Following all the training in the first phase of the program, students take their toolkit of recording devices to the field and initiate independent ethnographic research in this second phase. Field Research encompasses 10 weeks of full-time work beginning during the second week in January.
As the research progresses, students should send status updates to their supervisor on a regular basis. If necessary, students may request a meeting with their supervisor, however, we have designed a series of multimodal Field Reports to facilitate feedback and consultation. Students should submit these reports approximately every three weeks according to this cycle:
- First, students meet with members of their Supervisory Groups and discuss ideas for the reports the week before they are due. These meetings are informal and self-organized without the supervisor, but students should mention any relevant insights in their Field Report.
- Second, students submit their written Field Reports to the appropriate googledoc folder for their supervisor to read and comment.
- Third, students submit the multimodal materials (footage, recordings, drawings) to P2P for peer and supervisor feedback.
Students will be recording their observations, interactions, and conversations for a concentrated period (2.5 months), which will generate many hours of sound and image footage (<24-30hrs) as well as many pages of notes and sketches (1+pages/day). To make sense of all this data requires careful organization and consistent logging of files, not to mention the corresponding metadata (data about data) and paradata (data about the creation of the data, i.e., methods and techniques). Students should be regularly logging and backing up their materials, while also treating them with great ethical care. Refer back to the logging lessons and templates in the Field Preparations chapter as needed.
During the 11th and final week (15-19 March), the student should commit to finalizing the organization and logging of all their data in advance of the Organizing, Analysis, & Editing workshop (22 March – 6 April) designed for transitioning from data collection/production to data analysis and lays the groundwork for developing the thesis during the third phase.