Ethnography Lecture & Keyword Workshop
Lecture Notes:
I am a big fan of ethnographic research and the best part of my chosen major project topic is that it deals with scenarios that I have been in many, many times in my life so a lot of the 'Observation' and 'Participation' part of this research is already done. Horse riding on the road has been part of my life for so long that my challenge is to actually try and step back and think what it would be like from an uneducated drivers' point-of-view rather than the horse riders experience. I also think that interviewing and hearing stories from other people is definitely going to be a huge part of my project.
Keyword Workshop:
The first thing I did when we started back at university and I had definitely settled on my topic idea was start creating a brainstorm of all of the keywords surrounding my topic. This helped me decide what things were most important to me about this topic/what I wanted to focus on and explore more, and also gave me some key terms to help guide the start of my research.
This week (week 3) we had a keyword workshop where we were split into smaller groups of five within our supervision groups and we had to explain our major project idea to this wee group and the other members would start to give us keywords of what they thought the essence of our project was based on our explanation. They could also give us keywords that they though would enhance our idea or lead us to new avenues to explore that we hadn't previously thought of. We then jumbled up the groups so we were with new people and repeated the exercise until we had a page full of key words about our project. Lastly, we got to go around the whole VCD cohort and look at everyone's keywords (stealing some to add to our own lists if we found particularly good ones that our groups hadn't thought of). This was a helpful exercise as I added some keywords to my main brainstorm (although lots of the ones my groups had thought of were already on my brainstorm) and also because having to describe your project idea in a few succinct sentences to other people really made me solidify my project and what I want it to achieve in my head.
- Meet people in their own environment and learn about them
- Observation and Participation leads to Commentary and Interpretation
- Getting "Up-Close"/Getting yourself involved in order to learn
- Ethnographic Research = Fieldwork (Descriptive and Reflective), Observation, Participant Observation, Interviewing
- "Be a big sponge"
I am a big fan of ethnographic research and the best part of my chosen major project topic is that it deals with scenarios that I have been in many, many times in my life so a lot of the 'Observation' and 'Participation' part of this research is already done. Horse riding on the road has been part of my life for so long that my challenge is to actually try and step back and think what it would be like from an uneducated drivers' point-of-view rather than the horse riders experience. I also think that interviewing and hearing stories from other people is definitely going to be a huge part of my project.
Keyword Workshop:
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| The words in blue pen are my original brainstorm, the words in red are words that were generated by my different groups during the keywords workshop that I didn't already have on the brainstorm, and the highlighted words are my final five keywords. |
The first thing I did when we started back at university and I had definitely settled on my topic idea was start creating a brainstorm of all of the keywords surrounding my topic. This helped me decide what things were most important to me about this topic/what I wanted to focus on and explore more, and also gave me some key terms to help guide the start of my research.
This week (week 3) we had a keyword workshop where we were split into smaller groups of five within our supervision groups and we had to explain our major project idea to this wee group and the other members would start to give us keywords of what they thought the essence of our project was based on our explanation. They could also give us keywords that they though would enhance our idea or lead us to new avenues to explore that we hadn't previously thought of. We then jumbled up the groups so we were with new people and repeated the exercise until we had a page full of key words about our project. Lastly, we got to go around the whole VCD cohort and look at everyone's keywords (stealing some to add to our own lists if we found particularly good ones that our groups hadn't thought of). This was a helpful exercise as I added some keywords to my main brainstorm (although lots of the ones my groups had thought of were already on my brainstorm) and also because having to describe your project idea in a few succinct sentences to other people really made me solidify my project and what I want it to achieve in my head.