more like the former - a reflexive, more bottom up and feedback sensitive approach. Of course scope needs to be declared at the beginning, but there's room for adaptation in the process. Much more so than with those other -----itative approaches.
Reconstructing Technologies as Social Practice
A very interesting read I thought.
"From looking closely at actual encounters with this machine, Suchman began to develop the idea that its obscurity was less a function of lack of technological sophistication on the part of its users than of their lack of familiarity with this particular machine." p.394
This insight stems from a study way back in 1981 - I wish it were more widely and publicly understood today. I've spent a lot of time training / supporting unsophisticated users in how to use computers. When confronted with a difficult or unintuitive user interface, they nearly always blame themselves for not immediately understanding how to use it. The assumption is that if they were smarter, they would have been born with the knowledge that the way you change to landscape orientation in Word is via File - Page Setup... This has interesting repercussions. Because users so often blame their lack of technical sophistication for their difficulties, they very rarely blame the interface itself or understand that it takes time to learn to use a new tool. Were they to place more blame on the design rather than themselves, one could imagine that would put more pressure on designers to make software easier to use.
I really like your comment about adaptation and the analogy to extreme programming (showing my engineering bias here:). Rapid prototyping and iterative design philosophies are definitely a better starting point for thinking about ethnography than something like clinical trials or trolling for Hadrons.
"Listening to a Long Conversation: An Ethnographic Approach to the Study of Information and Communication Technologies in the Home"
It was interesting to trace the researchers' assumptions through the initial stages of their work and see how
circumstances, data, and feedback changed their approaches and assumptions. It was useful to see how tools, such as the home maps,
became more useful and on multiple levels, than expected.
I did wonder how the original primary researcher (a woman) "participated in the domestic life of the household" and why the researchers
thought that a man couldn't participate equally in that space. I am familiar with gendered household expectations, but what was she
actually doing that precluded a male researcher from doing the same.
I liked the absence of things being considered as important as the presence of things (families' failures to identify technologies in their homes
might point to forgetting their presence or taking them for granted).
"Making by Making Strange: Defamiliarization and the Design of Domestic Technologies"
The authors state that defamiliarization is a literary device, but I keep thinking of Dali. Can't defamiliarization be artistic, too? Certainly I've been exposed to familiar objects that were constructed in unique and new styles that rendered them unfamiliar to me.