My lifestream this week reflects my work on the ethnographic project. As a sociologist and research methodologist I spent time earlier this week reflecting on how I would approach this project after having finally decided to look at YouTube’s Davidsfarm. I posted on Tuesday my research design for the project following my own research design checklist which I developed with my co-author Judy Davidson. The lifestream reflects my use of Delicious to book mark key videos on the site and the use of Tumblr to record my research journal and to store extracts of comments on the videos I bookmarked. I wanted to get the big picture and an overview of Davidsfarm rather than focusing on a very microlevel on a selected video, for example. I managed to look at Davidsfarm at a very crucial point in its history which will be evident from the ethnography and I wanted to sketch out the territory for a possible full scale ethnography which would explore the elements of a virtual community, the construction of community and the impact of other constructions and the ‘real world’. So the focus was to collect the range of information I needed and the lifestream reflects that this week.
I had a quick look at the suggested online tools we could use to present our ethnography and I played with OurStory without much success – partly because I wanted to focus on getting the material I needed rather than learn a new tool. I had already decided that I wanted to experiment with the presentation – and to use a wiki or WordPress to create a ‘non-linear’ approach to exploring the ethnography.
