For those who want to know...

... the ethics approval process has gone through, and everyone has a honking big thumbs up. As I said in class, I think the process needs to be streamlined a nudge. If anyone has any ideas, we could - collaboratively - work towards proposing something to the board that makes things go better.

And my cat had a check up yesterday, and is in perfect health.

A good question from someone who is actually doing the assignment in an almost timely manner

Shera-Lea writes:

Hey Ian,
So i am having some problems with my tape recorder thing and i went to seeif i could borrow one from the school, so i could redo my interview. Butwhen i went and asked about it i was told that students couldn't rent themout on our own. I went to the one that is kind of by your office, so i waswondering if i went to the right place or not. I asked the guy but i think iconfused him(apparently i am quite good at that), and now i am confused. Soi was wondering what the procedures were again for renting out equipment?

Okey-dokey. You first need to go to see Chris Reid: He looks like this.:


He's in the NRC wing. Look at this remarkably useless map:



Do you see the crinkly looking building to the left, just off of A-Wing? That's it. Imagine yourself walking from the cafeteria to the registrar's office without going outside. Walk past the labs but, instead of turning left at that slopy corridor where there's always boxes waiting to be recycled, keep going straight, down a rather opulent corridor that looks like money not spent on liberal arts, to the very end (past the unused labs). Turn right (you can't turn left) and keep going through the set of doors that force you to turn right again, then left at the t-junction.

There's the Alexander Graham Bell centre, then the next thing to your left (once you get through a set of doors) is a non-descript looking corridor with three doors off of it. Music will be blaring from the one in front (the one in left will have a nice lady working on a journal, the one at right is a closet.

Knock on the door, say you are my student, and you need equipment.

TADA!

(Here's a deep question: I quote Shera-Lea directly, without changing spelling, etc. I have taken an informal communication to me and recontextualised it into a slightly more formal context. Given our conversations on how we should render speech into something that (a) is respectful of the vernacularity of the speech but (b) is respectful of the presumed intent of the speaker, what should I do with informal text?)

Class the sixteenth: Panic attack, explanation, and apology

I discovered something about myself this summer. I went to Loiusbourg because, hey, I heard good things. And there are nice things to see there, and the exhbit on how Louisbourg came to be is interesting, and all that sort of thing. But it was one of the worst days of my recent life, because I discovered that I suffer from panic attacks.

I am more or less allergic to historical re-enactment.

At the gate, we were stopped by a guard, and forced into conversation. Afterwards, it hurt so much that I had to sit down by the seawall with my head between my legs. The entire day was spent trying to thus avoid people talking old-timey, which is pretty fucking impossible when you are at Louisbourg. I went into another spiral when, at lunch (six bucks for bread and cheese!!), I was informed that "Yes, the King accepts credit cards."

WTF?

It was bad enough sitting next to strangers at communal tables (that's how they did it in the old days) and eating the faux-Acadian crap they serve (I don't eat the vrai-Acadian stuff in the real world, where it's free) because ye old ATM was experiencing difficulties and I had to eat in the restaurant as opposed to prithee-may-I-partake-in-a-bag-of-chips-and-a-diet-coke-nay-with-the-British-threatening-to-attack-we-do-not-take-Interac snack shop next door, but for Jebus's sake, drop the act.

So I suffer from attacks, like my dear departed dad. I can handle weird amounts of pressure (from the committees that the satanic adminstrators sit me on, from chairs, even from the ungrateful students over whose education I sweat), but embarassment, mine or someone else's, I can no longer handle well.

Which explains why I had to sit down. I was actually very close to coming apart completely. It is always awkward when you are in a position of some authority and you make a mistake. It is doubly awful when the students who so rightly laugh when they see that authority blown and the charade busted move from ridicule to embarassment to outright concern.

I am very sorry.

So, learn this, if you learned nothing else last class (which, I know, you didn't): when using equipment, take time to test it first to make sure (a) it's working and (b) you know what you're doing. If I had picked it up even a half hour before everything would have gone fine. I've decided to blame someone else. I haven't picked a victim yet, but I think I will blame the fairies.

Fourteenth and Fifteenth classes: Interviewing, Transcribing

By now, you should know the drill: everything one can say about photography and ethnography one can say about interviewing: it is doing what you do in your day to day world anyway, only a bit more structured.

An interview is a conversation: like most conversations (as opposed to idle chit chat, which is swell but something different) it has a point. You are talking about something. But it is as much an opportunity for communion as it is an instrument in data mining (perhaps more the former than the latter). So you don't go into it with a strict "must get answers to these questions" mentality. It is not an oral questionnaire. No matter what ethics boards want to tell you to do, you can;t predict the course of an interview any more than you can predict the course of a conversation. You can make intelligent guesses, and have intelligent expectations, but it isn't rocket science (it's harder than rocket science, because you are dealing with the trajectories of human interaction (see how I did that with the word 'trajectories'? I'm balls to the wall clever sometimes)).

But you know this already, don't you? Because you all slavishly read the Statement of the American Folklore Society On Research with Human Subjects, particularly where it says:

On occasion, a folklorist may employ a questionnaire or other survey instrument at the initial stages of research, but these are rapidly abandoned in favor of close conversation, careful observation, and prolonged participation.

and

There is almost no folklore research that can be conducted using a pre-formulated set of questions. As folklorists learn more about the traditions that are the focus of their research, the kinds of questions they ask will necessarily change. Each response provokes new and unanticipated questions, each question leads to new areas of inquiry. In folklore and other ethnographic research, the questions to be asked cannot be known or formulated in advance. In many respects, folklore research is a type of investigative journalism; but it is deeper, longer lasting, and more responsible: the bonds established between the researchers and community members are more personal and enduring.

and

Folklore research presents no more risk to human subjects than any sustained, deep, and wide-ranging conversation about cultural beliefs and social practices.

So that's that.

After the interview is the transcription. You will all have read Ives (on reserve at the library). And, based on the exercise in class, creating a transcription is a subjective exercise: no two will be exactly the same, and each will depend not so much on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the transcriber as on the way they choose to interpret the recording. How literal one is in terms of trying to capture accent, how one uses punctuation to express pauses, changes in thought and idea, etc., are as much framing devices as what one chooses to write down in the ethnography and what one puts in the picture in photography.

Get the interview assignment handout here.

Eleventh and Thirteenth classes: Ethnography

Ethnography is a weird thing. It is fieldwork at its most basic, on one level. You go somewhere and observe. It is highly subjective, but over time one gets to see patterns. What you are creating is a primary document that can be later translated into something more textual: it is a record of your impressions and observations there.

The idea I try to put across is that you are doing what you do normally: you go into a space and try and figure out what is going on and how you should operate. To do ethnography, reflect on what you do when you go to a new place for the first time. You tend to hang back and check things out a little bit, get the lay of the land, see what happens and where, see if you can figure out what you should and shouldn't, can and can't do.

The ethnographer does the same thing, albeit with the intent of translating that experience into a more formal text that will be read by an undisclosed third person.

With that in mind, we went out boldly into the world (the cafeteria) and as a group recorded what happened. Each person was seemingly dissatisfied with the activity (and with the entire exercise) but, when we got back, it was weird to hear what other people had seen, how they created shorthand for it, and so on.

In the middle of everything I went to Milwaukee for the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society. So here are three cool things from there:

1. The Onion started there, and they give out free copies.
2. Lots of German's (Budweiser, Schlitz, etc.) so ate German food.
3. Not a huge amount of Africans (at least not compared with Germans) but that doesn't stop one from eating at African Hut and ordering the Mandingo Warrior Platter. (Get menu here.)

Get the ethnography assignment handout here.

Ninth and Tenth classes: Margaretbennettpaloozathon '06

If only all irruptions in the schedule were as pleasurable as this one. Margaret Bennett, that Hebridean firecracker, entered our lives for a week of things.

First she came to our class not to hit on Clare, as the picture may imply (oh, see last post) but to talk about some of the practical aspects of conducting fieldwork.

For those who have trouble remembering:

1. Have a bag
2. Put things in it
3. Things should include
   1. Recorder, all cords for same, microphone, and instruction manual
   2. Spare recording media
   3. Extra batteries
   4. Bottle of water
4. Bring bag with you
5. Position equipment so that it can pick up sound good but
6. Don't position equipment so that your interviewee is uncomfortable
7. Things of ways to reciprocate for their time: this might include
   1. Offering to make them copies of the interview
   2. Bringing them something like a housewarming present (everybody likes muffins)
   3. Cure them of their diseases (*swamis or angels only)
   4. Don't bring them booze (revision to standard folklore protocol 1975)
   5. Cookies: everybody likes cookies too
8. And, in all instances, like in life, don't be a turd (my paraphrase).

Then, on Thursday, we finally got a taste of lore (some of you who signed up with a less talk, more rock approach must have been waiting for this). Her talk on the songs of immigration (or emigration) indicated not only the time-depth of the tradition in a Cape Breton and Scottish repertoire, but also how they can be used as a source of historical data. Take that, "real disciplines."