Mike Fortun, "Reflecting on the Workshop", contributed by Katie Cox, Center for Ethnography, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 10 May 2019, accessed 26 April 2024. http://centerforethnography.org/content/reflecting-workshop
Critical Commentary
Ethnographers reconvene at a hilltop picnic table to share their photos and sketches, compare insights and questions, and reflect on the experience of shared field work.
Cues for reflection included:
STEP 3: INSIGHTS [~20 minutes]
Trade “field sights” with your collaborators. Resist, for a moment, explaining your image, so that you can consider what these images communicate without annotation.
Take turns annotating each other’s visualizations, writing notes in the margins of the image, on the image itself, or in the space below. After a few minutes, discuss and elaborate upon your annotations with your group.
Some questions to consider:
What information does this “field sight” convey?
How do you interpret it in relation to your research questions?
What other questions does it provoke?
What knowledge or information do you have that helps you contextualize this image?
What further information do you need to understand it?
Is this information indexed somehow within the image, or is it absent?
What is left outside the frame? Is this deliberate or accidental?
How would your visualization change if you were to shift its direction or scale?
How does its meaning change when juxtaposed with your collaborators’ “field sights”?