Blogging in and out of the field
Posted by Lance Gravlee on July 8th, 2008 in Metablogging, Research group | 1 Comment »
This morning Brian Tyler and I met and talked about his preparations for dissertation fieldwork. He floated the idea of a blog to share experiences with—and get feedback from—others in the med anthro research group about his fieldwork. An hour later, a new blog was born.
Our first task is to develop a shared vision of what the blog should be. I’ll let Brian take a first stab at jotting down some of his thoughts and then invite Doug Monroe to join the conversation. Doug is working full-time to collect interviews in Tallahassee before he returns to UF for classes in the fall. He surely has some tips and tricks to share from his first foray in the field.
Some questions:
- Should the blog be restricted to members only, or open to the whole Web?
- What purpose does the blog serve? What types of information belongs here?
- Do you want a different name for it (e.g., Brian’s suggestion of Dispatches from the Field)?
The links I’ve added to the blogroll (on the right) may provide some inspiration. See, in particular, Erkan Saka’s whitepaper, “Blogging as a Research Tool for Ethnographic Fieldwork” and Cicilie’s reflections on how blogging “sharpens the attention” in fieldwork.
Let’s hear your ideas!
One Response
Now that your site has been overhauled with RSS feeds, I thought I make some (somewhat) updated comments to my previous post about the birth of FieldBlogs:
http://www.gravlee.org/fieldblogs/?p=3#comments.
I’ve spoken with some other students – some with field experience and some with experiences to come later – but all agree that this is a worthwhile endeavor; their comments mirror some of the points brought up by the Saka whitepaper and Cicilie’s reflections that you mention.
My feeling is that, perhaps at first, in order to get the ball rolling, this particular blog needs to get its feet on stable ground before opening it up to the public. On the other hand, perhaps in order to get more feedback as we try to get established, this blog should be opened up, if not to the public, at least to colleagues that might have a similar interest in contributing and in seeing something like this develop into a worthwhile resource.
To identify the purpose of the blog, I think we need to formulate a basic Statement of Purpose that can be posted (and amended over time) to the blog. At the outset, in order to help get interest in and contributors to the blog, maybe we can take some time before/after Journal Club or solicit from colleagues some preliminary ideas about (1) the initial purpose, (2) the content, and (3) the long-term goals.
Some of this is a bit redundant from my first comment, but reflects my initial ideas about a “being in the field” blog:
1. To share personal experiences and thoughts for first-timers and to offer an outlet for people who are struggling to prepare and carry out fieldwork. As I’ve prepare to head to the field, I am now realizing what I have always known but never really understood: no amount of classwork and no amount of reading can truly prepare someone for going to the field. There are so many things that I am discovering now — going through the IRB process, the “little things” that I need to take with me — and once I actually get to the field I will surely discover a number of things that I wish I had brought with me to the field.
2. To share experiences from the field and to seek advice from field veterans whenever problems arise. I’ve spent so much time working on my formal proposal in order to apply for grants and to organize my thinking about my research that I fear that I have not spent enough time thinking about the different reasons that my thinking might change once I’m in the field or about what I will do if I find myself facing potential moral, ethical, or research design dilemmas. A blog like this could serve as a resource for researchers in the field but also as a source of ideas for future research, researchers, AND publications.
The real question is what topics we want to discuss, how and why we want to discuss these topics, and what purpose(s) we would ultimately want to serve by such a blog, both in the immediate future and as a long-term and ongoing project. There’s nothing wrong with simply sharing our thoughts about being in the field for our friends, family, and colleagues, but my feeling is that those who might be involved would like to actually contribute to our peers and to the larger discipline.