First of all, I’ll admit that I was pretty spoiled during the first few months of fieldwork because I had WIRELESS INTERNET access anytime I wanted.  That’s right, a wireless connection right in my room.  Madness, I know.  This was definitely not the case when I was here in 2009 and 2010 doing prelim work for my dissertation.  I had no problems with my fantastic and luxurious internet situation…until it evaporated like spilled gasoline.

Gone.

For the last month the internet has once again become a rare, fleeting occurrence that is only attainable (it seems) when the wind blows in the right direction.  You can’t always get what you want.  The funny thing is that once something like the internet comes into a place, certain technologically-skilled folks (like the local satellite internet tech) become high demand individuals–and almost impossible to find.  The internet is wonderful, amazing, and very useful…until it breaks and there’s nobody to fix it.  So anyway, my extended vacation from Savage Minds has a little something to do with the sudden loss of signal syndrome (SLSS)…but the truth is that this might not be a bad thing considering the fact that I am in the middle of fieldwork.

Still, having internet for fieldwork can be really beneficial, especially in my case.  Why?  Because many of the residents of this area use the internet to communicate with one another instead of telephones (and sometimes instead of walking over and tapping on a neighbor’s door)*.  So it helps to be connected into this network in order to keep a certain level of communication going.  It also helps to have internet when I need to try to set up meetings in places that are 1-2 hour drives away, since there’ nothing worse than making a long, dusty drive to find out that the official you wanted to talk with is away for two weeks on vacation.

At the same time, internet access in the middle of fieldwork can be a time-sucking curse (I’m sure many of you know what I mean).  In the old days I think a lot of cultural anthropologists used to wile away the hours and fieldwork anxieties by reading massive books.  This is still pretty common.  But what about now?  Are future generations of anthropologists going to deal with culture and fieldwork shock by playing solitaire or Angry Birds?

There are lots of conversations out there about how the internet is going to affect fieldwork.  In my case, it’s both a positive and a very negative thing all at once.  It’s useful to have, just like anywhere, but it’s also not really a good idea to depend upon the internet.  Why?  Because when it isn’t there, and your research methods are counting on it to make connections, then what?  Well, that’s where flexibility comes into the picture.  If there’s one thing that we all need in fieldwork, it’s the ability to adjust what we’re doing to the situation at hand.

I’ll go ahead and admit that I may have been counting a little too much on having internet access to get in touch with certain people in the communities where I am working.  I planned on using it as one of my recruitment tool, mostly after I learned how important it was for many community members down here and how often they use it.  And when the net is on and accessible, it works great for getting in touch with people, setting up meetings, and even arranging times to meet for interviews.  But when it goes out, it’s like getting stuck on top of some massive roller coaster…the whole system got you this far, but now you’re stuck.  Now what?  Well, this isn’t exactly a new problem in anthropology.  Veronica, my wife, who is also a cultural anthropology grad student, always reminds me about the fact that old Bronislaw Malinowski used a pretty simple yet effective anthropological method when he needed to learn what was going on: he went for walks.

He went for lots of walks.

So there you have it.  If your research design counts upon having access to high-speed (or even excruciatingly slow speed) internet, here’s my advice: don’t count on it.  This is not just advice for field sites in places where the internet is a relatively new luxury.  This applies everywhere: haven’t you ever experienced a day or two when the net goes down at your university of office and the whole world seems to freeze and nobody knows what do to?  Ya, it’s the same thing…kinda like when the power goes out and then everyone realizes that maybe having candles, water, and flashlights would be a good idea.  So, the lesson of the story (and I am learning this myself) is to find the fieldwork version of candles and flashlights for when the communicative power known as the internet flickers into nothingness.  Two feet, motivation, and a decent little notebook can still go a long way in the 21st century.**

So, there you have it: keep on walking, people.

Over and out.  I’ll write when I can.

*In fact, where I am working, there are many people who PREFER to be contacted via email, since that’s what they use for all kinds of social planning.  So, another issue here is that we might have to face the fact that our preferred methods of meeting and recruiting interview participants might not always be available, so we have to adjust accordingly.

** Repeat this mantra as necessary if you are an intractable online junkie/fieldworker.

Ha! Just kidding.

The 30 March 2012 issue of the journal Science includes a news piece “Psychology’s Bold Initiative” on a possible moment of introspection for the discipline. Spurred on by some recent high profile academic fraud cases a cohort of scholars are leading a movement aimed at scrutinizing their field.

According to Science, many psychologists now feel that their field has a credibility problem. To my ear this underscores some of the differences between our disciplines and simultaneously calls to mind the critiques of Clifford and Marcus, et al.

The greater concern arises from several recent studies that have broadly critiqued psychological research practices, highlighting lax data collection, analysis, and reporting, and decrying a scientific culture that too heavily favors new and counterintuitive ideas over the confirmation of existing results. Some psychology researchers argue that this has led to too many findings that are striking for their novelty and published in respected journals – but are nonetheless false.

As sociologists and anthropologists are both prone to lament when the mainstream media wants a social scientist they turn to psychology. Even on the topic of human origins it seems the evolutionary psychologists have one up on the human ecologists and bioarchaeologists. Perhaps this envy has contributed to psychology being the punch line in some anthropological circles, but more profound than this are the very different ways the disciplines conduct research and the kinds of knowledge they claim to produce.

Whereas anthropology oft claims the mantle of science with a “but…” psychology appears to have no such hesitation. Rather than deconstruct the authority of science here, I will simply nod in the general direction of France. Psychologists self-identify as scientists. Being that they believe themselves to practice science it follows that one way they may right their vessel is to test the reproducibility of others’ conclusions.

This in and of itself is a radical notion. Reproducibility is one of the core principles of science but the current prestige economy does not reward this sort of work nor does the publication regime offer an outlet for its dissemination. What would be the incentive for expending one’s energies testing reproducibility in an academic culture that gives the highest rewards to new ideas? Just as limiting is the virtually unpublishable status of negative results, which may motivate scientists to identify false positives or structure their research agenda around what is publishable rather than what needs to be known.

A group of 50 psychologists have organized themselves as the Open Science Collaboration with the stated goal of systematically replicating recently published psychological experiments. This is very interesting to me. Instead of worrying about what the limitations of their field might be there’s a group out there setting up an empirical project to test where that limit is.

Jonathan Schooler, author of a study to be tested by the OSC, was quoted in the news story and I found his words to be very revealing.

I think one would want to see a similar effort done in another area before one concluded that low replication rates are unique to psychology. It would really be a shame if a field that was engaging in a careful attempt at evaluating itself were somehow punished for that. It would discourage other fields from doing the same.

Here is the bit that reminded me of Writing Culture. You don’t have to go far in the house of sociology to find scholars who perceive anthropology as having gone off a cliff in the 1980s, a historical moment epitomized by the radical reflexivity of Writing Culture. Even in anthropology its not hard to find old schoolers who think the whole thing has gone to pot and Geertz is the villain. But the kernel of the Writing Culture critique is the same as the OSC movement: its was a call for more empiricism not less.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but reproducibility doesn’t really seem to have a place in contemporary cultural anthropology. On the one hand this makes methodological sense. In ethnography I am my own instrument. The culture I experience is different than the culture you experience even if we’re in the same place at the same time.

But its worth asking again, once more with feeling, how is it that we believe what we read in the journals? I mean, we can disagree about the meaning of an event or whether this idea from Edward Said really goes with that idea from Richard Price. But for the most part if somebody describes Carnival in Trinidad don’t we accept that description and move onto the interpretation?

What the OSC has done is select studies from three high-impact psychology journals published in 2008. “They reasoned that articles published during this time frame are recent enough that most original authors can find and share their materials, yet old enough for the OSC to analyze questions such as whether a study’s reproducibility correlates with how often it has been cited subsequently.” So far the response from study authors has been positive.

What would it look like to refashion this testing of reproducibility on anthropological terms and check up on publications to see if authors really knew what they were talking about? I’m not talking about the rare case of outright fraud, where authors are willfully deceiving readers. But could you pick, say, an essay on Indonesian cross-dressers out of Cultural Anthropology and go to Indonesia and find what they were talking about?

I don’t know, that sounds kind of crazy. Who would pay for it?

A similar issue has arisen in anthropological research on Muslims in North America. In the conclusion to Katherine Pratt Ewing’s edited volume, Being and Belonging (2008), Andrew Shryock called for greater attention to “the immediate and mediated worlds…articulated in everyday life” (206). So, how should one strike a balance between studying media and the everyday? One could study the everyday dimensions of production practices, or how the reception of media is incorporated into people’s everyday lives, or how and why media producers construct the everyday in certain ways.

This issue is especially relevant to many members of the Muslim community in North America and those who conduct research on/with them. Last year I attended two large conferences: The American Academy of Religion (San Francisco, November 2011) and the Islamic Society of North America (Chicago, July 2011). Religious adherents, spokespersons and academics all converged on the notion that engaging with media (news, entertainment, and social media) was the most vital means to influence public opinion about Muslims. I heard numerous panels where professors, journalists, filmmakers, writers, students, etc. discussed the benefits and pitfalls of media activism. Such a large degree of interest solidified my focus on the anthropology of media and Islam by generating more questions than answers. But what about the everyday?

I share Shryock’s view that ethnographies of the everyday lives of Muslims in North America could add texture to our understanding of post-9/11 Muslim identity formations, while also humanizing the Muslim ‘Other’. Yet, television shows about everyday Muslim lives have reached more Muslim and non-Muslim American homes than any ethnography could dream of. Even though an ethnography of actual lives could provide a much needed point of comparison with televisual representations, it seems just as pressing to ethnographically research the construction and reception of the everyday in tv programs.

An ideal approach would analyze the relationship between the everyday in televisual media and lived realities. But, there is no guarantee that such moments would arise during fieldwork and would probably have to be one dimension of a larger study. For this reason, internet sites could prove useful for analyzing how Muslims discuss such shows and apply them to life situations (more on this in the next post), as well as understanding how non-Muslims make sense of them. Another possibility would be to approach the relationship between the everyday and media in a sideways manner (see my last post). This would entail interpreting one in light of the other without positing an underlying unity.

How do you perceive the relationship between media and the everyday? What are some other fruitful directions to pursue?

I stumbled upon the sideways issue in some of the readings I will discuss below. Initially, I read laterality and sideways discussions to be the equivalent of the keystone anthropological activity of cutting across social spheres. It is only after hearing about the Sideways conference this past Fall at UC-Irvine that I decided to take a second look and try to think it through a bit more. And, this is a wonderful venue to hopefully hear back from many of you who have been thinking about this issue in more depth and at greater length than I have at this point.

Last year Julian discussed projects of studying up or sideways as hinging on how “ethnographers relate to their interlocutors, as well as different degrees of “identity overlap” between ethnographer and subject.” In another post, Dorien Zandbergen took issue with such “identity overlap,” by claiming that the sideways concept “suggests that there is some kind of plane that is shared by particular kinds of people, who can move ‘sideways’ to have a peek into each other’s affairs.” It is thus by paying careful attention to similarities that Dorien was able to identify issues where “such similarities appeared only superficial,” as differences emerged. However, Julian addressed the issue, as well, by looking at how such research is “differentiated on several axes: of political sympathy, of shared knowledge, of power relations, of informants’ reflexivity, and of socio-cultural belonging, to name a few.” Within these posts the matter of studying sideways, or up, involved drawing a connection between self/other (i.e. who) and similarity/difference (i.e. what).

On a different note, Kerim analyzed Tim Ingold’s articulation of the “sideways glance” as an “anthropological attitude.” This attitude consisted of the “constant awareness of alternative ways of being, and of the ever-present possibility of ‘flipping’ from one to another.” This formulation shares a concern with the axes of self/other and similarity/difference, but intimates the “how” by conceiving of “flipping” as shifting subject positions within anthropological “participatory dialog.” It is for this reason that Kerim contended that Ingold’s title “should have read: Anthropological reasoning is not inductive, but dialectical.” This approach served to “challenge the dichotomy which places ethnographic description on the one side and anthropological theorizing on the other.” What we will encounter below continues along this trajectory.

While there are many insightful sources for thinking about how to conduct sideways research, I have found the work of Tom Boellstorff (2003), Bill Maurer (2005), and Diane Nelson (2009) to be particularly instructive. There are some differences of emphasis in their projects, but for my purposes here (and for the sake of brevity) I will focus on the commonalities between them. Tom Boellstorff was concerned with how a “space for subjectivity appears” through the “holding together of two ostensibly incompatible cultural logics without conflating them” (2003:237). He argued that thinking about culture in terms of dubbing, “sets two elements side by side, blurred yet distinct” (237). The reason they are distinct is that “[t]he authoritative voice is at odds with the visual representation” (237). A “disjuncture” is therefore crucial to the “performative act” of subject formation based on “collage,” in that “there is no “real” version underneath, where everything fits” (237).

Bill Maurer explained this conception of setting “side by side,” or “alongside” in his terminology, as opposing “any synthetic or absorptive metatheoretical rubric to bring them under one sign of law” (2005:19). Instead of attempting to fix meaning, information, money, subjectivity, translation, etc. into a stable set of relations, Maurer is concerned with the “oscillation (alternare) between adequation and other modes of praxis” (17). By adequation, he meant the conjoining of representation and reality. So, he sought to understand how alternative banking and currency practices utilized various “analogies…homologies…analytical moves” that both critiqued and utilized adequation as modes of “conjunction” that are “impossibly linked” (19-20). It is helpful here to think of Maurer’s conjunction as an exmaple of Boellstorff’s “performative act” in which each link is always incomplete, capable of change, as well as maintaining simultaneous differences.

In the work of Diane Nelson (2009) we find an attempt to trace a genealogy of a sideways approach. She noted Russian constructivists (Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov), Surrealists,  Situationists, as well as Walter Benjamin and Michael Taussig as contributing predecessors to sideways work (73). While Boellstorff (2003:237) and Maurer (2005:17) cited Gilles Deleuze in connection with their lateral and sideways approaches, Nelson drew more from Slavoj Zizek’s reading of Levi-Strauss (2009:xxxi). Nonetheless, they all share inspiration from Marcel Mauss’ (1924) usage of similar phrasing and methodological positioning (Maurer, personal communication). Nelson depicted her “methodology of dialectical montage” as “[l]aying two unlikely things like two faces beside each other” (73). Again, note the beside, alongside, and side by side correspondences between these three works. Like Boellstorff, Nelson identified a gap, what she called a “cut” taken from film theory, as the space in which the subject constitutes herself (73). Much like Ingold’s “flipping,” Nelson attempted to “play them against each other” by interpreting “one with the help of the other” (xxxi).

It is this interplay between disjunctive/conjunctive practices and processes that seems to be one of the most crucial dimensions of sideways projects. As such, it enables us to identify and track the spaces and crossings where the maintenance and construction of much of that stuff called culture occurs. Boellstorff summed the approach up well in the following passage: “the more-than-juxtaposition and less-than-unification of pasts, presents, and futures” (2003:239).

Perhaps in my next post or two I will outline some examples from these works, and/or attempt to identify some of the stakes involved in sideways projects. In the meantime, what aspects of lateral/sideways projects have resonated with you? Are there some worthwhile distinctions awaiting articulation since I have merely sketched some similarities? Do you perceive other modalities at work? I look forward to reading about your considerations of the topic.

(I want to thank Adam Fish for the invite to guest blog here on SM. I am also very appreciative of the engaging conversations with Bill Maurer and my fellow students at UCI on this subject.)

Works Cited
Boellstorff, Tom
2003 Dubbing Culture: Indonesian Gay and Lesbi Subjectivities and Ethnography in
an Already Globalized World. American Ethnologist 30(2):225–242.
Maurer, Bill
2005 Mutual Life, Limited. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mauss, Marcel
1967 [1924] The Gift. New York: W.W. Norton.
Nelson, Diane
2009 Reckoning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

The fury: When I finally checked the recording later that night, the rain made it almost impossible to hear the conversation.  The voices of mother and son were swept up in an auditory wrecking ball that sounded more like a tornado than raindrops.  The interview was still salvageable, but it was hardly a masterpiece of ethnographic audio.  Frustrating.

The admission: While I have a lot of experience in photography, I do not have a lot of experience making high quality audio recordings.  And if we’re going to record interviews, we should make them as good as possible, right?  Sure, I have used digital recorders that do the trick, but the overall quality of most of my interviews hasn’t been exactly stellar.  They have been decent, but not great.  The above incident (which took place during my MA field research) caused me to upgrade my digital recorder to a Zoom H2, which was certainly a step in the right direction.  Still, while I know how to handle a whole slew of difficult lighting situations in photography, I am willing to admit that I have a lot to learn when it comes to recording audio in tricky situations.  Two situations create consistent problems for me: 1) when there is a decent amount of background noise (traffic, dogs barking, rain, etc); and 2) windy, or even slightly breezy situations (which can ruin audio pretty easily).

The question(s): How do you deal with difficult sound/audio situations?  Do you have any tips or methods that help you in these kinds of tricky situations?  What about controlling/mitigating background noise?  Dealing with wind (e.g. what accessories/tools do you use to cut noise)?

*As a gesture of reciprocity, here is a quick, basic tip for photography in the field.  If you want to photograph someone in the middle of the day (when the sun is blazing overhead)…just look for what’s called “open shade” lighting.  That’s basically shade that is just on the edge of bright sunlight–whether under a porch, just inside a doorway, or any other even shadow (watch out for shade under trees because this can produce patchy light).  Open shade blocks direct sun and keep the lighting nice and even.  Just place the person right inside the shade line, but facing the sunlight–this will provide that even light (and avoid really deep shadows).  Here’s the key: the bright sunlight is reflected off the ground to fill in the shaded subject, which creates excellent light.  Much better than trying to photograph people in blinding sunlight all the time.  As one blogger over at “Pioneer Woman Photography” writes, “Open Shade is Your Best Friend” (this link gives a pretty good rundown, including some tips about white balance).  When it comes to photography, simplicity goes a long way.

**Apologies to those of you photographically hip Savage Minds out there who already know about the wonders of open shade.  I tried.  Maybe next time.

Scanning

I spend too much time doing this. The dopamine hit one gets from finding something new is immediate and gratifying. I have my email, Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. each of which is sending me a steady stream of new links. (Follow our SavageMinds Twitter feed or Facebook account for the results of this time-wasting activity.) I check all of them throughout the day. Especially Twitter.

One of my favorite ways to browse all this in one place (excluding Google+ for now, but I’m sure that will change) is Flipboard for iOS. Google tried to buy Flipboard and when they failed made their own app called Currents. Currently Flipboard is still way ahead of the Google, as well as other competitors like Pulse, Zite, etc. (Here is a post from Lifehacker reviewing several of the options.)

To make the best use of Flipboard, you want to group your favorite Twitter sources into “lists” so that each list can have it’s own magazine on Flipboard. I haven’t been doing a great job of updating my various lists, but you can see mine here (or post your own in the comments.) You can do the same thing with Google Reader folders and Facebook “Friends Lists.”

But if you are in scanning mode, what do you do when you find something interesting to read? There are now a number of “read later” services, but my favorite is still Instapaper which gives you a nicely formatted offline reading experience on your smart phone or Kindle. Flipboard and many other apps have Instapaper support built-in. But this doesn’t work for everything. What if someone links to a book? Or a movie? Or an article which doesn’t work in Instapaper? Or perhaps it is just a website you want to save for later?

In that case, my favorite option is the social bookmarking service Pinboard.in. Pinboard can be set to archive your Twitter account and even automatically bookmark every link in your Twitter feed. But I prefer more selective control. For that there is an option to only bookmark “starred” tweets. This means that as I read Twitter I can “favorite” something and know it will be bookmarked in Pinboard. I can then return later and process the links accordingly. I will usually add books to my Amazon wishlist, movies to my RottenTomatoes “want to see” list, and articles to my Zotero list.

Browsing

Browsing is a more engaged and purposeful type of scanning. This is what I do when I’m doing research. There are really a couple of different activities I might be engaged in when I’m browsing. I might be actively searching online, in which case I’ll add finds to my Amazon wish list or Zotero, or perhaps save a website to Evernote (Pinboard can also archive websites offline, but I prefer Evernote because I can also save PDFs, and I can select which part of a webpage I wish to archive – it also works well on iOS.) I also get various TOC and Google Scholar Search alerts via email. But here I want to focus on another type of browsing which is the process of going through actual texts and figuring out what you want to do with them.

I used to use Sente for this, but increasingly I find it easier to simply save PDFs in a folder in my Dropbox account which seamlessly syncs with my favorite PDF reading application: GoodReader. It is much easier to sit on the couch with my iPad and quickly scan these PDFs than it is to do at my desktop. The articles I must read go in a “must read” folder. For books, I download sample book chapters to Kindle, and use the Kindle iPad app in the same way. The books I decide to read I then buy from Amazon. If the book isn’t available on Amazon (or anywhere else), I will scan the book in Google Books if I can, or sometimes the publisher has a sample chapter.

Increasingly many books are available online in PDF even if the publisher doesn’t officially make them available as texts. This happened with the music industry earlier, and I think academic publishers would do well to learn from the past by making their books available via legitimate services like Amazon and Apple. One interesting new option is 1dollarscan which will scan your books at a rate of $1 for 100 pages. The downside is that (for copyright reasons) they will then pulp the book after scanning it for you. For a cheap PDF of a book not currently available, one could purchase a cheap used copy online and send it to 1dollarscan. I haven’t tried this, but you might even be able to have the book sent to them directly.

Devouring

So you’ve finally got your articles in Instapaper, Kindle, and/or GoodReader and want to sit down with a cup of tea and engage in some more careful reading. Things still aren’t that simple. What if you want to take notes? While printed texts can all be dealt with in the same way: a highlighter and/or a pencil, electronic texts have different restrictions depending on the software and publisher. Instapaper lets you save articles you like directly to Evernote. GoodReader lets you highlight text and then email a summary of your highlights, which you can send to Evernote via your private Evernote email address. A more complicated scenario is when you have a PDF that doesn’t have text which can be selected. Then you either need to run it through OCR software on your computer, or use GoodReader’s other annotation tools which let you draw over the PDF. (I usually use the “box” tool and simply draw a box around the text I am interested in.) The annotated PDF can then be sent to Evernote, which will do it’s own OCR, allowing you to search the full-text of the PDF (assuming you have a “pro” account).

Kindle is more difficult. Kindle lets you make highlights (read this tutorial), but then you need to go to the webpage and copy those annotations back to your computer. There is no way to simply copy or email these annotations from the Kindle app. Because some publishers restrict how many annotations you are allowed to make on a single book, you might need to backup and delete some of your annotations before you can make additional highlights. For the tech savvy, there are also ways to crack the Kindle DRM and save the book you’ve bought as a PDF in GoodReader, where you will be free of such restrictions.

As I mentioned above, it is very easy to find oneself spending far too much time “scanning” and “browsing” and not nearly enough time actually “devouring” the books and articles that we have already decided to read. It is too easy to be distracted by the constant stream of incoming distractions. Research shows we are far worse at getting back to concentrating on the task at hand than we think we are. My solution for this has been to adopt the Pomodoro approach. This means you set a timer for 20 to 25 minutes during which you don’t do anything except read. When I started doing this I found myself itching to check Twitter after about ten minutes. Slowly, using this approach, I’ve re-trained myself to go for longer without seeking distractions. You then “reward” yourself with 5-10 min of scanning before doing another “Pomodoro.” I personally found Pomodoropro to be the best Pomodoro app for iOS. They don’t yet have an iPad version, but the iPhone version works just fine on the iPad.

That’s it for now. A year ago I wrote a similar post about “going paperless” but a lot has changed in a year. I imagine next year this will all look hopelessly out of date. If you have your own suggestions, or a more Android friendly version of some of the iOS apps I listed above, feel free to share them in the comments.

1. Photographs as notes/mnemonic devices. I use cameras all the time during fieldwork as a way to record all sorts of details—from the covers of newspapers to bus schedules and new graffiti. I often do this in conjunction with taking quick notes or “jottings” in a small notebook. Sometimes it works to write a few lines, and sometimes it’s a lot easier—and maybe more effective—to use a camera phone or small point and shoot to record something that I might otherwise forget. These kinds of photographs are really useful when I sit down at the end of the day and write up more detailed fieldnotes, and I find that they jog my memory pretty well. This way of using photography is a bit different, since I am often less concerned about making a technically “good” photograph (framing, exposure, etc) and more concerned with getting something recorded so I don’t forget about it. Of course, it’s always a good idea to get the best image possible, but the most important thing is getting that detail, bit of information, or idea secured so you can write about it later. I have a feeling that plenty of other ethnographers do something along these lines and I’d be interested to hear if and how they do so.

2. Photographs as social objects. I am really fascinated by this approach, and I have borrowed a lot from folks like Elizabeth Edwards and Arjun Appaduri with this particular method. Sure, it’s important to think about photographs based upon image content, but it’s also really fascinating to look at how photographs are social objects that pass through different networks of meaning. I explored this aspect of photography during my MA fieldwork in Oaxaca, when I asked research participants about their photographic collections and then used particular images as research prompts during interviews. This was amazingly interesting, since many of these personal collections illustrated all kinds of histories that do not exactly show up in more formal histories (by politicians, historians, anthropologists, etc). For this method I also brought down a few of the ethnographies that had been written about this pueblo, and used the photographs in those texts as starting prompts as well—that worked pretty well to get conversations going, and to talk about how the pueblo had changed since the 1950s and 1970s.

3. Portaits. This was another way I used photography during my MA research, and at some point I need to revisit these images and put them into some sort of final form (book, website?). Basically, at the end of each interview I asked people if they would allow me to take photographs of them, and many of them agreed. I tend to avoid directing people very much, and tried to give them photographs that they like. This is the really great part about digital photography: I could show people the images I’d taken immediately to see what they think. I would then run into town and get some prints made and hand those out during subsequent interviews and visits. It pays, of course, to follow up on these sorts of things—this is one way in which photography can be a sort of rapport-building tool. This is one way in which my photographs become social objects that start getting passed around (whether in print or digital form). They definitely have a lot of value for research participants, and I think they also have plenty of ethnographic value as well. I certainly do not think that these sorts of images should be seen simply as illustrations of ethnographic texts, but that’s just me. These kinds of images are best, in my view, when combined with captions that detail the moment the image was taken and other contextual information. Sure, there are times when photographs can stand alone, but I tend to prefer some direction/focus.

4. Place/space. I often use photography to document key places during the research process. This could be a plaza, a house, a road a landscape, etc. These kinds of images tend to be somewhat mid-range shots to distant shots. I started off in the landscape photography tradition, so I end up taking a lot of these kinds of photos. Much like the note-taking photography listed in #1 above, this type of photography can have many different uses. For my dissertation work I am working on a way to use photography as a tool to document how people think about and use particular places. Borrowing some ideas from geographers and anthropologists who employ “mobile methods,” the plan is to use photography to record key landmarks and places while walking with people through landscapes/places. These photographs will then be used during later interviews. I have a good amount of experience doing archaeological surveys, and I used a similar method to document sites and cultural landscapes. Walking through a particular site, especially with someone who has a close connection to a place, is very different from sitting in a room talking about that place. I am still working on how I am going to employ this method—and how I am going to write about it in grant proposals. But I think this particular use has a lot of potential, especially since the creation of meaning and place is a key question for my research.

This is just a rough sketch of some of the ways that I use photography, and I am more interested in a discussion about using this tool (and writing about it) than rehashing my own ideas. So if you use photography, and have written about how and why you use it, I hope you’ll post a response in the comments section. I definitely think that it’s about time for anthropologists to look into some different methods, and to rethink the standard methodological canon that we rely on. Yes, participant observation and written fieldnotes are foundational, but there is definitely room for exploring some other methods as well, especially since they can be useful in a very synergistic way. Anyway, I’m interested to hear what some of you think about this.

Eli Pariser tells us, not too surprisingly, that Google adapts to our needs, showing us stuff it thinks we are more likely to be interested in.

If you’re a foodie, says Jake Hubert, a Google spokesman, “over time, you’ll see more results for apple the fruit not for Apple the computer, and that’s based on your Web history.”

Which is fine, except that

in a effort to single out users for tailored recommendations or advertisements, personalization tends to sort people into categories that may limit their options. It is a system that cocoons users, diminishing the kind of exposure to opposing viewpoints necessary for a healthy democracy, says Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and the author of “You Are Not a Gadget.”

“People tend to get into this echo chamber where more and more of what they see conforms to the idea of who some software thinks they are — like a Nascar dad who likes samurai swords,” Mr. Lanier says. “You start to become more and more like the image of you because that is what you are seeing.”

Perhaps more troubling, from Lehrer’s piece, is a recent study by U of Chicago sociologist James Evans

in which he analyzed 34 million academic articles published in the last 50 years. Though the digitization of journals has made it far easier to find this information—most articles are now accessible online—Mr. Evans found that digitization also coincided with a narrowing of citations. Since search engines rank highly cited articles first, scholars tend to focus on them, which leads to the neglect of more obscure research, even when it is relevant.

These concerns are nothing new. People have been writing about homophily for some time. But the rise of social networking, and its integration into how we read the newspaper or search the web, has made more people aware of the issue.

I know I am not a typical user of these technologies, but not having researched the issue in depth I can only draw from my own experience. What I’ve found is that while my online world is more insulated than ever before from your typical FOX News viewer, I encounter a much broader range of similar-but-different views online than I ever did before. Through blogging, Twitter, and Facebook, I’m much more likely to be exposed to people who share similar fears and concerns, but have a different way of looking at those issues. And since there is a broad similarity, I am much less likely to dismiss those views and much more likely to actively engage with those people than I would if I was forced to read the New York Post every day. In a sense then, homophily actually expands the range of views and opinions I interact with seriously rather than contracting them.

At the same time, however, I find good reasons to worry about the effects of these technologies on academic research. For one thing, Google and Facebook’s algorithms are trade secrets. That means that we don’t really know why we are being shown one search result rather than another. Another concern is that it is all too easy to see homophily as a problem which affects other people, not ourselves. But how can we know for sure? It is easy enough to be swept along by inertia, forgetting that we might need to make a special effort to get out of our narrow comfort range (or what Google/Facebook thinks our comfort range might be) when conducting research.

But more than anything else, I think we are still ignorant to the extent to which our online experience is being shaped by these algorithms. I was surprised to learn, from this interview with Pariser, just how much Facebook social engineers each user’s online interactions:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] Now, how in general does Facebook work to keep us on Facebook?

ELI PARISER: For example, they know that if you’re a 30-something woman and you see that your female friends have uploaded pictures of themselves, you’re likely to upload a picture of yourself in the next month. And they know that if you do that, that your male friends are very likely to comment on that picture, and they know that if your male friends comment on that picture, they’re likely to stay on Facebook for months to come.

And so, what Facebook does, according to one person I talked to there, is they actually kind of run that in reverse. They say, oh, this guy looks like he’s kind of getting bored of Facebook. Let’s find one of his friends, show her pictures of her friends that they’ve uploaded so that she uploads a photo so that he comments on it so that he stays on Facebook more.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Diabolical!

Of course, most of us are more likely to use Google Scholar than Facebook when doing academic research, but that is changing, and sites like Mendeley.com and Academia.edu seem eager to turn academic research into more of a Facebook-like experience. We should at least be aware of the issues this might raise if they succeed and begin thinking about how we could make the best use of such tools without falling into some of the traps mentioned above.

I read two different ethnographies this past semester that put photography to use in some very different ways.  One was Laughter Out of Place by Donna M. Goldstein.  She made the editorial choice to obscure the faces of her research participants.  This results in dark, ominous images throughout the text that have a somewhat unsettling feel.  Interestingly, Goldstein consciously decided to keep her subjects anonymous even though they were seemingly open to having their portraits in her book:

While all of the people I came to know were enthusiastic about the prospect of having their photographs appear in a published book, I have chosen to fog their expressive and aesthetically pleasing faces to ensure their personal security (Goldstein 2003:2).

Goldstein’s decisions were anything but simple.   Her research participants were dealing with very real personal dangers in many cases, so the question of anonymity is absolutely critical.  Still, considering the fact that her research subjects expected to be pictured in her publication, did she make the right call?  When should the wishes of people be set aside in the name of security and safety?  Are anthropologists the ones who should make these sorts of decisions?  Or should these choices be made, and agreed upon, in a collaborative manner?  Are there cases in which ethnographers have to make the command decision and do what they think is best?

These are incredibly complex questions, and there isn’t some simple rubric that can give us the answers we need. Again, I am not denying the basic reasoning behind Goldstein’s actions, let alone the fact that such decisions are immensely complex. I understand the reasons why ethnographers keep names and places anonymous. Yet I wonder if this technique is always the right path. Mostly, this has me thinking about the ultimate use and purpose of ethnographic texts. Maybe, in some cases and for some purposes, obscuring faces and effacing names is definitely the best decision. Goldstein argues for the need to give voice, and to represent the real lives of the people she knows so intimately. But what power do they have, ultimately, when they no longer have names or faces? Are these women really speaking through this text, or have they been silenced in the name of IRBs, liability, and ethical decisions? What’s the use of all of the detail, context, and discussions about structural power if people might not even recognize their own stories?

The other photographically-inclined ethnography I read this past semester was Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg’s Righteous Dopefiend, which utilizes a pretty different tactic than Laughter Out of Place.  The faces of research subjects are prominently displayed, yet their names are kept anonymous.  This, despite the fact that Bourgois and Schonberg’s research subjects “gave Jeff permission to photograph and encouraged is to use their real names when they signed the bureaucratic informed consent documents” (2009:9).  This editorial/photographic tactic allows for readers to witness the brutal lives of Bourgois and Schonberg’s research subjects, yet still provides a measure of anonymity and protection.  Is this method more effective than what Goldstein employed?  Does it all just depend on the situation?  Again, who makes the final call in this case, the subjects of the ethnographers/photographers?

There are, of course, ways of using photography that sidesteps these issues.  Places, events, and situations can be photographs in ways that capture details yet keep people relatively anonymous.  I have hundreds of images that are basically details, like this one:

I end up taking a lot of images similar to this, and I use them mostly as part of a note-taking process.  I use them to remember situations, conversations, and interactions.  Photographs–at least for me–are a really useful way to make visual reminders, and they are tremendously helpful for sparking my memory.  But images like this are only fragments, details of lives and moments rather than whole stories. And they certainly aren’t the kinds of images that appeal to people I have met and worked with during previous field experiences.  By far, what people appreciate and find the most fascinating are portraits–of family, friends, etc.  So I end up taking a lot of pictures of people, but I generally don’t circulate those images beyond the communities themselves.

This brings up another interesting issue.  My guess would be that Bourgois & Schonberg, along with Goldstein, gave their research participants copies of images they took while working in the field.  I do this all the time as well.  So there are some different levels of media production happening during fieldwork–this means that the publication of  a final ethnographic text is by no means the limit of media production that takes place during the ethnographic process.  There is a whole layer of informal image  production and exchange that occurs among ethnographers and the people they work with.  Long after anthropologists leave, these images will remain tucked away in notebooks, albums, drawers, and stored on digital devices.  Photographs are, as Elizabeth Edwards argues, all about “relationships made visible” (2006:33).  They are tangible reminders of interactions, agreements, conversations, and collaborations.  Photographs are definitely illustrative of the collaborations and long-term social relationships/bonds that are built between ethnographers and research participants.

But these bonds and relationships are not always all that prominent in final ethnographic texts.  So there is a kind of disconnect that occurs between actual fieldwork and the final publication of ethnographies–maybe because these texts are often written, edited, and produced far from field sites and research communities.  At this point, the question I have isn’t whether or not to take pictures of people that show their faces and reveal their identities–I do this all the time.  The question is when those faces should be included in final ethnographic publications, and when they should be left out.  Ethnographies are clearly produced for certain audiences–and they are not necessarily made for the research communities themselves.  We all know this.  This is, I think, one reason why ethnographers often decide to keep subjects hidden and anonymous.  Maybe.

However, if the production of photographs is the result of established agreements and relationships between ethnographers and participants, what gets lost when people are made anonymous in final publications?  Interestingly, while research communities are hidden and “protected,” the researchers themselves are prominently displayed and identified in final texts.  To me, there is something worth paying attention to here.  Ethnographies are supposed to be about the communities themselves (theoretically), but what purposes do they really serve?  If their pages are filled with nameless, faceless, hidden people, what do they have to do with the lives of the people who took the time to work with ethnographers?  I wonder, at this point, what a more collaborative ethnography would look like.  How would ethnographic texts look if they were designed–at least in part–to appeal to the needs and meanings of the research communities themselves?  Would participants choose to keep their identities hidden, or would they want to be prominently displayed–names, pictures and all–alongside the main “author” of the text?  Definitely something to think about.

References

Bourgois, Philippe and Jeffrey Schonberg
2009  Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Edwards, Elizabeth
2006  Photographs and the Sound of History. Visual Anthropology Review, Volume 21(1/2):27-46.

Goldstein, Donna
2003  Laughter out of Place: Race, Class, Violence and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown.

Margaret Mead once said that anthropology is a “discipline of words” (Mead 2003), and I think in many ways this is still true today.  Sure, American Anthropologist now has a section devoted to visual anthropology, and there are other great journals like Visual Anthropology Review that focus specifically on the use of still photography and other visual methods.  However, when it comes to the main canon of ethnographic methods, discussions of photography are conspicuously absent.  The methods courses that I have taken, and the standard methodological textbooks and articles that I have been exposed to, generally do not mention much about photography or other visual methods*.  They talk about writing proposals, designing research plans, sampling strategies, interview methods, participant observation, and so on.  Rarely are cameras mentioned, yet, ironically, photographs continue to crop up in ethnography after ethnography.  Clearly, most anthropologists bring cameras of some sort to the field, but for some reason they don’t talk much about them.

So what’s with the silence?  In some cases, it might be because some anthropologists and ethnographers see photographs and other visual materials as less objective or scientific than, say, fieldnotes.  And this is a pretty old debate in anthropology, one that has gone through a series of concatenations.  These debates about truth and representation are pretty fascinating since when photography was invented it was–at least in some circles–seen as the ultimate technological arbiter or truth.  This battle between words and images continues today.  From my experience in anthropology, it seems pretty clear that words reign supreme for the most part, despite the long history of engagement that the discipline has with visual methods.  This is a curious and fascinating situation–especially for someone who is in the thick of writing grant proposals, which require plenty of tactical choices when it comes to methods.  Are words more reliable than images?  Are they less subjective?

Granted, the photographic process is highly selective.  In fact, that’s what photography is all about: making good, effective images is very much a matter of deciding what should be including in the frame and what should be left out.  Photography is, after all, grabbing fragments from oceans of chaotic information.  Probably one of the biggest mistakes that beginning photographers make is that they put far too much in the frame.  Lens choice, angle, lighting, timing, shutter speed, and f-stop selection are all part of this calculus of composition and exclusion.  Clearly, there are a lot of editorial choices that go into making photographs.  During the observation of a particular situation or event, a photographer is always selecting small bits and pieces of reality to focus on and capture.  Life moves, so you grab what you can with the camera as it passes by.  That’s just how things work–there is no way to completely capture an entire situation, ever.  Perspective, choice, timing, and the limits of photographic equipment always guarantee one thing: it’s only possible to capture fragmented, partial realities.  That shouldn’t be a shocking realization.  So is photography simply too subjective for use in anthropology?  Are words–and fieldnotes–more reliable, accurate, and stable?

Imagine you’re doing participant observation and you’re taking fieldnotes.  You’re in a public plaza filled with 50 people, and you have your notebook and pencil at the ready.  Your goal is to capture the situation.  There is a flurry of activity all around you, and you frantically jot down as many details as you can.  Participants are engaged in numerous conversations, but you can only hear bits and pieces of those that are close by.  Your perspective, which is anything but omniscient, is partial–you can’t see exactly what everyone is doing.  Later, you will take these rapid notes and expand them in more fully developed fieldnotes.  This is pretty standard practice for taking fieldnotes.  This is what “doing ethnography” is all about.  This is the ground floor of ethnographic data collection that results, eventually, in finished ethnographic texts.  I think it’s pretty safe to say that fieldnotes–and writing in general–take precedence in the production of ethnographic authority.  This is the methodological foundation of ethnography.

Yet, there literally endless editorial choices that go into taking fieldnotes, much like there are choices that go into taking pictures.  The decision to focus on one particular event or interaction is also very much about excluding other possibilities.  There are always choices involved in any observational process, whether it be note-taking, photographing, recording audio, or filming.  There is no way to capture the entirety of any human interaction, even if you have a multi-million dollar light, sound, and film crew at your disposal.  Not gonna happen.  Ok, you might be asking, so what does this all mean?

My point here is not to go down the rabbit hole of “truth” and attempt to argue that either photographs or words are somehow more truthful, accurate, or reliable.  That’s not where I am going, at all.  Each method has its positives, of course.  What I am saying is this: if ethnographers use cameras all the time (whether they are using iPhones or $5000 SLRs), it might be a good idea to rethink how and why they use them.  Simply avoiding the discussion doesn’t really cut it.  Now, rethinking the use of photography doesn’t mean that every ethnographer needs to become a master photographer overnight, and it doesn’t mean that using photography needs to be turned into some overcomplicated methodological nightmare.  It simply means paying attention to how and why photography is used as part of the larger ethnographic process, from preliminary note-taking to the production of finished articles and books.

From my perspective, it just makes sense to open up the discussion about the ways in which we use photography in anthropological fieldwork, rather than making uncritical assumptions and just putting pictures in books and articles.  Photography is another tool, and it might be beneficial to treat is as such.  This isn’t a discussion that only applies to visual anthropologists, since pretty much every anthropologist uses photography in some form or another.  The use of any medium for data collection, analysis, and presentation–whether paper and pencil, laptop, or camera–has its limitations and possibilities.

Photography, in the end, isn’t any more or less subjective than taking fieldnotes.  It has its own benefits and drawbacks, and to me it makes sense to add discussions about using cameras–as a primary component of anthropological research–to our general methodological conversations.  It would be even better to incorporate the use of different forms of media into our overall disciplinary training and teaching.   I know this is happening in certain cases, but I think there is considerable room for rethinking not only how we put photography to use, but other forms of media as well.  Anthropologists are producers of media, after all, and while we spend a lot of time exploring how and why we use words, for some reason we often overlook all of the images and photographs we happen to make along the way.

In an attempt to continue this conversation, my next post here will be about anonymity in ethnographic photography.  Should we keep identities hidden and anonymous at all costs?  Are there times when it’s best to show faces and reveal identities?  Who should make these decisions?  This is definitely a subject that covers some pretty tricky ethical territory, so I will be interested to see what some of you have to say.  Until then.

*Yes, there are several books that talk about visual methods.  For example, check out the work of Sara Pink, Paul Hockings, Fadwa El Guindi, and Gillian Rose, among others.

References

Mead, Margaret.  2003[1974].  Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words.  In Principles of Visual Anthropology, 3rd Edition.  Paul Hockings, ed.  Pp. 3-10.  New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

You’ve got several options, 1) write a book review, tearing apart the author for poor research, 2) kindly fold in a gentle critique into your future writing, or 3) contact the author with the goal of establishing a collaboration. Scholars deal with appearances of theoretical mistakes, oversights and overstatements, or malum prohibitum, all the time. It is our engagement with what we perceive as disciplinarily not accurate in generative and creative ways that builds theory and nudges the future of the discipline. This is theory building and this is what we do.

But what is our professional responsibility to malum in se, claims that are factually wrong? I am talking about the very quotidian error when a writer notes the wrong dates for events and misnames a person. I am also talking about the questionable representation of reality in those necessarily interpretive instances, like when a practice first began, or by whom, or what was the dominant influence behind the emergence of that practice. For example, synchronic work from a diachronic perspective is always somewhat limited. Such historiographical debates are generative. My point is that errors run a spectrum from the incontrovertible to malum prohibitum—from my perspective it is not as right as it could be. Again, these debates are what we do.

As anthropologists, we are going to always be able to critique most other even softer sciences for their methodological inadequacies. As I come in contact with more work in cultural, textual, media, and other hermeneutical studies I entrench more into empiricism and pragmatism. The anthropology of emergence, I think, is at its best when it is focused first on description. These other disciplines often skip that part and jump right into theory; making factual errors in the process. For those of us doing the rigorous movement through our data and the lives of our subjects identifying malum in se in this work is easy. But what to do?

I agree with one of my mentors, Tom Boellstorff, who is adamant that budding anthropologists studying related areas be collegial. He chides us to not get into the seductive trap of trying to make a career out of denouncing our colleagues. I’ve taken a look at the anthropologists researching one of my major foci, the internet, and I can count them with one hand. With and not against these colleagues I will attempt to first accurately describe and secondly carefully theorize this emergent culture. Thus I am going with option 3 and contacting the dead wrong scholar and future collaborator.

First a brief backstory: from 1998-2000, I attended urban planning graduate school. Halfway through, I realized I was far more interested in analyzing cities than planning them, especially because (at that point anyway) in NYC “planning” often meant little more than manufacturing windfall profits for developers. So I headed off to the CUNY Graduate Center to work with their flock of urbanists.

Flashing forward to 2003: my dissertation research begins. The idea is for me to investigate the process by which the “business agenda” comes to be. Basically, what I am trying to do here is use ethnography to explore what happens in the gap between the functional requirements of capitalist urbanization (as laid out by Harvey, Castells, Molotch and Logan, etc. etc.) and the construction of an actual elite agenda in a specific historical, cultural, and geographical context. My focus is on the public spaces of development policy formation, such as conferences and other professional meetings, city council hearings, etc., but also on more informal mechanisms. For the latter, I draw on the network of contacts I began developing in graduate school, and I soon find out that the development policy world in NYC is pretty small and interlinked (I had an excel spreadsheet with just a couple of hundred names on it). I begin talking to people, attending those conferences, interviewing, and so on.

As I do so, I quickly realize three things. First, the Bloomberg administration is up to something different than I expect, given the standard shape of neoliberal urban governance in NYC or elsewhere. The administration is engaging in citywide urban planning, moving away from the use of indiscriminate tax subsidies, and perhaps most interestingly pulling a lot of new people into City Hall. Not surprisingly, given the new Mayor’s background in business, this includes several people from finance and other private sector industries. Less expected is the hiring of a number of very well-respected planning and policy professionals to staff the top levels of the Bloomberg administration’s development and planning agencies. Such people had largely been excluded from previous administration in favor of folks drawn from the real estate industry or from the murky world of NYC’s public-private development agencies (which basically amounts to the same thing). Bloomberg’s City Hall is becoming a hotbed corporate and professional technocracy.

Second, the Mayor’s business background (along with that of the other private sector people he was bringing into government) actually seems to matter in substantive ways. Economic development officials are telling the city council about the thorough rebranding campaign underway; city officials are referring to companies as “clients”; City Hall was being physically remodeled along the lines the Mayor had used in his private company, Bloomberg LLP; and perhaps most remarkably, the Mayor is referring to NYC as a “luxury product.” Importing private-sector logic into government is nothing new, in NYC or elsewhere, but now it is being done by people who can (and do!) credibly claim to be running the city like a private company.

Third, everybody in the development and policy world is focused on the far west side of Manhattan. Everybody. Nobody wants to talk about the business agenda formation; they want to talk about the Hudson Yards (the plan proposed for the area). The Bloomberg administration is joining NYC2012 (the city’s private Olympic bid organization), the Group of 35 (an elite commission charged with stimulating office development in NYC), the New York Jets, and a number of other planning and development groups in targeting the area to the west of Times Square and Penn Station for redevelopment. And as it turned out, graduate school classmates of mine are involved in the growing conflict over far west side redevelopment in a number of ways–some working for city agencies, others working for community organizations that oppose the plan as currently formulated.

This was a key point in my research; suddenly focusing on the process of business agenda formulation seemed a bit boring, especially since I had a full-scale development battle emerging in front of me! I also had this interesting phenomenon of the ex-CEO mayor actually running the city as a business (rather than just for business), which seemed to have some unpredictable consequences (like a willingness to raise taxes and hire egghead professors and policy professionals and respect their expertise). Finally, I had all these professionals–city planners, professors, public health experts, markets, educational experts, former management consultants, etc.–talking about the new spirit of professionalism and competence in City Hall, and the new excitement about public service that they and their peers were feeling.

Realizing all this, I began to split my research onto two tracks. First, I began investigating the early years of the Bloomberg administration, i.e. late 2001 to mid-2003, using interviews with officials, government documents, transcripts of administration testimony to the city council, and various secondary sources. Second, I threw myself into the conflict over the far west side of Manhattan, attending every community meeting, rally, city council hearing, conference, and official planning meeting I could find, and redirecting my interviewing towards those engaged in the conflict. I’ll write a bit more about the second, more ethnographic of these two tracks next time.

INPUT: If you aren’t starting with a digital document from JSTOR, you need to scan your paper. My school has a fancy photocopy machine which can chew up an article and spit out a nice small PDF file, but if you don’t have access to that you can get yourself a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 (or S1500M for the Mac) which can do the same thing. If you have a smartphone with a good camera you can also simply take a snapshot and use software like JotNot to convert those photos to something resembling a scanned document.

STORAGE: Once you’ve scanned something or downloaded it from the web, what do you do with it? Personally I am a big fan of Evernote which will do OCR on your (English) image and PDF files and which lets you do fulltext search on your entire library. It also can sync between your computer and mobile apps. But for academic texts I need structured metadata. I need to be able to pull out citations and insert them in my bibliography, etc. For that I use Sente. The iPad version of Sente pro finally came out and it is amazing. (See my review of the free version.) Unfortunately, Sente and Evernote still aren’t enough. I have some huge PDF files which aren’t handled well by either app so I also depend on Dropbox to sync those files across computers. And while all of these options have the ability to share with others, I find the easiest way to share files online is with Google Docs so I also use that, especially for teaching.

READING/ANNOTATING: Sente is pretty good for annotation, and I’m sure it will get better, but my favorite way to read PDFs right now is with iAnnotate for the iPad. I find the reading experience nicer than Sente which currently only shows one page at a time. For academic reading it is nice to be able to quickly scan whole paragraphs which cross page boundaries. And for documents where text is not “selectable” (such as docs I’ve scanned myself but not OCR’d) I like iAnnotate’s ability to add little “stamps” in the margins, such as a check mark, exclamation point, or question mark. When done both Sente and iAnnotate have the ability to export selected text and notes along with the marked up PDF. I email these to Evernote. (The fact that Sente syncs its annotations back to the desktop means you don’t have to do this step if you just use Sente.)

Not everything is on PDF. More and more academic texts are now available on Amazon’s Kindle and other ebook formats. (Although sometimes the pricing is ridiculously high. Academic books from UK publishers can cost over eighty dollars as an ebook!) What I like about Kindle is the ability to easily access one’s annotations online via the Amazon web interface. That and the fact that my annotations are synced between all my various devices. (I don’t have a Kindle, but I use the Kindle software on my iOS devices and my desktop.) I have not found anything as useful in other ebook software. One problem, however, is that Kindle books don’t give you proper page numbers. You can just cite it as an electronic text as the APA recommends, or you can do a full text search for the material on Google Books or Amazon book search to see the page number.

NOTE TAKING/PROOFREADING: One of the last redoubts for paper in my workflow has been those few places where pen on paper just seems to work best: taking notes during a talk or marking up text while proofreading. But recently I found something which makes it possible for me to do this on my iPad without printing out: Note Taker HD. The trick is that it lets you “write” in a special writing box. This allows you to write large letters with your finger, but have it appear small on the page. You can also switch to a standard writing mode where you can mark up the page directly. You can either write on a blank piece of paper or you can import a PDF, such as a PDF of the paper you are working on or a student’s paper you need to correct. It may not be quite as good as pen and paper, but it works well enough for me that I’ve stopped printing things out. I’ve tried several similar apps, but I find Note Taker HD to be the best. However, for taking notes at lectures or while interviewing people it is also worth mentioning SoundNote which can record audio as you type notes. Afterwards you can then lookup the relevant audio by clicking on the word you were typing when it was recorded—a little like how Livescribe works.

With these tools I’m able to avoid using paper nearly eighty percent of the time. The waste generated creating all these electronic devices may not be any better for the environment than cutting down trees, but keeping everything electronic means it is all searchable and I’m less likely to loose it. And now that so much data is stored on the cloud, it also means I can access my library and my notes from just about anywhere that has web access. As someone who travels between at least three countries every year, I like the idea of having most of my stuff stored in the cloud. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to join the Cult of Less but it is an idea that appeals to me. More importantly, in 2010 it is finally within the realm of the possible.