Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER): New Technologies for Ethnographic Data Collection, Storage, Dissemination

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Sociological ethnographic researchers do not have a tradition of making their data available in formats that preserve integrity and allows for re-analysis. The proposal builds upon the PI's award winning research on homeless vendors, scavengers and panhandlers in New York City and is unique in that it brings the strong tradition of ethnographic films in anthropology to urban ethnography in sociology. The PI's research on sidewalk interactions among street vendor, and their suppliers and the public is published in a book entitled, Streetwalk. The PI used digital technologies for audio recording his research and will now develop an ethnographic film for use in college classes for teaching ethnographic research method, urban sociology, inequality, and other sociology courses. The instructional materials will include a hypertext version of Sidewalk, allowing student to "click on current photos in the book and see dozens of other shots that provide further insight that the single images used in the book cannot provide." The project provides potential procedures for completing and archiving ethnographic research in a manner that makes it publicly available for re-analysis and teaching. Specifically, it creates the first digital cd rom-based hypertext ethnography. The project's potential broader impact is twofold. It could potentially provide techniques for better archiving ethnographic research, thereby allowing for a wider dissemination of research findings and methods. Second, because it will be of interest to a wide variety of scholars (both for its teaching, substantive and methodological contribution) it serves as a model for creative strategies for data collection, archiving and distribution. This project, by creating replicatable ethnographic data, also strengthens the scientific basis of qualitative research.