ANTH 3420 Urban Archaeology OER

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Week 8: Ethnographic Methods: How to Study Urban Space

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  • #79733

    Two of the three readings for this week (Gehl and Svarre and Weiss) focus on more traditional ethnographic methodologies used to study urban space such as interviewing, mapping, tracing, etc. and Silberman and Purser’s piece focuses on the more current methods of culminated through social media and digital heritage. Discuss the variety of information that can be gathered through these methods and the limitations to them.

    #79794
    Jaeden Granger
    Participant

    Jan Gejl and Svarre Birgitte’s excerpt of How to Study Public Life discusses tips of properly observing individuals in public spaces in descriptive methods like counting, mapping, tracking, and other methods. Neil Silberman and Margaret Purser’s Collective Memory as Affirmation: People-Centered Public Heritage in a Digital Age discusses the impact of social media on cultural representation and online-based communities. Robert Weiss’s Learning from Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studies discusses the process and articulate understandings on the ‘art’ of interviewing.

    These documents focus on the how anthropology is adapting to the current age of social media. Jan Gejl and Svarre Birgitte’s tactics of anthropology are counting, mapping, tracing, tracking, looking for traces, photography, keeping a diary, and test walks. These tactics are useful when observing people and communities in public spaces, but using them online would be ineffective. In Neil Silberman and Margaret Purser’s document, they point out the many people on the internet “relating a sequence of carefully chosen details, often with a subtext of contemporary political significance. As modern Western nations adopted official versions of their national story-to be taught in public schools and transmitted through national park systems-collective memory became a Janus-faced phenomenon.” Many people on the internet, particularly in Western nations, usually cherry-pick details and interpret heritage to give themselves a version of the nationality and background, which could be exasperating to anthropologists. Robert Weiss’s document focuses on qualitative interview study, which is the attempt to understand the point of view of the subject being interviewed to develop their experiences.

    #79824
    Matthew Wojcik
    Participant

    Enthographies play an important role in modern anthropolgy, since they offer quantifiable data on how people act in a society. Enthographies can include the person’s social and economic status. They can also offer an insight on where people go, and what are some popular social gatherings. Finally interviewing offers an insight into the person’s thinking processes. It can explain why people do certain things. As Emile Durkheim  would put it, enthographies can separate the sacred from the profane.

    The first reading offers way very pure way of getting hard data. That is through mapping and counting. Counting how many people pass by on a given city block can give an idea on how  the flow of people in a city happens. Different blocks will give different results. Some blocks, like ones around a finacial center, will have more people. Others, like those around a garbage dump, will have less people. Mapping offers insight on the environment people live in. Tracing and tracking show where people go in that environment. They may go to supermarkets, the dry cleaners, the movies, among other places. The second reading was about the intangle aspects of culture and online recording. Memory can be influenced by oustide factors in society. Be it the government or other people, a person is molded by their society, subconsciously and consciously.  If you were to take an infant from culture and put it in another, that baby would acclimate to the new culture. It’s the whole nature versus nuture argument. Putting information on the digital plain allows many people to access it from wherever they are in the world. The information has to be accurate and unbiased, however. The third and final reading was about interviews. We all experienced interview in our lives. Whether is be in the academic, business, or social world, interviews offer a way for a person to bring out their subjective opinion on things. Every person will have a different view on things, but interviews allow for a main idea to come through.

    #79828

    Reflection #8

    Two of the three readings for this week (Gehl and Svarre and Weiss) focus on more traditional ethnographic methodologies used to study urban space such as interviewing, mapping, tracing, etc. and Silberman and Purser’s piece focuses on the more current methods of culminated through social media and digital heritage. Discuss the variety of information that can be gathered through these methods and the limitations to them.

    The three articles are about the various methods that anthropologists, historians and other related fields use to gather information about groups, areas or people. Two of the articles relate to older, more hands-on methods while the third article relates to how the methods are changing in the interconnected world of the twenty-first century.

    The Gehl and Svarre article, “How to Study Public Life,” focusses on the variety of methods used for studying public life, which is how someone goes about their day-to-day life. One method they use is counting the number of people, such as the ratio of male to female, or absolute numbers of people, say, who walk by a certain point. A second method they describe is mapping, which is where you mark the places a person or group of people move throughout the day or the duration of the project. A third method described is tracing, where the researchers draws lines of movement on area plans for a specific time period. The fourth method described is tracking, where the researcher follows selected people throughout the day to track their movements. The fifth method they describe is looking for trace evidence, such as paths through snow or grass. It can also be the presence or lack thereof of tables or chairs left out at night, which can give insight into how confident the owners are in the safety of the area. A sixth method is photographing to document the physical state of the area, showing the condition the buildings are in or the type of transportation available, and how people interact within their environment and with each other in that same environment. The seventh method is keeping a diary, where the researcher analyzes the diaries of people who write about their everyday life. It allows one to gain a much better insight into the daily life of the average person. A final method is test walks, where researchers identify important routes through a city or area. They walk around pre-identified routes, noting how long it takes them to get from point A to point B and note anything that can hinder the walk or make the walk more unpleasant. The authors also note that the methods described above can be greatly assisted by GPS technology, making it easier to collect data in an automated and non-obtrusive way.

    The methods described above don’t really give a complete of an area on their own. Three or more methods need to be combined to have a more or less complete picture. The mapping and tracing methods are better at giving a more general picture of activity. Test walks have very limited use in answering questions about a community.

    The second reading, by Weiss, from “Learning from Strangers,” is about how to conduct a proper interview in order to learn information about someone or something. The author gives guidelines for setting up an interview, such as identifying what information you want to get from the interview, what areas to explore, how to incorporate concepts such as respect for integrity and how to protect the confidentiality of the interviewee. The article gives suggestions about how to frame questions, how to identify important people or actors, and how to evaluate the information you’re getting from the interviewee, such as how useful or accurate it is. The author also gives examples of interviews to show how to properly carry one out and gives advice about how to avoid common interviewing mistakes, like intruding on or interrupting the interviewee or making the interview about the interviewer. The importance of an interview is that it can give insight into certain events, such as natural disasters or wars that you wouldn’t get from any other source. Interviews can paint a picture of the culture that you would never be able to get from studying artifacts, or using the methods described in the first article. You can get insight into religious beliefs and creation stories, gender roles, why they prepare their food in a certain way, etc., which you can’t get from artifacts alone. The information gathered from the interview can be distorted, either due to the interviewee lying or misremembering something. They can only comment on things that they actually know or heard from their community.

    The third article, by Silberman and Purser is about how digital technology is changing how heritage is collected and curated. Digital technology is also changing what people’s notion about what heritage is. They give as an example of what they call a digital diaspora, where people originally from Capetown’s District Six who have spread all over the world have gotten together online and recorded their memories of life in the neighborhood. The recordings are kept at the District Six Museum. It has allowed them to preserve their cultural history, which might have otherwise been lost. The article also mentions digital databases for genealogy which allow people from around the world to create a sort of pseudo remembrance of history as they track various members of their family tree through time. It allows people to get a much deeper understanding of their heritage as well as to connect with people who share their DNA profile. The article mentions that GIS workshops sponsored by UNESCO World Heritage Sites allow local communities to nominate cultural icons or sites for the list. Digital mapping makes it easier to compile data about the individual site as well as its condition so evaluation is easier, and more timely, possibly allowing protection of the site from destruction. Social media sites allow people from various groups to share their cultures and memories with the rest of the world. Through relating their experiences, they, as a whole affirm, their existence. Twitter and Facebook allow people to coordinate, gather data and comment with each other in real time. It allows them to form their own type of community beyond cultural heritage. An example is followers of Taylor Swift, who are fiercely supportive of her and form their own community.

    The drawbacks of digital technology in ethnographic studies are that it is vulnerable to manipulation from malicious groups, such as authoritarian governments, terrorist organizations or even white supremacists. It is vulnerable to hacking, which means you have to be cautious in vetting how authentic the digital record is as well as invest in systems to protect against such hacking. It can be biased toward the creator, like a selfie, trying to show only the best face for the world to see.

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    #79831

    Gehl and Svarre discuss how to get information on how society works through a variety of surveys.  They talk about mapping, teaching, following, listening, counting and so on. While these various methods give us a good idea on what society is like they do have their setbacks and flaws.  For one, it would be very difficult to count the actions of everything individual within a certain area without missing certain actions. This leads to a similar problem when tracing individuals walking habits.  Even if you gathered a group of people to record the same area there’s no telling how many overlaps of information you’ll get or how many pieces of information will slip away. That being said the ways to record presented by Gehl and Svarre would give a variety of information that could be very valuable when trying to study a specific aspect of society or even just society in general.

    Whenever I think about interviewing I think about how people speak about themselves.  In my experience people often speak about themselves in situations in a way that shows them in the best light.  Interviewing can be a great way to access various perspectives on a subject that has never been heard of before.  However because of people’s general proclivity to stretch the truth I wonder how accurate most interviews are. However according to Weiss there are ways to combat that. Finding multiple views to one situation or interviewing the same person over a certain period of time to see if their view changes.

    Silberman and Pursers article immediately made me think of social media as a combination of the previous ways of studying society.  The difference would be the environment. Instead of people interacting in a street or a plaza people are interacting with other people in a space they most likely want to be in because it reflects their interests.  However the environment is also them alone behind a screen. These two variations of environment different greatly from a public place such as a street corner or even a dinner table. I found it very interesting that Sibleman and Purser are viewing social media in this way because it combined elements of counting, tracing, mapping and interviewing.

    #79832
    Jared West
    Participant

    How to Study Public Life written by Gehl and Svarre, and Robert Weiss’ piece entitled Interviewing “In learning strangers” are two pieces with a central theme between them, that being how to study the enviroment around you. Starting with Weiss’ piece, he gives a few examples of the people that he has interviewed; a man with HIV, and a divorced dad to set a scene for the reader. Over the course of the excerpt that was assigned, Weiss goes over the different ways to be a strong interviewer. He talks a lot about the idea of “generalized present” which he defines as a summaries for developments that have past but continue to the present. This concept is a key factor when interviewing people as this is the event that you are interested in the most.  Weiss gives the readers a few notes on how to extract the most from an interview. He states 6 important factors to know.

    What led to the incident being asked about.
    You must have the details filled in.
    You need to learn the social context of the incident.

    Did the person your interviewing talk about it with anyone else.
    What are the inner events e.g. perceptions, what they saw or hears, their cognition about the situation, and emotions.
    You need to communicate with the respondent that you sort of understand their situation.

    Weiss also states that you need to establish a relationship with the person before asking the hard questions or they might freeze up.

    The second reading How to study Public Life written by Gehl and Svarre give similar information on how to study something. They give 7 umbrella terms and why they are so important for studying public life.

    1. Counting
      1. Everything can be counted
      2. Small inaccuracies can invalidate results.
      3. Counting is done over a long period.
    2.  Mapping
      1. Mapping is simply mapping what happens in a specific space.
      2. Provides a picture of a moment of a given place.
    3. Tracing
      1. Registering movement can provide some knowledge about movement patterns.
      2. Tracing however isn’t exact as there are a lot of people moving throughout spaces.
    4. Tracking
      1. Shadowing people
      2. Can be used to measure walking speed.
    5. Looking for traces
      1. Looking for traces can be any sign that humans walked though an area.
      2. Things such as footprints in the snow, flattened or trampled grass paths.
    6. Photographing
      1. Can describe situations showing the interaction or lack thereof between urban life and public life.
      2. You can look at scenes again at a later date.
      3. Can document life.
    7. Keeping a diary
      1. Keeping a diary allows a person to jot notes down as it’s a method of noting observations.

    The last reading Collective Memory as Affirmation: People-Centered Public Heritage in a Digital Age edited by Elisa Giacacardi examines “the potential of social media as a framework for such community-based heritage activities,” (pg 1) which purpose is to (re)create historical environments, collective narratives and geographical clusters which results in an attempt to recreate the past. The idea is to try and get people to reconnect with their heritage using computers and technology.

    #79835
    Blessing Tate
    Participant

    The authors describe various methods for studying urban spaces and the complexity and nuances of human culture and interactivity. Gehl and Svarre (2013), discuss the more traditional ethnographic methodologies such as counting, mapping, tracing, tracking, looking for traces, photography, test walks, and keeping a diary. Weiss (1995), discusses interviews while Silberman and Purser (2012), take a modern approach to use digital platforms and social media. These methodologies provide a variety of information, including unstructured (visuals and auditory), structured data (data with a high degree of the organization), qualitative, and quantitative data.
    Counting, mapping, tracing, tracking, and looking for traces are good ways to collect structured data. The information is, however, not interactive and does not allow for customization. Interviews can generate both qualitative and quantitative data, and the information unstructured comprising of people’s experiences, their opinions about urban plans, how events affect their thoughts, and the meaning space has for their relationships with families and even friends. In interviews, the interviewer can get the information that can be represented in various ways, including using videos and audios. Visual information is essential in giving the view of space and culture. Nonetheless, it is easy for the information to be misinterpreted as different people will derive different insights from it. Additionally, visuals are not as representative as words. The limitation of information in audio format is that the person speaking might not be audible enough. Hence information can be distorted.
    Both qualitative and quantitative data can be derived from these methodologies. Information that cannot be quantified, such as the experiences of people, perceptions, and feelings about space, can be represented qualitatively. Qualitative data is in-depth and coherent. Nonetheless, they are hard to analyze, and some, particularly from methods like tracing and tracking may lack objectivity since they might be affected by the views of the researcher. Quantitative information can be represented using numbers and are essential for statistical analysis. However, they might suffer from their standardized precision; in other words, and information from one person is fragmentary.

    #79849
    Kellen Gold
    Participant

    The readings for this week discussed how to conduct research in an efficient yet substantial way. Although Silberman and Purser’s chapter focuses on collective memory in the digital age, it still provides a resource for how to study online activity, as well as examples of digital mapping projects and methods. The authors criticize shallow digital mapping projects and 3D models that do not allow for adequate engagement or are too eager to provide as much information as possible, even when that information may not be accurate. I would have liked to see the authors discuss Indigenous-led movements for accountability in historical narratives. In the excerpt from Weiss, proper interviewing techniques are given. I enjoyed this reading the most, as it gave concrete tips for how to have a successful interview. It is a great introductory text, and I will be using it as a reference before conducting interviews in the future. Gehl and Svarre’s chapter is another essential reading for the study of life. I have already read this piece, and used some of the methods during my field school.

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