Sunday, May 20, 2007

INTERVIEW.

Interview, my field notes:

Conducted 5.20.07 approx. 4pm
Subject: M.B., Female, Age 21, Undergrad at University of Puget Sound, economics major, Resides in Tacoma, Wa, has been a student for 3 years.

Interview took place in downtown Seattle, at the Pike Place Market while attending the annual cheese festival. Subject was a friend of a friend.

Chronological description of events:

First I explained the nature of our study, and told her about the assignment and why I wanted to interview her, she agreed to do it. She said she wouldn’t mind having her name recorded but since it doesn’t seem essential to our study to identify her in anyway I simply recorded her initials for identification.

Q:What kinds of transportation do you use on a regular basis?
A: I drive my own car, sometimes get rides from other friends, sometimes the bus when we’re in Seattle and I’m visiting friends there. Recently started riding my bike around because “I can’t drive drunk to the bars”…(this then led into a conversation about how it was in fact quite possible to ride a bike drunk because riding a bike is programmed into your memory..and how it was pretty much as easy as walking, but faster)

Q:What kinds have you used in the past?
A: Used to drive back home, before I got my drivers license my parents drove me

Q: Are there certain kinds you prefer? Public vs. Private?
A: Well since we usually drive I never really need to ride the bus, so I guess private, it’s much easier in Tacoma.

Q:What are your opinions of transportation in the Puget Sound area? Including anything from the metro system to how roads and road signs are set up?
A: There really aren’t enough buses in the South Sound, and they’re not accommodating to younger people – they stop running really early. The street lights in Tacoma are really inefficient, they’re set on timers…I did a project on it for my enviro-sci class. We went down 6th, from union to mildred street a few times a week for a month, the time added on when you get stuck with a red light is really significant, time, as well as fuel costs. We have the most inefficient street light region in Tacoma…like you can go down an entire street and hit every red light.
And I hate Seattle, I like Tacoma a lot better because it’s on a grid system. I don’t really understand Seattle, and the one-ways make traveling really inefficient I think.

Q: What do you notice about your environment when you’re driving in your car?
A: uhmm, not sure
Q: Does it differ according to situation?
A: Well, I’m more cautious of the outside when it’s a difficult driving condition. I notice a lot less while driving than walking, of the environment… I always forget how I got places when I drive or don’t notice things.
Q: Do you think it’s different like when you’re in Tacoma vs driving in some unfamiliar place?
A: yeah, I’m more focused on driving when it’s somewhere unfamiliar, and although I try to notice my surroundings, I usually don’t. I notice a lot more now that I’m more comfortable with driving in Tacoma, but I’m still kind of programmed to getting where I need to go..and it’s so fast, its hard to notice what’s outside.


In general some stuff I learned from this assignment:
Clifford wanted us to post something about how we found the person we were interviewing, so I'm adding that here:
Since I wanted to just ask an average person rather than an 'expert' it seemed good to just find a random person, but I'll admit it, I can be pretty shy and just going up to some random person at a bus stop and asking them questions was kind of freaky, so instead I was going to go out with some people who are friends with one of my friends and asked one of them if they would let me interview them. I feel like this is probably the easiest way to find someone. A friend of a friend, or a contact of a contact rather than just going up to someone on the street.

It can be really hard to stay on topic with someone, especially when it seems just really conversational instead of a formal interview. And to know when to just let them keep on talking or move on to the next question. I had a hard time coming up with good questions that seemed relevant to our topic and didn’t stray too far into ‘what would you change about the seattle public transportation system’ or something like that. And while talking to other college students it can also be kind of hard to keep things serious I found, but I don’t want formality to stop people from really telling the truth…so some sort of happy medium will have to be found. I’m not sure exactly what kind of information Mark and I can hope to get out of an interview…it’ll probably be easy to find complaints about transportation, but quite a bit harder to find anything about how people interact with their environment in terms of transportation just by asking people about it…so I’m not sure. We are definitely going to have to work on some good questions if we attempt to use interviews in our research.

Monday, May 14, 2007

a few questions relating to ethnography and our research

1. Since many people have suggested we add some type of interview or at least contact some of the people running transportation blogs (blog from Portland, buschick in Seattle, etc) How would we go about doing this? What questions would we ask? What information exactly are we trying to learn from them? Should we only interview these types of people, or also include random people actually using transportation? and again, what do we ask?

2. We originally wanted to focus our research on just observation and taking various photographs of places in both Seattle and Amsterdam. How are we going to analyze them exactly? If we add video how again will that be analyzed? Are we trying to study people's perceptions of public transport? How and why they use certain types of transport? Or just use transportation as a means of studying the way people interact with their environment?

3. What kind of conclusions are we really going to be able to make from our observations? It seems as though it may be difficult to find and take pictures of similar areas in both cities when we are first going to be in Seattle and then in Amsterdam without being able to go back to Seattle to take more photos/videos before presenting our work in Switzerland, how are we going to account for this? Are we simply going to have pictures stand alone and make conclusions about them?...

I feel like although we seem to know what we want to do, we haven't fully discussed how we're going to do it. Where are we going to take pictures/videos (are we going to do video?) are we going to go back to the same few places over and over again? or try to go to a number of places? Once we've taken photos, what kind of field notes will accompany them? If so what questions are we going to ask people? About what they are doing? What they are thinking about in terms of the space they are in?....What will we do with all of our notes in the end? I'm feeling a little bit unsure about what conclusions we can really make about people or about a culture from our simple observations...

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

e-research

As far as I understand e-research is either the use of the internet or other web applications as a means to do research or find information. So it would be the use of online sources like e-journals and e-publications or the use of search engines. Or it is the actual study of the use of these kinds of processes. From what I'll admit is a pretty confused understanding of what VKS is and does I think they are more about the latter. It is the study of the internet and how it is used, etc that they consider to be e-research. Not even sure if I'm on the right track....

For instantiating it into our project we've already talked about looking into online communities like flickr and youtube to find examples of visual manifestations of our topic, to take it further we could do a deeper analysis of how people have used these websites to post their photos/videos.