Monday, August 31, 2009

Tomorrow I can start my ethnographic field study

Well my Summer break is over I begin my ethnography work. I ll have to start advertising for participates and organize my database. I have one set up to track interviewees and the sims I going to study but there are are about 16 different locations per sim to study and about 100 sims. Though many are controlled by the same builder which should reduce the numbers. While I am not sure how much of the study can be reported here I will report what I feel is appropriate. I am hoping the ethnography study will count as the major project of my Field Studies II class.

I also spent the last month rereading three vital works for my paper. All by JB Jackson. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape was the most interesting of the three and I know have a firmer hold on it. As for this fall reading I am going to focus on articles again with a few books. I know I have to get my hands on Yi-Fu Tuan's work Place and Space but I found a Professor at UT who studies virtual space and identity and he has a few articles that are a must read if just for their bibliography.

I am hoping to make my blog post shorter but more of them.

3 comments:

Jules said...

It's so hard to believe that the summer break is almost at an end! I don't actually begin classes for another month, but intend to spend the next month doing some reading on my topic. I am looking forward to reading your posts as you dig further into your research.

By the way, where do you intend to pull participants from for your research? I don't think I ever saw anything about that last semester.

J

Tim Reynolds said...

Julie yep its been a short month. I was fighting to the end to get everything approved. I was so exhausted, by the end of the semester. But I feel better about what I am doing.

In answer to your question the participates are coming from Second Life. In SL you can divide people into three rough groups. Visitors/travelers, Workers/Social programmers and builders/designers. Sense I am discussing landscape and its creators I am going to spend a majority of time with the builders. With feed back from the others as secondary participates.

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