CSE 510 -- Lab #2

Due: Jan 28

Ethnographic Field Exercise

Purpose:

Practice some basic ethnographic field methods, emphasizing the "observer" over the "participant" role. The emphasis in this part is on being unobtrusive and getting a broad picture of a situation, setting, or human practice.

Assignment:

Pick one of the below:
  1. Through observation and careful note taking investigate how space is employed in some area of your building or home. Explore the extent to which the area you study and the furniture within it keep people apart or draw them together. How does the arrangement of walls, doorways, hallways, furniture, machines, etc. effect the patterns of interaction you observe.

  2. Construct a map of an office area. Your map should show where people sit, their relationship to one another, the activities that go on at various locations, where "significant" objects are located. Describe how you gathered the information represented in your map (through observation, interview, available documents, etc). Include a key or legend to help others interpret your map.

  3. Locate an area where you can unobtrusively observe some activity. Observe the activity for 30 minutes or so. Take detailed notes of what is going on, including a sketch of the area, time of day, movement in and out of the scene, participants' relation to on another. You might want to develop a table to facilitate recording your observations.

  4. Any other exercise from the end of "Ethnographic Field Methods," by Blomberg, et. al.
We want you to try watching, note taking, observing a group of people or an overall situation at a distance. Attempt to get a feel for the dynamics of the situation at a level of social/physical/historical interactions. What can you learn by just observing? If you wish, talk to people involved in the situation (after you've observed them for a while -- remember, we want to be unobtrusive for at least a portion of this assignment), and contrast what you learned by watching to what you learned by interviewing.

Deliverables:

The deliverable is a poster paper, similar to that for Lab #1, paper describing the experience. The paper should include any necessary tables, drawing, photos, sketches, etc. How much did your presence interfere with the situation you were observing? Please feel free to use drawings, photos, or any non-verbal means to help portray the situation. If you made any audio tapes, feel free to include transcripts of interesting portions, if you wish.

We'll put the posters upand discuss them in class Jan 28. As before, we'll also post the results on the web (unless you request not to). (You can see the results from this exercise in the previous offering of the course in the CSE 590H web.)