An update from a buried researcher

I’m in the final stretch of data gathering, hoping to squeeze in a couple more interviews this weekend and perhaps one more observation.  This next Monday, April 7th is the day I’m cutting myself off. It’s time to stop the madness!! I’ve come to a conclusion that it’s not the amount of data that’s the [...]

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Analyzing all that data

I’ve developed two slightly different analysis forms from what I’d first posted to this blog. They’re spreadsheets to help with the process of recording data from my SL interviews & observations, and then to analyze that data. One <very obvious!> issue I’d neglected when putting together my analysis form is that a Word document doesn’t offer [...]

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What I’m observing — the final decision

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that I’ve struggled with decisions about how to define the ‘site,’ ’group’ or ‘area’ that will define my observations. I’ve conducted pilot observations throughout Second Life over the past two weeks: a TV show sim, a dance club, a recreation of parts of NYC, music clubs, academic classrooms, [...]

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Notes on verbal fieldnotes

As I’ve mentioned, verbal field notes have made my research process simpler, both in interviewing and observing. A protocol involving verbal field notes is not without its challenges, as this pilot stage of my project has taught me. What have I learned so far? Transcribe immediately. After every observation/interview, I budget the appropriate amount of [...]

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Love me some Audacity

  http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ Audacity is my new favorite tool as a researcher. Thanks to another great suggestion by Jim Oliver, MLIS IT guru at St. Kate’s, I’m recording my fieldnotes verbally. I met with Jim last week over some technical frustrations around trying to make screen capture work with my SL sessions. We talked about a [...]

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Flow

My blog posts have been all-Hine-all-the-time this week, but I can’t help it. She inspires me! Back to the spaces and places debate. Hine points out, rightly by how I see things, that  ”We can usefully think of the ethnography of mediated interaction as mobile rather than multi-sited” (p 64) and: By focusing on sites, locales and places, [...]

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In the heat of the moment

Yet another gem from Christine Hine’s Virtual Ethnography… Virtual ethnography allows a researcher to review community communications, such as discussion boards or chat transcripts, after the fact. This departs from a traditional ethnographic approach because it denies the researcher the experience of living in the community, experiencing it and gaining a much richer perspective. Experiencing [...]

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The problem with socially bounded spaces

Last night, I visited Gossip Girl as a part of my tromping around, searching for suitable sites at which to conduct my fieldwork. This place had promise: a socially bounded community, a seeming group of ‘regulars,’ a popular space that is highly trafficked, a courtyard to observe informal interactions plus regular events each evening. Then, [...]

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Why ethnography is important to me

Getting partially through Virtual Ethnography by Hine has helped me consider the ethnographic fieldwork component of my research. To start with, Hine’s words hit directly on why I am using participant observation as a method for studying information seeking behavior: Ethnography holds particular appeal for studying ‘what people actually do’ with the technology. Once we [...]

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Literature review

My Literature review is now complete, including an overview of four major factors I believe will heavily influence information seeking behaviors within Second Life: Sociability: SL is social, it’s a virtual world where people love to connect Active learning: experience is how people figure out new things in SL User contributed content: SL residents are [...]

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