Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

I created a new category on the Guide to Ease: ethnography.

This Blog Sits at the: how to blog like an anthropologist. Yes! I’m going to read this entire blog. See you later.

This Blog Sits at the: how anthropology works: “I am in Seattle and doing ethnographic interviews. The project is for Domini (domini.com) and the objective is to see why people invest in socially responsible mutual funds.”

Less Cyber, More Cafe: Design Implications for Easing the Digital Divide with Locally Social Cyber Cafes
, by what we can call the Intel Gang.

I am planning to experiment a bit with doing ethnography-like research and presenting it on the web using a mix of media (video, audio, text). There is a history of using video and images in anthropology, but there is still little work being done (that I know of) on using the web to what I think is its potential in presenting ethnographic research.

I’m looking for examples - tips welcome. visualanthropology.net seems a good starting point. Visual studies seems an interesting publication as well - you can see a sample online but you have to get a free login. (They’re good about providing linking options with each article.)

I have a documentary photography background, so I am all for using visual techniques. What I also want to do is to publish interviews and such, and annotate them, online. I want to publish unfinished, not-very-interpreted results of the study, so they can be re-interpreted by other people. I haven’t seen examples of this online yet. I say not-very-interpreted because I am well aware of the problems with trying to be objective - I won’t even try to be that.

A nice example of having extensive source material online and reinterpreting it through an ethnography is Looking at discipline, looking at labour: photographic representations of Indian boarding schools (PDF, 3M). (I think this direct link should work.) The ethnography looks at the documentary pictures of Indian boarding schools. A fascinating read, check it out. (A lot of classic documentary photography was commisioned by the USA and is freely available online.)

Photographs have the strange property of gaining meaning over time - the older they are, the more we can easily re-interpret them. Video may have the same properties.

More:
- Visual Anthropology Papers
- Understanding What We See: Subject, Author, and Audience in Visual Anthropology, which includes this quote:

“All over the world, on every continent and island, in the hidden recesses of every industrial city as well as in the hidden valleys that can be reached only by helicopter, precious, totally irreplaceable, and forever irreproducible behaviors are disappearing, while departments of anthropology continue to send fieldworkers out with no equipment beyond a pencil and a notebook. (Hockings 1975: 4)”

Also (this nicely illustrates the reluctance anthropologists seem to have with visual media) : “”Ethnographers worship a terrifying deity known as Reality, whose eternal enemy is its evil twin, Art. They believe that to remain vigilant against evil, on must devote oneself to a set of practices known as Science. Their cosmology, however, is unstable: for decades they have fought bitterly among themselves as to the nature of their god and how best to serve him. They accuse each other of being secret followers of Art; the worst insult in their language is ‘aesthete’.” - Eliot Weinberger, The Camera People”.

Here are some more thoughts on the same issues. A brilliant explanation of the history and issues in ethnographic filmmaking.

I’m looking for a piece of screencapture software, or a methodology. I want to use it as follows - recommendations are welcome.

I am interested in studying how people use technology, in an ethnographic kind of way. When I visit someone’s house, I might take pictures of where the computer is. I might also want to take some screenshots. What I need is a way to make screenshots on pretty much any computer (varying OS’s).

As long as it’s Windows, I think I can do this: use CTRL-PRT SCR to make a screencap. Open M$ Paint (which is installed on all computers). Paste in the picture and save it. Then either save it on a diskette (most computers) or email it to myself (internet cafe where diskettes are disabled).

Any tips for macs?

I have some free time coming up, and I hope to do some research about a few things:

- the Everything Else category (example at Half.com)

- the co-construction of users and technology. I’m ordered 5 books, mostly out of the anthropology field, about how users and technology are constructed. Fascinating stuff, with definite repurcussions for how we construct taxonomies. Don’t be surprised if I write about the co-construction of users and taxonomies soon ;)

- international information architecture

- the properties of classification systems. I’d like to expand our understanding of classification systems a bit with information from not just the library sciences and IT sciences, but to include cognitive science and the social sciences. What are the cognitive relevant aspects of certain types of classification systems? What can we learn from the research on cognitive basic-levelness of categories? How exactly do power relations in a social system influence the creation of classification systems? How about identity? How do users co-construct classification systems?

Lotta stuff, I probably will only get to some of that this year… Sometimes I wish I was a student still, but most of the time I don’t. Couldn’t afford it anyways.

MIT OpenCourseWare | Science, Technology, and Society | STS.360 Ethnography, Spring 2003 | Home: The politics of independence and technological objects.

I updated my Examples Of Web Ethnography page.

InfoDesign: Special on Jared Spool. Interview with the excellent Jared Spool: “When a design team has to tackle one of these designs, how do they know what content is required? They could do field studies (contextual inquiries and ethnography) to determine who the users are, what content they need, and when. However, that’s an expensive, time consuming process and it comes at the beginning of a project, when resources and funds are extremely tight.
[...]
This research can be very expensive. We fund most of it with money from our conferences, roadshows and publications. A small portion is privately funded with client consulting.

We’ve come a long way from our roots of being a usability testing service. We really don’t do that anymore, primarily because our research has shown that the most successful design teams are those that do their own testing. Farming your testing out substantially reduces its effectiveness. Instead, we help teams start and maintain their own internal testing process.
[...]
It’s interesting to note that the more we play down our opinions, the more clients beg us to give them and tend to seriously consider them when making their decisions.
[...]
Since UIE started as a consulting outfit, we had to learn quickly how to prove to people we were valuable. After all, when you’re a consultant, you don’t eat if nobody believes you’re of value.

I learned quickly that business executives didn’t care about usability testing or information design. Explaining the importance of these areas didn’t get us any more work. [...] We found, early on, that the less we talked about usability or design, the bigger our projects got.
[...]
Yet, was the iPod’s design process a standard one? Nope. Have we dissected the process, so that everyone in the field knows exactly how they did it? Nope. Can we explain why Apple is in the process of shutting down all their usability labs? Nope. Have we even tried to answer these questions? Nope. ”

Sorry for the extensive quoting. Read the article! Jared is very, very good.

If you’re interested in ethnography and design and business, say hi on the Ethno Cafe.

- What can I do with an anthropology degree?: “Get as much experience as you can as an undergraduate.”
Anthropology majors can capitalize on the growing global marketplace: “Archaeological digs, exciting though they may be, don’t exactly qualify as a family-friendly job. Museum work, by all accounts, is tough to come by. And you’re not particularly inclined to become a “lifer” on campus, chasing a Ph.D and an academic post.
[...]
“The bachelor’s degree, however, does provide suitable background for many different kinds of entry-level jobs, such as research assistant, administrative aide, or management and sales trainee.”
- What can an anthropology degree do for you?: “Cultural anthropologists are equipped to work in a variety of fields. In the business world, they can be found in public relations and advertising positions. In the academic world, cultural anthropologists can work as museum educators. Cultural anthropologists with an emphasis on medical anthropology also find jobs in community health. ”
- Finding a job in anthropology.
…

Just wanted to point out that my GuideToEthnography : Recent Changes has a working RSS feed. Enjoy!

I added some new companies to Companies That Do Ethnography. Feel free to add yours if you offer true ethnography services.

Dina landed an ethnography job through her blogging contacts. Congrats!

A little self-promotion: the revived ethnograpy wiki.

Ooh. The IA Summit 2004 has Brenda Laurel as the plenary speaker. Ethnography enthusiasts must attend!

Center For the Ethnography of Every Day Life: “Before the abstractions of social science, there are people’s stories, the emotional worlds of disappointment and uncertainty, and the brave coping of everyday life. Established in 1998 with a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life fosters research and training to document the challenges of American working families. Working people, everyday lives explored in the tradition where ethnography and documentary come together.”

The Guide To Ethnography wiki is back.

Designing Collaborative Systems: A Practical Guide to Ethnography (Computer Supported Cooperative Work): promising. I hope it’s any good.

Interview with Jay Melican: “Anthropology for designers”.

Dr Mils Hills, The Cabinet Office, Ministry of Defence: “Social Anthropology is not a conventional qualification for those seeking to conduct research in the defence and security community.”

It was this blogs anniversary about a week ago: ethnography and usability. That first post was ported from a poorbuthappy blog hosted on editthispage which seems to be down now (but Google has a cache).

Usability in India (post on CHI list). Aaron Marcus made a great point that I’ve been thinking about: we need cultural dimensions (in Geert Hofstede style) relevant to the web. Looking it his website by the way, Aaron seems a year or two, three ahead of the curve on a lot of the thinking relevant to IA and webdesign as it relates to cultures. He wrote a good introductory article, making the point that yes, Hofstede’s dimensions *are* relevant for the web. Yet they need to be adjusted, and more research is needed.

One thing I’m gonna try to look at the following years is cultural diversity on intranets. I am going to work on a lot of large intranets, and have audiences all over the world, so that is a great opportunity to do that type of research. And try to develop intranets that are sensitive to cultural differences that may exist between countries but also between job roles. Trompenaars (in one of his books, forgot which one) did some work on how Hofstede’s dimensions get reflected in job descriptions: how cultures of laywers are different than cultures of HR people for example.
On a related note, I had a chat with a niece of mine - she’s an accountant - and was talking about how different managers came in with new methods and how they got received. Culture! I’m happy I took that ethnography course, it will be useful me thinks.

Peter Merholz points to Steve Whittaker who has some yummie research papers like this one called Networkers and their activity in intensional networks (PDF), discussing how social networks are becoming more important (using ethnographic research methods.), and how we should take these into account when designing interactions, and not just design for teams.

jill/txt on ethnography:

“Did you know that ethical guidelines for internet research are mostly inspired by guidelines for medical research that stems out of the N�rnberg trials and the response to the Nazi’s horrid medical experiments in concentration camps?”
(more…)

What’s an archaeologist doing at a design firm? (via Peterme)

“By now, I’m used to the question, “How did your background lead you to this job?” People aren’t quite sure how several degrees in Archaeology and Anthropology connect to a career in high tech design. The best way to explain the connection is to talk about the other question I get as soon as people find out I’m an archaeologist: “Have you found any cool stuff?” The answer is yes, but not exactly the kinds of cool stuff most people imagine. “

Gender and Technology: A Case Study (Video feed) by Brenda Laurel: she describes ethnography as a design tool nicely as: “paying very close attention to the details in the lives of certain types of people as a strategy to design products”.

Some tips on interviewing kids: interview them together with their one best friend. Advantages, they keep each other honest, and they talk a lot to each other. Focus groups with kids don’t work.

They did lots of research on gender differences as it relate to designing games for girls, and came up with a hierarchy of colors and characteristics for what works for boys vs. girls. For example: pink overrides truckness. So a pink truck is still girlie, no boy wants it. Other finding: the hi-res polygon typical rendering of games is very boy-like, even if the thing that’s being rendered is a pink pony, it still says “boys”.

Other interesting bits: Brenda thinks there are some key biological differences between boys and girls: the biological differences are small but get enlarged by cultural narrative. (Differences like spatial awareness under time pressure (videogames anyone?)). Girls do well with Tetris, a pattern matching problem. How the problem is described matters on how well you perform: are you “helping your car down the street”?

Brenda also made some good points on ethics: use applicable ethics at the right point: when doing research, use research ethics. When developing products, use more political ethics. Don’t use political ethics when doing research.

It’s an interesting talk about gender issues for kids, but also about research practices - she shares lots of interesting findings. If you build websites for kids, listen to this!

Something I am thinking lately: websites aimed at very specific audiences are pretty powerful things. They serve these particular people so well that it’s hard to steal the audience… Not that that had anything to do with the above post. Oh well…

Maybe it’s just my D844 exam (I can recommend this course - you can study from home) coming up this week.

From Intel ethnography:
- CHI 97: Design Ethnography: Using Custom Ethnographic Techniques to Develop New Product Concepts (CHI 97)
- Engineering Ethnography in the Home (CHI 96)
- Getting Out of the Box: Ethnography Meets Real Life: Applying Anthropological Techniques to Experience Research (UPA 01)
- From the dreams of children to the future of technology (The Independent - newspaper article)

There is lots more at this Google search for “Intel ethnography”.

Other good queries on Google:
- IBM ethnography
- Nokia ethnography
- hewlett packard ethnography

TextArc.org Home

“A TextArc is a visual represention of a text%u2014the entire text (twice!) on a single page. Some funny combination of an index, concordance, and summary, it uses the viewer’s eye to help uncover meaning. A more detailed overview is available. ”

The tools keep coming. There is a slow building of tools that help analyzing stuff. However, there is no interaction between them. Software designed to help social research and things like the above should all be able to export and import data in XML, so you can use multiple tools for data analysis. One day maybe…

It’s funny how disciplines often are still separate and yet struggle with the same problems.

Contectual design is a fairly famous method for designing software that takes a very ethnographic approach. One of the problems they have is to communicate their findings to the team. The data they gather (like ethographers) is very rich, very detailed.

A spec of course can only communicate a limited amount of information. So what they do is they have group sessions where they work through the data, and like that get everyone familiar with it.

One of the things ethnographers struggle with is exactly the same: how to communicate their results. Ethnography is one of those academic disciplines that has a whole history behind it, and people tend to get stuck in that history.
They tend to believe that writing a text in a similar way the early anthropologists wrote their texts is the way to go. Ha! Ethnographers do recognise the problem, but most still seem to stick to gathering and analysing data, and then writing it up in a fairly classical manner.

To me it seems that the contextual design crowd has solved the communication problem a lot better. Sharing data with the whole team, having data analysis sessions, so the whole team gets soaked in data, and they all can go home and make decisions based on a real understanding of the subtleties of what’s going on.

During the last few years, I’ve felt the limitations of (my) writing specs to communicate with a team. Sure, specs are nessecary and useful, but on their own they’re just not enough. That’s one of the reasons why working together with people who live at the other side of the world can be hard.

Anyways, I’ll shut up now.

Here’s the thing with ethnography: they seem to have the feeling they need to prove they are a real science.

I was trying to find out where I’d heard that before, and then it dawned on me: photography. I studied photography, and a surprisingly large part of photographers felt this strange need to prove they were Art (the classes were in the Academy of Arts, together with painters, sculpters and such).

I always tought that was pretty silly, also because “Art” is such an undefined thingie.

The value of ethnography, as I see it, lies in the extended attention you give a certain thing. If you look at and think about something for so long, surely you’re gonna come up with some good ideas about it.

Which reminds me of a story I read about a guy who was manic-depressive. He was talking about one of his manic phases (which last a few months), and how he spent a whole afternoon staring at a glass of water, touched in his deepest soul by the beauty of it, by its connectedness with all things. A Zen master would approve, I thought.

One of documentary photography’s classics is “Let us now praise famous men” (book at Amazon.com), by James Agee (writing) and Walker Evans (pictures). It is a documentary examination of poor families in the US. Is it Art? Is it journalism? Is it ethnography? Nobody can tell. But it stands tall, even after all these years.

One of the most famous documentary filmmakers ever (he shot those really long black and white movies in prisons and schools, but I can’t remember his name for the life of me…, please let me know if you know his name) was in Bogota a few years back, at a conference on documentary film.

A friend of mine was there. She told me he was asked if he considered his films Journalism or Art. (The films are very impressive, and in a dry style, very journalism like. There are no voice overs, nothing added, just roll the camera and edit.) To the shock of many present he said “Art, of course.”

It’s strange how these disciplines have this urge to prove their worth by being “Art” or “Journalism” or “Science” or anything else with a capital. Surely it’s all the same? I’d rather concentrate on making something that stands, regardless of which of the cultural maffias approves it.

I’m doing the Open University course on ethnography:

-Ethnographers are very conscious of the ethical implications of their work. But then they seem to think that getting permission solves that. As if.

-Ethnographers are slow. A typical project takes a few years. Partly, that’s because of the academicness of it: grants have to be applied for, literature has to be studied. Sometimes I can’t help thinking; just get on with it!

-Ethnography is fun for the same reason usability is fun. You get to deal with people.