General Issues

Pedagogy

1. Methods training not enough to go around (HRB)

We know that some fraction of anthropology students, both undergraduate and graduate, are interested in taking courses in research methods. In my view, the problem is neither lack of need nor lack of interest. The problem is lack of instructors.

(An aside: There are plenty of courses, particularly at the undergraduate level, with titles like "ethnographic methods" and "field methods in anthropology" and "participant observation methods." When I talk about instruction in methods, then, I am not referring to this, relatively well-covered component of the field, but rather to specific methods for collecting and analyzing data about human thought and human behavior under all but laboratory conditions. Included here are, among many others, methods for collecting and analyzing behavior, text, decisions and folk models, and so on, as well as methods for collecting and analyzing still and moving images.)

The fields of political science, psychology, education, and sociology produce a steady stream of scholars whose expertise is specifically in research methods and who are hired to teach methods in graduate programs. For example, there are 373 current members of the methodology section of the American Sociological Association (Thomas DiPrete, personal communication) and 700 methodologists who attended the 2004 conference in Amsterdam of the International Sociological Association (Karl van Meter, personal communication).

By contrast, the number of anthropologists who teach and do research on methods (qualitative or quantitative) is very small and is not likely to develop substantially. Since 2005, through a grant to the University of Florida, NSF has funded a program of intensive summer courses in research methods in cultural anthropology. The SCRM (short courses in research methods) is funded through 2010 and is developing a curriculum of methods courses, including text analysis, behavioral observation, survey research, ethnoecology, and network analysis. These courses are offered during 5-day intensive sessions each summer. Some courses are offered as abbreviated, one-day workshops at national meetings.

The model programs of short courses on research methods are the University of Michigan's Summer Institute in Survey Research Techniques, now in its 60th year, and the University of Essex’s Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis and Collection, now in its 40th year. Four of the 30 courses offered at Michigan are on methods for collecting and/or analyzing qualitative data or mixed, qualitative and quantitative data, yet few anthropologists take those course. Eight or 10 of the more than 60 courses offered at Essex this summer (2007) are of interest to anthropologists; yet again, few anthropologists have even heard of these course, much less enroll in them. One possibility is to see if we can expand the offerings at Michigan and Essex to include courses that are marketed directly to anthropologists. Another is to develop another venue where anthropologists can get training in research methods during their student years and beyond -- including face-to-face courses and courses delivered over the Internet.

The latter goal, in my view, should take full advantage of the computing and telecommunications technologies now available, so that anthropologists everywhere, not just in the highly industrialized nations, can participate. This would entail establishing an Institute for Teaching of Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology. The institute would offer face-to-face courses during the summer and on campuses across the country, as well as via the Internet during the academic year. Internet-based courses does I do not mean automated courses, but courses in which the instructor offers the material via Internet technology to people anywhere. Internet-based courses are often more, rather than less work than face-to-face courses. Students are free to ask more questions when they are not in a classroom and it takes more time to answer questions by e-mail than it does in a classroom. Nevertheless, in a field with few specialists and a substantial number of widely scattered potential students -- which describes the field of research methods in cultural anthropology -- Internet-mediated instruction can be very helpful.

A national institute for teaching research methods would need a home -- a university that would offer credit through a department of anthropology -- but the institute would function as a university without walls and would involve faculty from anywhere in the world who wanted to teach research methods courses. --russ bernard 19-Jun-2007 12:30 BST--russ bernard 19-Jun-2007 13:00 BST

Modes for training/learning

-- Research on new modes? (SS)

1. Assumption

Data

Data Issues

1. Heterogenous data - approaches to analysis (DR)
2. Data sets
3. Computational Stuff
4. New capacities for capturing data

Data access

1. restriction (LM)
2. security
3. ethics, legal requirements, confidentiality (LK, LM)

Sharing and Archiving

1. Sharing and fieldnotes (LM)
2. Fieldnotes of the past - archives (HRB)
3. Documents and documentation, not access. !! Capture documents (HRB)

On documents and documentation:

Not long ago, we talked about the documentation problem. Today, we have a document problem. Anthropology Plus indexes 2,500 journals, including many from developing countries. The Web of Knowledge indexes 22,000 journals and has 20 million users in 81 countries across the world. Our colleagues across the world, including especially those in developing nations, need access both to the documentation resources and to the documents in order to participate fully in the production of anthropological scholarship. --russ bernard 18-Jun-2007 17:53 BST

On capturing documents:

(For more on the following, see the introduction to Handbook of Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology, and the chapter by Bernard and Ryan on texts in the same volume.)

In 1881, Adolf Bastian, director of the Royal Ethnological Museum in Berlin, discussed the basic mandate for an emerging science of anthropology. “We must,” he said, “... assume the responsibility for preserving and transmitting the basic materials as we pass the burden of building ethnology onto the shoulders of the next generation. If we fail on that point,” he said, “the whole endeavor will again fade away in that fata morgana of philosophical deductionsim” (Bastian 1881:216-217). But, he continued, we must act quickly, for “even now, material perishes in front of our eyes through our inconsiderate neglect. ... Each year, each day, nay, each hour, things disappear from this earth and we look on without moving so much as a little finger. ... Our guiding principle, therefore, in anthropology, prehistory, or ethnology should be to collect everything” (ibid:217; cited in Bunzl 1996:218).

Franz Boas worked with Bastian for a year and left for the U.S. in 1887. Boas hewed to the first principle of science—to get it all down and to get it right. We would not tolerate an account of the civilization of China or Japan, Boas observed, from someone who did not speak the language and didn’t know the local literature (Boas 1911:56). How could we expect less from anyone who wanted to understand the culture of a preliterate society?

There were obstacles, of course, and Boas was aware of them, but he enjoined his students to do the best they could—to go out and work on the American Indian Reservations, to learn the native language of the people whom they studied, to salvage whatever remnants of earlier cultures could be found. The remnants would be found in material artifacts, which should be collected for analysis and display in museums, and in people’s recollections, which should be collected as texts in their native languages and analyzed as time permits.

Boas practiced what he preached. Of his 5,000 pages of published work, 4,000 pages are translated, unannotated, Kwakiutl language texts (Berman 1996:216). In addition, there are thousands more pages in the Boas archives that remain unpublished, including the efforts of George Hunt, Boas’s chief Kwakiutl informant. Many of Boas’s students—-Sapir, Kroeber, Swanton, Goddard, Dixon, Lowie-—followed their mentor’s lead and collected mountains of native-language text. Margaret Mead introduced her own adaptation of Boas’s mandate, by shooting hundreds of hours of cinema verité about Bali dance—a rich, textual record that can be turned to again and again through the years as new insights and new methods of analysis become available.

There were complaints that Boas’s work came to nothing more than a mountain of raw facts. Murdock mocked Boas’s “‘five-foot shelf’ of monographs on the Kwakiutl” as contributing little to understanding the social structure of the Kwakiutl (1949:xiv. note 5). Leslie White complained that the mass of texts that Boas collected on the Kwakiutl, were not intelligible because they were without commentary (1963:55). And yet, the 50 years of solid work from by Boas and his students to get it down and get it right remain an enduring legacy of our discipline.

My own work with Jesús Salinas was based on this principle. I think we can continue this tradition and expand our database for building theory by using computing and telecommunications technologies. We can help thousands of people around the world to contribute directly to the mountain of facts.--russ bernard 19-Jun-2007 12:42 BST

References

Bastian, Adolf 1986 [1881]. Die heilege Sage der Polynesier: Kosmogonie und Theogonie. Osnabrück, Germany: Biblio.

Berman, Judith 1996. “The culture as it appears to the Indian himsel”: Boas, George Hunt, and the methods of ethnography. In: Volksgeist as Method and Ethic, George W. Stocking, Jr., ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Pp. 215–256.

Boas, Franz, ed. 1911. Handbook of American Indian Languages. Washington , DC: Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin No. 40.

Bunzl, Matti 1996. Franz Boas and the Humboldtian tradition. In: Volksgeist as Method and Ethic, G.W. Stocking, Jr., ed. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press. Pp. 17–78.

Murdock, George Peter 1949. Social Structure. New York: Macmillan Co. p. xiv

White, Leslie A. 1963. The Ethnography and Ethnology of Franz Boas. Austin: The Museum of the University of Texas, 1963. p. 55.

Community stuff

1. Data replication and distribution (HJ)
   1. instant archiving of the notes (HRB)
   2. archive interface (HJ)
   3. archive-like services (SS)

Work Practices

1. Wikis and Blogs (HJ, SS)
2. The 'invisible college' is more visible (HRB)
3. The citation network (LM)
4. Access to wider networks of resources - integration of resources (DR)
5. May

Facilitating the development and exchange of theory

1. Methodology and Theory (LK)
2. Exchange of info and data (LK)
3. Comparing and evaluating a range of different theorectial positions
   1. and the models that arise from these
   2. evaluating how models interrelate
4. Post-post modern anthropology

Conduct of Research

1. Software for collecting surveys on the web (HRB)
   1. Where is the rest of the stuff? (HRB)
2. Wiki/Grid services for building and deploying tools (HRB)
3. Incorporating local people into the research process (HRB)
   1. Collecting data over the web (HRB)
   2. How do we fund this? (HRB)
4. Comparative analytic resources (HRB)
   1. Longitudinal data (HRB)
   2. Evolutionary data (HRB)
5. Useful tools (SP)

Grid Capabilities

1. What are the key aspects of anthropology addressable by capabilities managed by the grid (DR)
2. Collaboration tools (SS)
   1. Applied area definitely collaboration (SS, LM)
   2. What about multidisciplinary?
3. Tools aren't going to change anthropology. (LM)
4. Helping management of dynamic communication