Re-reading Jenna Hartel's article on ethnography for next week reminded me of how many disciplines place great value on fieldwork, and of the question of what constitutes fieldwork, as distinct from other kinds of work, in information studies. As Prof. Hartel points out, fieldwork is
not only a necessary stage in many kinds of social research, but also a
kind of ritual exercise of professional standards and intellectual
virtues. That ritual exercise is often signalled by the use of a quotation from the twentieth-century American sociologist (and former newspaper reporter) Robert Park,
who enjoined sociologists to "get the seat of your pants dirty in real
research" (emphasis added) by getting out of the library and spending
time in the actual spaces under study, from luxury hotel lounges to "the
doorsteps of the flop-houses" (you can find the full quotation and citation here: bit.ly/1oLiLbv).
What interests me in this often-quoted passage is the dialectic between the library and the field, and especially the latter's association with the real. One can understand what Park is getting at: as researchers of all kinds, not just sociologists, we need to expose ourselves to contexts where our assumptions may be challenged, and where materials, phenomena, and people can exert their own agency in the research process. The field is where our objects of study can push back in unexpected ways against our preconceptions, which, in the safe space of the library or lab, can all too easily ossify into fact. In other words, the field, broadly defined, is a space where we willingly surrender the control we associate with laboratory conditions, and instead embrace surprise and serendipity. Therefore, the act of venturing into those spaces signals an epistemic virtue on the researcher's part, like dirt under the fingernails after a full day's work. For those working in Park's tradition, that metaphorical dirt confers an authenticity upon the research process that can't be found any other way.
Perhaps the ultimate example of fieldwork in this sense -- as both a process of discovery and demonstration of intellectual virtue -- is Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947. (There's a really good recent film about it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1613750/.) The specific value of this characterization of fieldwork might be found in what the archaeologist Ian Hodder calls, in a brilliant phrase, "interpretation at the trowel's edge," in which the processes of data collection and interpretation are not carried out separately, with a temporal interval between them, but instead overlap in the same moments. (Hodder mentions this idea in several places, but summarizes it most accessibly in the introduction to his edited collection Religion at the Emergence of Civilization [Cambridge University Press, 2010], p. 12.) You can imagine how that would be an especially potent idea in archaeology, where data tend to get collected through an inevitably destructive process that physically intervenes in the literal fields where it works. Hodder's point is that some interpretations only become available at the trowel's edge, and that some insights are available only in the field, amid sunburns, mosquitos, and -- unless Indiana Jones and Lara Croft have misled me about archaeology -- secret societies, Nazis, and ancient booby traps. You know it's fieldwork if you come back from it dusty, sore, and a bit wiser about what you're studying.
Where, then, does the fieldwork of information research take place? How does your own research reflect or complicate the notions of the field described above? Or, how does information research call us to rethink this notion of the field beyond the more straightforward sociological and archaeological pictures of fieldwork, which may happen in actual fields with grass and mosquitos? How does the traditional notion of fieldwork change when the field is online or virtual? Also, for those working in areas that aren't particularly ethnographic, what is your area's equivalent to the field, or does it have one? For example, I'm a book historian and bibliographer, and much of my fieldwork actually happens in the library -- the field's supposed antithesis -- and takes the form of examining material objects to see what surprises they reveal. Your fieldwork might be similarly non-obvious, such as online communities or massively multiplayer video games, but they might have the same functional role: a space where your objects of study retain their power to surprise, confound, and illuminate.
Stories of your own experiences of fieldwork (or its equivalents, broadly defined) are welcome too, and feel free to wear your dusty Indiana Jones fedora as you type.
What interests me in this often-quoted passage is the dialectic between the library and the field, and especially the latter's association with the real. One can understand what Park is getting at: as researchers of all kinds, not just sociologists, we need to expose ourselves to contexts where our assumptions may be challenged, and where materials, phenomena, and people can exert their own agency in the research process. The field is where our objects of study can push back in unexpected ways against our preconceptions, which, in the safe space of the library or lab, can all too easily ossify into fact. In other words, the field, broadly defined, is a space where we willingly surrender the control we associate with laboratory conditions, and instead embrace surprise and serendipity. Therefore, the act of venturing into those spaces signals an epistemic virtue on the researcher's part, like dirt under the fingernails after a full day's work. For those working in Park's tradition, that metaphorical dirt confers an authenticity upon the research process that can't be found any other way.
Perhaps the ultimate example of fieldwork in this sense -- as both a process of discovery and demonstration of intellectual virtue -- is Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947. (There's a really good recent film about it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1613750/.) The specific value of this characterization of fieldwork might be found in what the archaeologist Ian Hodder calls, in a brilliant phrase, "interpretation at the trowel's edge," in which the processes of data collection and interpretation are not carried out separately, with a temporal interval between them, but instead overlap in the same moments. (Hodder mentions this idea in several places, but summarizes it most accessibly in the introduction to his edited collection Religion at the Emergence of Civilization [Cambridge University Press, 2010], p. 12.) You can imagine how that would be an especially potent idea in archaeology, where data tend to get collected through an inevitably destructive process that physically intervenes in the literal fields where it works. Hodder's point is that some interpretations only become available at the trowel's edge, and that some insights are available only in the field, amid sunburns, mosquitos, and -- unless Indiana Jones and Lara Croft have misled me about archaeology -- secret societies, Nazis, and ancient booby traps. You know it's fieldwork if you come back from it dusty, sore, and a bit wiser about what you're studying.
Where, then, does the fieldwork of information research take place? How does your own research reflect or complicate the notions of the field described above? Or, how does information research call us to rethink this notion of the field beyond the more straightforward sociological and archaeological pictures of fieldwork, which may happen in actual fields with grass and mosquitos? How does the traditional notion of fieldwork change when the field is online or virtual? Also, for those working in areas that aren't particularly ethnographic, what is your area's equivalent to the field, or does it have one? For example, I'm a book historian and bibliographer, and much of my fieldwork actually happens in the library -- the field's supposed antithesis -- and takes the form of examining material objects to see what surprises they reveal. Your fieldwork might be similarly non-obvious, such as online communities or massively multiplayer video games, but they might have the same functional role: a space where your objects of study retain their power to surprise, confound, and illuminate.
Stories of your own experiences of fieldwork (or its equivalents, broadly defined) are welcome too, and feel free to wear your dusty Indiana Jones fedora as you type.
