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Early
fieldnotes like Rene’s on Christopher Edley’s talk in January
were not uncommon. Rene’s
notes directly reported Christopher Edley’s talk, almost to the point
of transcription, rather than observing the qualities of the event itself—the
feel of the room, the reactions of the audience, etc. With the help of
discussion and reading excerpts from Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes by
Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw, the student researchers
developed their own mode note-writing. The book proved an effective primer
to encourage the ethnographers to record more than just the information
conveyed by speakers at events. Fieldnotes, the authors
assert, are always already both subjective and analytical: they capture their
writer’s particular take on an event, and the act of writing is indisputably
interpretive. |
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Afterwards, in one of her fieldnotes,
Rene wrote: “I typed most of this
before I read the chapter on writing ethnographies. In the future, I plan on
writing more about the people in the room, the mood, what elicited strong reactions,
and less word-for-word detail. The chapter was helpful and I wish I would have
read it sooner.” (Chapter 3) |
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