Blog #7

From the data collected, I believe that there is definitely enough information to draw some conclusions about how amateur ethnographers take notes. However, I don't think that an amateur ethnographer would usually take notes without direction or purpose nor without an example by an expert ethnographer. Still, in the cases where an amateur ethnographer is gathering information without prior experience on how to gather random, unfocused data and without thinking to have some kind of focus before hand, it is safe to say that the result would be similar to that which was presented in the data collected.

That being said, I think what the father of linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure said was accurate when he said that you cannot know what brown is if you don't know about other colors, just as you cannot know what one sound is without knowing other sounds [this is a rough paraphrase]. Thus, I don't think it's fair of me to make any kind of judgment about what an amateur ethnographer would write mainly because I have no contrast with which to compare. Therefore, all of my reasoning behind my first paragraph here hinges on unfounded assumptions and weak understandings about what is truly expert level ethnographic work.

General Similarities, juxtapose to the article "Writing Ethnographic Field Notes:

1. Tried to capture all the information that seemed relevant, but there was no methodology to follow.

2. Wrote more about impressions than observations.

3. Details about interactions were limited.

4. We struggled with writing and interacting at the same time.

• Most of us can only focus on listening to what another has to say before writing down what the other said.
• Most of us cannot multitask by listening to someone and writing down their words at the same time.
• Sometimes, we made errors in what we write down what we learn from the other; often those mistakes are difficult to correct, as we're not entirely certain what was said originally since we were trying to listen and write at the same time.
• Sometimes, while we're writing, someone says something that we react to, and we stop writing to comment on what the other person said, losing our train of thought on our writing.