How did I get here?
What online community did I choose and why.
What di I intend to find out?
What questions am I going to ask?
A Ethnographic approach involves providing a description (a beginning), an analysis (a middle) and an interpretation of the culture sharing group (an end). Esentially the ethnographer is required to take on the role of a story teller. (Cresswell 2007, p162). So first of all to the beginning, or as I will call it, the “arrival Story”
What is meant by an arrival story?
“What developed in classic ethnographic text was the inclusion of some sort of arrival story to give authenticity to the findings”. (Geertz 1988, Pratt 1986)
“The arrival story provides a metaphor for the people and society being studied, suggesting to the reader how the susequent analysis is to be framed”. (Davies 1999)
Given the limited amount of time allocated to this task (to produce a mini ethnography project, based on a virtual community) the study will be an investigative one and will take a qualititive approach to research.
How did I get here?
Obviously the primary motivation to do this task is that it is a course requirement. So my arrival here was mainly due to a desire to do well on this module. Now I am here I inted to observe the interactions of the online community and try, if it is appropriate and I receive permission to participate in some of their debates.
What online community did I choose and why?
After a number of days spent trawling through the internet for inspiration I came across Banketfields: Tunstalls Community website. This site markets its self as an area where participants can discuss local issues, blog, post and read crime reports, display images and photos and contribute to a local directory. It is a fairly well estabished site and has been running for ten years. It has around thirty users who contribute on a regular basis to the numerous blogs and forums.
I decided to choose this online community as primarily it is a community who has a similar interest to me, they care about the well being of our local area. (I omitted to mention that Tunstall, the sites focus area, is the community in which I grew up). I also felt that with the volume of interaction going on in the blogs and forums it would reveal some interesting results about the users sense of online community as well as highlighting their physical sense of community. Does the sense of physical community I know only to well about from growing up there translate to their online community?
What do I intent to find out?
I am going to focus my attention on one thread on the forum, entitled “Beware- Trick or Treat threat” I felt that it is easily managable in the time frame allocatedto the task and that it gives a sense of their community online. The thread was started on the 18/10/2009 and is ongoing. So far there have been six postsand I expect more with this particular topic and bearing in mind the time of year! I intend to document the postings using a timeline in timetoast. The link I will post up at a later date.
What questions am I going to ask?
The questions I ma going to ask include,
What is a virtual community?
Does this forum show evidence of there being a virtual community?
How do participants construct a sense of community?
Are the users supportive of one another?
Is this a good place to study given the overall cultural themes we are tackling? (M.Clari)
Once I have answered these questions and any others I think appropriate as I go along will be presented in a series of blog postings. In my blog postings relating to this mini project I will tag with Ethnography mini project.
Week two, apologies that I havent been very present over the last week, see reasons above! Am trying my very best to get updated and up to speed again!!