December

"Patterns of unintentional coordination develop in assemblages. To notice such patterns means watching the interplay of temporal rhythms and scales in the divergent lifeways that gather. (...) This turns out to be a method that might revitalize political economies inside them, and not just for humans. Assemblages cannot hide from capital and the state; they are sites for watching how political economy works." Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2017). The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the Possibility of Life in capitalist Ruins. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

Image as Method

From the Heyman Center:

"Image as Method: Ethnography – Photography – Film – Sensation – Perception" is a two-day symposium presented by the Society of Fellows in the Humanities. The symposium is organized by Fellow Brian Goldstone, Lecturer in Anthropology.

See discussion in LinkedIn about «qualitative vs quantitative» methods.

Visions of ideal solutions to the management of personal information collections

Bruce, H., Wenning, A., Jones, E., Vinson, J., & Jones, W. (2011). Seeking an ideal solution to the management of personal information collections. Information Research, 16(1) paper 462: 

"(...) the researchers found that observing people over time as they find, select, collect, organize, and manage information for a personal project provides an excellent context for studying the challenges of personal information management."

Visual Research Conference

For some time now that i feel that i need to know more about the use of visuals for research. Lack of «local» peers to talk about the use visuals in research and the implications of those for the research design, have made me go back to readings... but never really able to discuss what I read.

Just now, a friend of mine, also doing her research, sent me a link to Visual Sociology. They have an open call (till March 30) for an event that will take place in Bologna, July 20-22, this year.

Apart from not knowing how can I afford going in there, the main issue is getting to prepare my contribution and facing that this would be a great opportunity to learn with other people using visuals for research... and a great opportunity to change my long time fears of talking about my work that turn into procrastination.

Thinking, Doing and Publishing Visual Research: the state of the field? Bologna, Italy, July 20-22, 2010.

Although all sessions are interesting, the ones that address more questions I've been doing to myself are:

«Theory of the image»:

- Panel 1, Visual Mobile Landscapes, because it addresses the issues concerning how mobility is perceived (or mobilities like explained in Urry). I'm not only dealing with artefacts (mobile phones being one of them) but I'm also trying to «capture» what kind of mobilities do workers face for getting work done and how do they perceive it. Historical context is also of important and it is addressed.

- Panel 2, Sociology of the Visual, would be great when I can present the results of my research. But I would like to be expose to research done using visuals in order to have a feel of the problems, solutions and options that people using it as a method face.

«Methodology»

- Panel 7, Integrating fieldwork methodologies using Net and its Tools, cause I feel that I don't need to be re-inventing the wheel when finding/learning how to use existing tools and adapting them to my ongoing needs (although it is one of the things that I like most and that also contributes for what others perceive as procrastination)

- Panel 10, Methodological issues of Visual Data Collection, Production and Presentation, cause I have accumulated so many questions during visual data collection and accompanying readings that I feel like jelly when it turns out to justify the need of visuals as an integral part of the basis of my research set in Information Systems.

«Fieldwork»

- Panel 22, Doing Work, a lot of issues in here, but one of the main connections is about «visible» and «(un)visible» work. When we use visuals we bring the «unvisible» visible by way of image... I'm also dealing with use of information artefacts in «private spaces» that by way of documenting visuals become not-private anymore. «Doing work» anywhere is also an issue for conducting fieldwork and, more often then not, I keep asking myself how to have a more robust work?...

And also the panel 27, that deals with representations in visual research and the need for reflexivity. Trying to address this on my research by expliciting my practices, making visuals of my own artefacts in work context but still, not knowing how to integrate that as part of one of the research layers.

continuous present

"When a photograph is situated in the present tense and is treated as a realist representation, a particular relationship between the text, the image and the ethnographic context is constructed. The specificity of the photographic moment, set in the past, is lost and instead the photograph is situated in a continuous present." Sarah Pink (2009). Doing Visual Ethnography. Sage, p.150. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

IS & ethnographic research

Myers, M. (1999). Investigating information systems with ethnographic research, Communications of AIS, vol. 2(4).

on the use of «labels» for writing research

McKechnie, L., Julien, H., Pecoskie, J.L. & Dixon, C.M. (2006). The presentation of the information user in reports of information behaviour research. Information Research, 12(1) paper 278 [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/12-1/paper278.html]:

"(...) the terms partner and participant, may perhaps be regarded as the most inclusive of all as they construct the individual as a member of the research team and an active player in the research process."

When addressing participants in a research, McKechnie et al (2006) suggest to use the words «participants» or «partners» since it acknowledges their active paper in the research process and denotes a more centralized role in the research than the use of words such as «subjects» or «objects» that distance the researched from the research. Also, there was a correlation with the data collection methods used where the participant label was used:

"The important role of the user or research participant was evident in the method section of some of the papers. Some data collection practices reported by authors were designed to bring, and were effective at bringing, researchers closer to users and capturing their perspectives. These included open-ended interviews, face-to-face interviews, close interaction over an extended period of time, audio-recording of interviews, full transcription of audio-recorded interviews and participant checking. Conversely, data collection practices such as transaction log analysis or the use of secondary survey data served to distance the researcher from the researched."

The core of the paper is concerned not only with the labels a researcher uses, but how this labels might reflect how the researcher sees the participants. To be avoided, specially if one is using the qualitative paradigm, reports that address participants by numbers, by letters, by pie charts, etc., not giving voice to the participants.

This is one of the differences that might be an issue when presenting my research in an engineers context. They might say that I used a lot of quotations and little aggregated information. Also, it may reflect how I see the world of engineers: my pre-conceptions of what it is expected of my research in the context of the Department I'm going to present my PhD.

The Petabyte Age

To reflect and provoke! 

In the last Wired News, The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn't Just More — More Is Different, they have an entry about «The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete».

So where is the method? The scientific rigour? If what they state was true, than scientist would be obsolete. Scientific method is not only about finding correlations in data. The scientific method allows for a number of triangulations: data, methods & theory. Scientific method starts from choosing what kind of data to look for, how to collect it, how to analyze, how to interpret the data.

Anyhow, it shows that the perception that having access to large amounts of data can suffice to make science :S

Tracking Transition

"(...) the transition to employment is only one of a number of possible transitions which the individual may experience upon leaving university and as noted above these are not necessarily mutually exclusive events, but often exhibit a degree of interaction between the various transitions. (...) a number of transitions may simultaneously be in operation: that of status (undergraduate to graduate); in terms of accommodation, living arrangements and even location of domicile; and, in terms of activity (undergraduate to post-graduate or from part-time to full-time work or from student to employee). In the case of some of the respondents as noted by comments above, the transitions were not always unproblematic. Moreover, for some of the respondents, the transition especially in relation to independent living was conditioned by a lack of financial resources and this could impact on relationships with partners and parents." Houston, Muir (2008). Tracking Transition: Issues in Asynchronous E-Mail Interviewing. FQS, vol 9(2).

Visualization of Data, Information & Knowledge

Lengler R., Eppler M. (2007). Towards A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for Management. IASTED Proceedings of the Conference on Graphics and Visualization in Engineering (GVE 2007), Clearwater, Florida, USA [click on the Table, and then move around the «elements»]:

[Note to self on 2011/05/10: added to citeulike collection]

Blogging as a research tool in ethnography

[connecting links from here]: Erkan Saka (2006). Blogging as a Research Tool for Ethnographic Fieldwork. Paper submitted to the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, Internet Research 7.0: Internet Convergences, Brisbane, Qld, Australia, September 27 - 30.

Rapid ethnography

Millen, D. R. (2000). Rapid ethnography: time deepening strategies for HCI field research. In Proceedings of the Conference on Designing interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques. D. Boyarski and W. A. Kellogg, Eds. DIS '00. ACM Press, New York, August 17 - 19, 2000, pp. 280-286:

"Due to increasingly short product realization cycles, there has been growing interest in more time efficient methods, including rapid prototyping and various usability inspection techniques. This paper will introduce "rapid ethnography," which is a collection of field methods intended to provide a reasonable understanding of users and their activities given significant time pressures and limited time in the field. The core elements include limiting or constraining the research focus and scope, using key informants, capturing rich field data by using multiple observers and interactive observation techniques, and collaborative qualitative data analysis. A short case study illustrating the important characteristics of rapid ethnography will also be presented."

Exemplo de utilização de Structured-case

Santos, Leonel D. (2004). Factores Determinantes do Sucesso de Adopção e Difusão de Serviços de Informação Online em Sistemas de Gestão de Ciência e Tecnologia. Guimarães: Universidade do Minho, Tese de Doutoramento.

Photographs for documenting fieldwork (ethnography)

As i will need to uncover individual and group information spaces and information needs in mobility settings, I've started taking photos of meetings taking place in work settings, outside the organizations. Due to ethics on need of preserve individual identity, collected picture do not depict human subjects but concentrate on objects of information used during meetings (archives in my flickr account classified by date taken, settings, project acronym and place, among other key words that can be added later on during data analysis).

Supporting views for this method:

Kanstrup, Anne Marie (2002, May). Picture the Practice—Using Photography to Explore Use of Technology Within Teachers' Work Practices [32 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research [On-line Journal], 3(2).