This is my attempt to build a schedule for the days at The Newspaper

My objective with this is to see in a more graphical way what I have been thinking about lately. I need to make sure I observe the newsroom in different times and, if possible, at all times, in order to achieve a comprehensive combination of staff + time of the day + day of the week.

This way, if an event happens at a certain time in a certain day of the week I will be able to check not only if it happens also in other times of that same day, but also if it happens in other days of the week.

I am aware of the fact that it will be very difficult to follow this schedule by the line, since interviews and visits will be modulated by the process itself. But I found it important to have a plan that can guide me through it.

Maybe I am just a control freak. Maybe one cannot have such a plan when doing ethnography. Or maybe I just have to be good on it, which means being very adaptable to the circumstances and change the route halfway through the journey. I think I can do it.

Bibliography

Again, no much news in this side of life.

Reading:

Crabtree, A. (2003) Designing collaborative systems: a practical guide to ethnography London: Springer.

“…the rationalist mentality embedded in methods of description so prevalent in the human sciences keeps us from looking at the essential issues in the workplace, which is to say that the rationalist methodologies gloss over and obscure the real world, real time character of work”. (p.46)

Dey, I. (2004) Grounded Theory. In Qualitative research practice edited by Clive Seale [et al.] London: SAGE p. 80-93

Good historical account of the origins of Grounded Theory, synthetic explanation of Strauss and Corbin's three phase coding system and sufficient critique of the method.

"Concepts can both reduce and enrich data: they reduce in the sense that they summarize a range of observations and they enrich because concepts convey connotations that facilitates connections with other concepts".

“Posing questions isn’t the same as presuming answers”

Hammersley, M. & Atkinson P. (1995) Ethnography:principles in practice 2nd ed.. London: Routledge.

Action

Replied Jirotka's email asking for an appointment

Last updates

The DE module is totally sucking all my available time (and the brains too).
Last updates on the research site:

- Marina Jirotka replied to my email saying we could either talk on the phone or I could go to Oxford. Great!
- Had a meeting with Andrew Harder, from Flow Interaction, who did an ethnographic study of the London Underground for his theses a couple of years ago. He told me he used to sit in the back of the room, 2 or 3 hours per day and observe, literally. He let the data talk to him. He says it is agonizing, but things start shaping up little by little. He didn't use any kind of tool (like the Ethnographer or Atlas) to analyze the data, he used post-its that he stuck on his bedroom wall. A good point he made is the post its give a better visualization of the data and he found it easier to find patterns. That's valid point. He also said he didn't worry much about the implications to design, because as it was -- a MSc thesis -- it was already valid just as sn observation study.

The career of information

So, in response to my worries, yes, I just need to read more.
Harper agrees with me that there is very little in the literature to guide the novice ethnographer, who just goes to the field with fingers crossed and good faith he/she will "bump into" something interesting. That is why he decides to explain HOW he did his ethnographic research.

Summarizing it all, he bases what he calls his "field work programmes" into 3 main components:

1. Following the career of information
2. Rituals of induction
3. Undertaking interviews and observing work.

I am still trying to absorb this, but the idea of "following a career of information" sounds very appealing. Else, it fits perfectly into the AT framework, where the artefact plays a central role. Understand how a story is prompted, written, edited and published could be a good way to start.

"My view is that reference to the career of information (irrespective of whether that career might be manifest in a document or other artefacts) is a technique through which nearly all organizations can be mapped" (Inside the IMF - Harper - p. 70)

Lots of "why", lack of "how"

I am curious about something I had noticed and then Harper put into nice words: why is it that we find a lot of texts and papers defending the usefulness of ethnography as a method for collecting information about the context where activity is performed, but very very rarely we find a paper that actually describes HOW the ethnographic observation is done.

Maybe is it because I am only in the beginning of my reading and still didn't find much about it.

Harper's explanation is actually very convincing: he argues that by mid-1980's organizations were tired of being fooled by vendors, who promised a lot of things that technology at that stage couldn't do. So these companies started to make up their own way of finding out WHAT exactly workers need in these terms to improve their performance.

And that is, for example, when Participatory Design comes in. And also, that is when mangers realize that having an anthropologist to take a look at their company and help them in the task could be a good idea. So, basically, the first sparkle for the ethnographic approach started in the commercial world, not in the academia, where the REAL anthropologists are. By no means this diminishes the work of Suchman and Lyin, quite the opposite: they were the first to show that even in ORGANIZations, things don't happen quite in a ORGANIZide and rational way.

So, managers don't really want to know how ethnographers arrived at the conclusions they arrived: they are interested in the results, punto.

I think I need to read more. Need to find HOW to ethnograph.

Quote - Harper

"According to the sociological view, documents are tools in the construction of fixed and shared meaning. (...) Without them, organizations would collapse". (Harper, p 42)

Inside the IMF

I just started reading this book by Richard Harper. He analysis the "document careers", i.e. the paths of documents inside the Fund, and how this picture contributes to understanding the institution dynamics as a whole. So far, I am truly amazed.
This book was not available at UCL's library and I had to request it to be purchased. I hope other people enjoy it as much as I am.
Besides that not much work done in the the project front. Emailed Jirotka asking her if she would talk to me. Fingers crossed!