Recently I saw ‘The Aristocrats: 100 Comedians, one very dirty joke’ which is a documentary film about the comedy world. Specifically, it’s about an old and famous joke which is really not one joke but a model for a joke – it’s different every time someone tells it. I think I can safely not give away anything about the movie by describing the joke to you:
A guy walks into an agent’s office and says to the agent, ‘I’ve got this great new act you’ve got to hear about. It’s really a killer, it’ll bring down the house.’
The agent says, ‘So what’s the act?’
{insert a description of the most foul scenario you can think of that includes all sorts of sexual acts, horrible scatological stuff, bestiality, incest, basically the most abhorrent stuff you can think of. Each comedian makes this part up on the spot, gives it his/her own flair.}
The agent, flabbergasted, can only say ‘Whaddya call that act?’ and the guy says, ‘The Aristocrats.’
Here’s Cartman telling the joke if you want to get a flavor for it (Warning: this is extremely vulgar and disgusting. Like, really, I think you ought to watch it if you want to get the feel of the joke, but it’s truly gross. You’ve been warned.):
The movie consists entirely of 100 different comedians telling the joke, talking about the joke, or talking about other people telling the joke. Apparently this joke is a big part of the construction of this community of comedians.
Somewhere about 30 minutes into the 90 minute movie, about five minutes after I stopped laughing and started wondering how the movie could possibly sustain itself for another hour, I realized something. The Aristocrats doesn’t work that well as a comedy, but that’s okay, because at heart it’s an ethnographic film. I started to look at it differently, and I LOVED it! This joke has so many flavors and so many characters – it’s something that 100 different famous comedians could all talk about and share stories about with excitement and passion. The film is a window into a history and a sense of community. Knowing the joke, telling the joke, talking about the joke, and loving it all become parts of the cultural construction of comedy. It’s more about comedy and the practice of comedy than it is about the joke – the joke is just the vehicle for the story.
Now I know I said it wasn’t that funny, but I almost lost control of myself when Steven Banks (a.k.a Billy the Mime) gave his wordless interpretation of the joke, standing right in the middle of the boardwalk near LA, people walking by behind him. After almost an hour of context about the joke, what it means, and the way it’s told, Billy the Mime absolutely tore it up. Dear lord. I wish I could find a video clip, but I can’t. I’ll keep a lookout.
Recently Joe Hall and I found ourselves on CalTV talking about the recent spate of scandals surrounding Wikipedia. Check out these recent entries if you want some background. (1, 2, 3) Until they emailed me, I hadn’t heard of CalTV, but it’s a pretty neat project. It’s an entirely online news outlet set up something like a running video blog. (Actually, it looks like the site runs on a flavor of Wordpress.) But what I really like is that the way they set it up it’s all about the perspectives of people they interview - the reporter will set up the problem, but then the interface allows you to click on short edited segments of interviews. Good stuff.
The Annenberg Center for Communication (ACC) (www.annenberg.edu) at the University of Southern California invites applications for up to eight postdoctoral positions and one visiting scholar position. These Visiting Research fellows will take part in a major multi-disciplinary research initiative to explore the “The Meaning of the New Networked Age: Innovation, Content, Society, and Policy.” We welcome researchers from various disciplines including anthropology, architecture, the arts, business, communications, computer science, design, economics, engineering, history, international relations, law, library science, neurosciences, political science, rhetoric, and sociology.
Ctrl + Page-Up / Page-Down - Switch to the next/last tab
Ctrl + Tab - Cycle through tabs (just learned these!)
Ctrl + E - Switch the focus to the searchbox in the address bar
Tab - Next field
Shift + Tab - Last field
As I mentioned before, I switched my RSS feed over to FeedBurner because of some nifty features, most notably the ability to track readership.
I began by switching the feed only for new subscribers, but now I’ve redirected the old feeds to the FeedBurner feed. This should be seamless for existing subscribers - please let me know if it’s not (and I apologize!). It turns out that switching to FeedBurner with Wordpress is very, very easy thanks to a plugin that automates the whole process. I highly recommend it!
Anyone who’s done interview transcription themselves knows that it’s both necssary and a giant, unimaginable time-suck. When I’m getting towards the end of a 2 hour interview that took place in a loud cafe, I know I’m about to poke my eyes out. So I try to send them out to transcription services whenever possible. It isn’t cheap though, so sometimes we’re stuck.
Through the Anthrodesign list I learned of a new, free (Shareware) application called transScriber. It’s a simple and functional tool for playing back transcription audio while you’re typing it into a word processor. I like that it’s unencumbered and easy to use - you load the sound file into the app. and it sits in the background while you work in MS Word or whatever. To access the audio controls you just hold down the Alt key and hit an arrow key. Up is start/stop, left and right are for stepping back and forth in 10 second chunks. You can also set bookmarks by hitting the down key, but it looks like there is no way to save them if you quit the program. It supports a wide variety of audio formats, at the moment MP3, MP4, AAC, WAV, AIFF, GSM, and G.711.
So, I like tranScriber, but all things considered, I’d definitely choose Express Scribe (which I blogged about last year) instead. On the one hand, Express Scribe doesn’t do bookmarks, and transScriber’s Alt-function keys are nice compared to Express Scribe’s use of the function keys at the top of the keyboard. I found hitting ‘F7′ and ‘F8′ with any speed required a lot of accuracy since my hands have to move from the typing position. Alt - arrow is much easier. On the other hand, Express Scribe is also free, does everything transScriber does, and has a ton of flexibility and features:
Supports foot pedals
Lets you customize the playback speed, supports slow playback
Let’s you customize the FWD and REW jump lengths
Remembers audio position across sessions
Supports a VERY long list of file formats
Still, you’ve gotta give transScriber’s author Mads Rydahl a huge amount of credit. He built the software from scratch to help out his girlfriend who is a social anthropologists. That’s get you points!!!
I spent 7+ years in and around Baltimore, and Alex’s perspective reminds me that Baltimore is a city with a deeply rooted identity crisis. In the October 21st, 1973 edition of the New York Times Magazine (that sadly I can’t seem to find online), famous Baltimore columnist Russell Baker published a piece titled ‘The Biggest Baltimore Loser of All Time.’ It’s a fascinating read about collective identity and social history in Baltimore. In it he basically argues that Baltimore has developed a massive penchant for underachieving as a result of everything from its position as the banking capital for the Confederacy to the fact that the Baltimore Orioles are the almost-winningist baseball team of all time. In other words, they have gone to the World Series without winning more times than any other team.
It would be interesting to revisit that argument in 2006. Alex, you up for it? Let’s get Russell on the line…
I check my site stats from time to time, but I always wonder how much of my traffic comes from RSS feeds, which are difficult to track. So just today I decided to start using Feedburner, which is a nifty service that helps track RSS readership and promote your feeds. I’ve switched the links on the blog to the new Feedburner feed, but those of you who read through the normal channels won’t be affected. If you want to switch, I encourage it. I know there is a way to do painless redirects to the new feed, but it involves some htaccess magic, which is particularly tough if you’re already using htaccess to manage semantically meaningful permalinks, as I am. Maybe someday I’ll be bold enough to try that! In the meantime, check out Feedburner.
I was pretty thrilled to find out recently that my paper, Cultural Assessment for Sustainable Kiosks, was accepted to the 1st International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD2006). In it I argue that most assessments of ICT4D projects are too narrowly focused on economic and technical factors, that the concept of sustainability needs to be refigured in terms of grassroots culture instead of business modeling, and that so-called ‘rapid’ ethnographic methods are a great way to captual cultural factors in an efficient and contextually appropriate way. An earlier version of this paper is available here.
It’s very gratifying because I’ve loved working on ICT4D over the last year, and at the same time I’ve been sad that I haven’t been able to devote more time to it. This gives me motivation to keep going. At the moment it is just a theory paper. This is the beginning of a long road that includes theory, method, and most importantly case-studies of successes and failures in ICT4D projects. The serious analysis of faliures is a glaring hole in the ICT4D community. Why has there been no effort to extract best practices? Considering how many ICT4D projects fail to some degree, it’s really amazing…
To keep up the theme of reblogging ancient posts (at least in blog time), here’s a fantastic summary, complete with academic references, of what it takes to build a virtual community. It’s framed in the context of a business that wants to develop online relationships with communities of customers, but it’s particularly relvent in the context of the Mycroft Project, which I previously blogged about.
Mycroft is off to an amazing start, and thus far we’ve been quietly rolling out a variety of mostly sucky content. However, a real prototype is almost ready, and we are working on our web presence. It’s okay for now, since we get next to no traffic. But anyway, as I hope will be clear from the description that Mycroft’s success and failure depends to a huge degree on how well we can create a distributed community of contributors.
This post from Savage Minds, now several weeks old, has an interesting discussion of trying to get ethnographic research approved by institutional review boards. The comments are a particularly good read. At Berkeley we certainly have our share of issues with IRB, but at this point I think they’re more about institutional process than about ethnography in particular. I find that this is one of those frustrating situations where I can see both sides of the story. On the one hand, the University needs to protect itself from liability - its interest is certainly in protecting research participants, but perhaps moreso avoiding the consequences of our country’s litigous ways. And who can blame them? The world is full of irresponsible researchers.
But on the other hand, many of the requirements and restrictions of IRB review and informed consent are so cumbersome and innapropriate for ethnographic practice that, even when researchers are diligent about the review process, they inevitably get tossed out the window once approval is in hand and research begins. IRBs aren’t doing anyone any favors by requiring social scientists to abide by practices that, though they are more general now, are based on the needs of biomedical and psychological research. They might actually be making things more dangerous for participants because they are encouraging researchers to design protocols that they can’t possibly follow.
During a recent fight with Berkeley’s CPHS, which, thankfully, turned out well, I basically said to my representative, as I explained how ethnography works (again): ‘How could it be that you don’t have a policy for dealing with this?’ I never got a response, but I think it’s more critical than ever, especially now that many folks in the IT & design worlds are adopting qualitative methods. Here are a bunch of folks who are not used to thinking about the ethical obligations to research participants in the way that dedicated social scientists are, if only because the focus of their education has been about devices and not people (although this is changing). The ones I encounter mean well, but are often surprised that human subjects protection is something they need to deal with. My feeling is that must choose not to deal with it. Another CPHS representative at Berkeley said that he is positive that most people don’t submit protocols for their research, because if they did, the office would be so swamped in proposals they couldn’t get in the front door.
CNET News.com reports that nearly one-third of American Internet users go online just for fun.” From the article: “A survey of 1,931 Internet users conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project in late November and December 2005 found 30 percent of respondents said they went online “for no particular reason” on the previous day. That was up from 21 percent in a November 2004 survey. The survey also showed that 34 percent of online men were surfing for fun on an average day in December, compared with 26 percent of women.(/. Link)
ComputerWorld is running an article stating that some senior managers in IT think the answer to boosting morale is to have more fun on the job. The IT managers interviewed for the article claim making people laugh contributes to successful businesses and reduces turnover. How do you have fun? According to the article, Dale Sanders, head of IT at Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation, ‘has posted photos on the intranet of staffers caught in awkward moments installing cables or servers, for instance. Sanders encourages others to add funny (and tasteful) captions.’ John Wade, CIO at Saint Luke’s Health System Inc., sometimes dresses in drag and encourages other unusual behavior. Other potential tactics for laughs include encouraging self-expression, encouraging ’serious play’, and asking potential hires their favorite funny movies or comedians.” (/. Link)
The recent posts (Joe’s 1 / Doug Tygar’s 1, 2 / Mine) about the real or perceived changes in popularity of email and IM (among some unknown and unnamed group of ‘youth’) beg for a couple of driving questions to be answered:
The word use – as in, ‘Email use is almost constant at around 90% of all online Americans’ – is clearly a placeholder for much more complex and situated behaviors and ideas. What do we really know about what ‘use’ and similar phrases mean in the lives of people?
If it turns out that ‘use’ is mostly the same across boundaries, then fine, but if it doesn’t, and I don’t think it does, then we have to ask: what should we really glean from broad statements about what people are or are not using?
One way to understand how useful something like the Pew studies are with respect to these issues is to look at more than the bulleted findings that the PR department puts out – at the actual questions. Pew is actually pretty great about publishing its datasets. Many organizations don’t do this at all. You can find all the data Pew makes publicly available here.
The data for the ‘Generations Online’ report that Joe references comes from Pew’s 2004 Teens & Parents Survey as well as a bundle of surveys they did in 2005. The 2004 dataset (zip file containing MS Word document) is a fascinating read. I don’t intend for this to be an in-depth analysis, but we can quickly infer that many of the questions that inform the bullet-points about IM and email use take the form of ‘Have you ever…’ Now, these are carefully crafted surveys, and I just think what we infer from them should be just as carefully crafted. It is certainly interesting to see these statistics, but by looking at the questions we can tell that they are perhaps not very useful for talking about what actually goes on, in terms of ‘use’, in the life of any individual person. (Insert your favorite argument about the importance of a mixed-methods approach here…)
Finally, I want to copy two particularly fascinating sections of the 2004 dataset. Both teens (the 1st set of data) and their parents (the 2nd set) were asked the same set of questions (to save formatting headache, I took screen captures of the dataset, which is an MS Word file):
Check out this interesting synthesis from Joe about recent discussions over the fate of email and IM in the hands of young people.
I think this is a fascinating development, and even if Paul Saffo’s comments are unfounded, that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. I think he and danah are in many ways saying the same things. I take these two things from the discussion, both of which are supported by work I did with Ben Gross last year: (side note, we are presenting on this research at next month’s meetings of the Society for Applied Anthropology)
The emerging pattern is that a simplistic categorization of electronic mediums is getting more useless all the time. Email and IM aren’t the same kind of asynchronous communication, and they don’t seem to be perceived to be. This distinction probably has very little to do with the technical differences in the two systems, and so infrastructural or organizational changes like Goodmail might have little influence on actual practices – except in situations where it’s actually the young people themselves who are footing the bill. (I’ve heard stories, but does anyone have any concrete data about how many young people are actually paying for their mobile devices or internet access out of their own pockets?) The important and useful factors are things like context of use, sense of ownership of the medium, etc.
Because it’s the contexts and perceptions that are the important factors, it may be that we shouldn’t be saying that e-mail is dying, but instead that its boundaries are fading. Again, I don’t think the technocentric view of this as ‘convergence’ in the sense of devices or systems is useful. More I’d say it’s that the contexts of communication are merging so that an identity or a social connection is the same regardless of technological medium (email or IM, e.g.).
This is the introduction to a series of posts about the practice of being a graduate student and becoming an academic. When I moved from a graduate program in anthropology to another in informatics about two years ago, I joked with friends about using it as a chance to do an ethnography about the peculiarities of academic practice, but I never got around to writing about it. It’s sort of been percolating in the background all this time, though. Of course, it may turn out that these comments reflect only the particular departments and communities in which my academic life has existed, but somehow I doubt it.
An academic department is in many ways a neat little diorama of the wider world. But I’m not so much interested in a description of the process by which we learn to become members of our departments or the academic community as a whole – others have done that too well for me to offer much. I’m more interested in how everyday interactions work and change on a much smaller level – in how we learn to perform the talk and the movement of everyday academic life and, just as importantly, to interpret it. As such, I’m going to focus on three central themes, with the option for more as time goes on. Those themes are:
Body Language
Discourse
Social Games
I suspect none of these observations are particularly original, and I imagine that most graduate students and academics will think them obvious when I point them out. But I consider the ‘duh’ response to be a mark of success in ethnography, and in talking informally with lots of my colleagues, I’ve found that these are the sorts of things that are obvious when we talk about them, but we just don’t talk about them.
Disclaimer # 1: I know there is a wide and fascinating array of writing out there on this topic – academics do love to study other academics, after all. It’s awfully convenient! I fully admit to having read almost none of it. I’m just thinking out loud, which is what I imagine blogs are for anyway.
Disclaimer # 2: I don’t mean for any of these comments to have value propositions attached, although I realize it’s inevitable that some of them will be seen to have.
Posting this introduction is partly meant to motivate me to continue writing my thoughts on the three themes. I also want to welcome discussion from you few out there – it’d be fun to get a real diversity of views on this. So I hope to make the first post on this topic very soon – stay tuned if you care!
I challenge you to find a better closing sentence than the one that ends Sharon Traweek’s ethnography of high energy physicists, Beamtimes and Lifetimes:
I have presented an account of how high energy physicists construct their world and represent it to themselves as free of their own agency, a description, as thick as I could make it, of an extreme culture of objectivity; a culture of no culture, which longs passionately for a world without loose ends, without temperament, gender, nationalism, or other sources of disorder - for a world outside human space and time.
Last week’s New Yorker has a great article by Malcolm Gladwell about the trouble with generalizations. Basically, Gladwell uses the examples of aggressive pit-bulls and policing and profiling tactics to show how problematic generalizations can be. It’s really worth a read.
Gladwell’s column in the New Yorker is called ‘Fact’, which may explain why his article is mostly a straight report of some interesting contradictions and oversights. The interesting thing that he didn’t even get into, though, is why people choose to abide by generalizations, often without any supporting evidence at all. I suppose that’s a combination of sociocultural and psychological, and it’s at least as complex as what the article does get into. But my theory is that people choose to abide by generalizations, even when they are seemingly illogical (as they often are), for two main reasons.
Most people believe things that support things they believe already. In other words, people don’t like to contradict themselves, at least not internally. It sets up too many upsetting complexities and ironies. Generalizations allow people to be consistent about their attitudes at a much lower resolution, which is nice for them.
No one likes to blame themselves when they can get away with blaming other people. Or, in the case of pit-bulls, no one likes to blame people when they can blame animals. Generalizations are based on extrapolating the details of a small number of situations out to a very large set of situations. Sometimes this is fair, granted. We wouldn’t get far in the world without some degree of generalization. But in the process, all the pesky little details (like the negligent, animal abusing owner who made that pit bull go crazy) tend to just go away.
