A step ahead

Yesterday was my last day in the newspaper, and it was a great one. I felt sorry for leaving... not only I got used to those people, I even liked them. I think they liked me too. It is a strange thing a fieldwork ... you create bonds with people, you know what they are thinking, what they are doing, the way they move, ... and then you go. It's almost heartbreaking.

But well, now it is writing time. I found that:

- It is almost irresistible not to start drawing conclusions about what you found. The "data analysis" that must happen during the data gathering didn't happen for me in any formal way, i.e., I didn't code any data before the end of the fieldwork, as you are supposed to do, but I believe I did a sort of analysis by writing up the summaries for each day and comparing things from one day to another. How I am going to explain this in the theses is another subject.

- In many many ways, ethnography is like making a long news story. You go there, you listen to what the people have to say, you ask questions, you make notes, you transcribe tapes, and then you come back to the office with the hint, that feeling that you know what the lead of the story is, but you need to check the transcriptions again, see if you are not jumping ahead with conclusions, and you check with your editor what he thinks (that's Simon, in a way) and then you seat down and write the story. There is always the "uh, am I sure this is the lead? Did I get this right?" question you ask yourself, but in 99.999% of the times, you are spot on.

The difference here is that, as a reporter, if you are not right about the lead you will get to know the day after when you read the other newspapers. And what a horrible feeling that is...

If you are a researcher, nobody will know if you missed the lead or not, because is pretty much your choice, it depends on what the data tell you, but also how you want to look at it, and from which angle you want to describe what you saw.

So being an ethnographer, for me, is like a step ahead: it is journalism with choice, thought and freedom. I think I love it! (godforbidsomeonereadsthis!)