Marco Bruckdorfer

Reflection on my field study experience and the teamwork involved

Goal

My main goal at first was basically supporting a side effect, namely to improve my English skills. What better course to choose than the one dealing with lingualisms and globalization, given in english language; reading scientific papers, preparing and holding a presentation, publishing an internet-portfolio on a study case - Perfect!

Description

From the first session on, I was drawn to the ethnographical aspects of the seminar. Hearing about the task of performing a case study, a couple of ideas came up right away, for instance gathering audio and video-data from the U7 subway-line (representing a cross-section through berlin from southeast to northwest in itself) to develop a profile of languages one could find there, to examine multi-lingualism in a globalized city. Then I realized this would not be so easy for me, because:

1. I would not be able to use illegally collected data, therefore

2. would have to approach people, which I felt very self-conscious about.

The solution came with the session on Blommaert and Linguistic Landscape Studies.

Gathering public photo-graphic data avoids legal jeopardy, the signs arre 'out to be consumed', plus, possibly I would be able to put the work on the signages into a literary-science context later on.

Our group was put together, we decided to perform a LLS on Hermannplatz, since we had a hunch, that this area might provide for a couple of languages, scheduled our photo-shoot for the 5^th of January.

We made a lot of expe-riences that day, e.g. mistakes.. :-)

We hadn’t really thought things through. We should have put more effort into describing what we wanted to photograph beforehand. Our GPS-tracking-solution was not working properly, we simply ‘shot-away’, which made analysis more complicated. Questions like ‘Who is the author’? ‘What qualifies as German?’, etc. should have been adressed. Thankfully the method is relatively forgiving and one can apply new parameters to the data-set afterwards.

I sorted the data into mono-, bi- and multilingual groups, collected the languages found and how often they were represented. Our result was that Hermannplatz is mainly bilingual, German and English being the dominant languages.

Evaluation

I gained a lot from this experience. This was my first scientific fieldwork and proved to involve a lot of fun and new insights and knowledge. I almost physically learned of the importance of focussing on good questions beforehand - to be approached better the next time around.

We could have done things better, especially when it comes to preparation and establishing a team that is functioning through a collectively established set of guidelines.

At times I was very frustrated with the team-work aspects of this endeavour. Internal deadlines where disregarded, communicational attempts ignored several times. One member didn’t even bring a camera to the photo-shoot. I decided to drag these issues along in order to not cause any further vexations - wrong plan.

I am very thankful for the experience, though. And I particularly like that we let ourselves go in the direction of being a little bit 'discriptively thick' by bringing in our reflections.

Prospects

I had decided to skip the ‘storming’-phase of our team development, so there could be no norming. Rules that I would have liked to see established or at least talked about were not addressed. I like working in a team and learned about the importance of clarity in the storming phase in order to be able to reach the next stage. Got it.

The fieldwork, to me an active scientific test-run was, again, a lot of fun. I learned that I shouldn’t be too fast with conclusions. That I would have to be patient and let the data give the answers to me. I even performed another LLS data-gathering already on a Café, regarding multiple food-cultures which could possibly be ‘distilled’ out of a space that is mainly monolingual. I am looking forward to re-entering the LLS-mindset again in the future.

Reflections

Kopieren bestätigen

Sicherung wiederherstellen