Ethno-Graphics

This first FSA is designed to already introduce you to the many ways that multimodality plays a role in our ethnographic research. By producing a map on your own and with another participate, by drawing from memory and searching the historical archives, you are engaging a range of perspectives. In combination these may have synergistic effects on our ability to produce knowledge. We encourage you to incorporate smartphone map apps into your research, but also use your own research of a place to note inconsistencies.

Please select an accessible and relevant site inside The Netherlands that allows you to train the offered techniques and methods and helps you to think in different ways about your research site. Try to choose a location that is closely related to the topic of your thesis research. You should base all your FSAs at the same location, so choose wisely. Drawings and maps (as with all the FSA studies) should be documented in your journals. Scans or photos of these drawings and maps should be uploaded to P2P when sharing your FSA.

We anticipate this assignment taking you around 3-4 hours (75% in the field, 25% write up & submit). It is important that you get in the regular habit of spending concentrated periods of time on location, meeting people, and exploring new resources. Even if you’re doing digital ethnography, you cannot do most of your fieldwork at home in your armchair! You should allow another hour to complete the peer reviews (20 min per review).

Please read the assignment instructions carefully and completely before visiting your site. You are advised to preview the peer review guidelines so you can best align your efforts with the intended outcomes.

Part 1: Mapping Observation (approx. 30 min.) By applying a cartographic perspective to your field site, the aim of this task is to document the spatial arrangement of the site and better understand the social significance of place.

• Before setting of to your research-site, please develop a research question that reflects your particular interest in this site as a place. Why does this site interest you and how does it relate to your thesis topic?
• Once at your site, observe the place from different vantage points. Reconsider your research question and how the space speaks to it.
• Consider how you will determine the boundaries of your map. This kind of map requires some precision, so measure the distances in any way that is practical and try to use a consistent scale (f.i. 1/100, 1 cm = 1 Meter).
• Draw a map (bird’s eye perspective) of the most relevant features of the place and the organization of space, but you should be fairly detailed in your rendering.
• Create an explanatory legend referring to the important ethnographic features of the place and add text on your map as necessary to convey these aspects.
• Reflect on your research question. How did it affect what you saw and how did what you see challenge your question? What other questions were generated by drawing this map? Reflect on how relevant space and place will be in your research. (max 200 words).

Part 2: Participatory Drawing (20-30 min.) By eliciting a drawing from a local subject, this task affords you the opportunity to situate personal relationships with place and elucidate perspectives that you may not have considered.

• Recruit someone to collaborate in your mapping task. This may be someone who you met or expressed interest in your own mapping efforts or someone you approach at the site yourself.
• Ask your subject to draw a map of the site (either on location or from memory if elsewhere during the exercise).
• Be present whilst s/he draws to (gently) guide their efforts and discuss the outcomes. Make note of how their interpretation differs from your own.
• Have them add to the map their regular trajectories through the space and ask them to explain the trajectories and features that s/he draws.
• Have them to imagine a ‘mental map’ by recalling any specific events/memories/meanings connected to this place that are important to him/her.
• Make notes of these particularities and add them to the map.
• Reflect in a short text (max 200 words) on what you’ve learned about the meaning of the place from the participant and this methodological process of participatory drawing. Comment on your abilities to communicate with the participant and how drawing may have aided your communication.

Part 3: Drawing from Memory (15 min. on site and 10 min. at home) This exercise is inspired by Andrew Causey’s book Drawn to See: Drawing as an Ethnographic MethodEtude 38 The Memorized Place (p.137). The task is to concentrate your attention and try to memorize as many details as possible, so you can retrieve these later. As Causey suggests, you can “force yourself to remember … by thoughtfully examining” every detail you notice, including “sounds, visuals, smells, people, objects, juxtapositions, poses, lighting, temperature” (136). Intensely observing a place will help you develop your short-term memory and ability to make mental ‘snapshots’ (136) or ‘after drawings’ (56) that you can retrieve when making your fieldnotes.

• Observe your research site intently for about 15-20 minutes, walk around and view it from different positions.
• Go home and draw it from memory. Try to imagine it from a ‘normal’—eye-level perspective—as if it is a landscape or draw it in any other creative way. The drawing does not have to be realistic, but it should serve the purpose of a visualization of relevant features of your research-site.
• Pay attention to your point of view and to colors. You may also indicate sounds and other sensorial detail. It is important that you try to render as much ethnographic detail as you can remember.
• Reflect on what you’ve learned about your site and your own visual memory by doing this visualization (max 200 words).

Part 4: A View from the Archive/Database (45-90 min.) Your task is to locate some historical maps of your FSA field site. Most municipalities in the Netherlands have their own online archives (and often many off-line archives developed by different institutions exist), but not all maps are digitized.

• Find online and save as PDF at least 3 maps from different periods in time of your field-study research-site in an online or offline archive or via other sources.
• Try to visit an archive in person so you can appreciate the materiality of the source materials as well as the infrastructure that preserves them. Make photographs of the maps/documents (be sure to confirm your reproductions rights).
• Investigate socio-political development of your research-area by identifying the changes in the organization of space, property, naming, etc. How has this space been rendered before, particularly from an official standpoint?
• Research the historical maps for meta-data: why were they made, by whom, for what purpose, using what material, with what dimensions, etc?
• Compare the maps that you and your participant drew with these historical documents. What similarities and differences do you notice? What insights and questions are generated in light of the historical context of your field site?
• In light of these new understandings from the archive, consider how the map apps that we use daily (drawing upon a massively networked database) can be analyzed through the same framework.
• Reflect whether and in what ways a historical approach to place brought new insights to your research site (max 200 words).

Meta-commentary: All assignments must be accompanied by a brief written reflection (200-300 words max) that provides a ‘meta-commentary’ about the student’s intentions with the assignment’s selection.