The proliferation of communication and internet-enabled appliances poses a real challenge for us as ethnographers, and meeting this challenge is central to our role as practicing ethnographers. On one hand, the very concept of the field has to be flexible enough to contain communities, symbolic systems and relationships that are not in any way apparent to the observer who is merely present in a physical sense. On the other hand, the proliferation of technology forces us to change the way we approach research in the field. It is easy to become lost in the growing number of data streams, especially when we fail to build in signals that allow us to know not only what is happening, but what kinds of meaning participants ascribe to their layered interactions.
Goals & Key benefits
So, the problems we'll address in the workshop are:
- Diary fatigue - difficulties getting people to participate in meaningful ways;
- Data paralysis - researchers who end up drowning in their data because there is too much to analyze effectively.
How can we overcome both of these problems using technology?
We will put new technological tools into the hands of field researchers, to let them re-gain the richness of the field experience without being overwhelmed by multiple and potentially conflicting data streams. Through a practical research exercise we will introduce participants to some of the technological innovations that can help them re-think the field and their approach to understanding it.
Structure/Schedule: Agenda
[Half-day workshop agenda: 3 hours]
15 min: Welcome & introduction: the field and the research problem
45 min: Demonstration and discussion: technological tools to enhance field research
30 min: Review and explication of field data streams
30 min: Analysis of data and small group discussion
30 min: Share findings
30 min: Evaluation, reflection, discussion of main take-aways
Pre-work for the workshop
To ground the discussions in the workshop in specific examples and data, we will invite workshop attendees to act as 'study participants' prior to the workshop, documenting their EPIC 2009 experiences using some of the light-weight mobile capture tools we'll introduce. We will send detailed instructions for the pre-workshop exercise to everyone. Participation in this pre-workshop activity is encouraged but not required.
In the workshop we'll jointly analyse the data, and will close by evaluating the tools, both from the point of view of the 'study participants' and the 'researchers', gaining insight into the possibilities they open to us, and their limitations.
Target audience
We invite researchers to participate, who see the potential for applying mobile tools to their field work, or who want to learn more about mobile tools' benefits and challenges before committing to them.
Organizers
Patrick Larvie, Jens Riegelsberge, Olga Khroustaleva, and Yelena Nakhimovsky are part of Google's User Experience Research team and are based in Mountain View, CA and London, UK. In their field research they often employ mobile tools to gain a richer understanding of people's practices.
