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Posted by TNDY 4010 Inductive Inquiry / IS366a Qualitative Methods - Ben Schooley
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Reaction to Mariann De Laet guest lecture:
I was very interested in Professor De Laet’s presentation. While I am interested in Astronomy, I was more interested in the fine line that she is walking as a “participant- observer” in the process of watching the project of building the huge telescope. I am certain that there are or will be frequent times when the desire to be an independent observer will be challenged by the desire to help the opponents see the benefits of the project. I do not see this as being a bad thing; in fact, it might be much easier to be able to disclose one’s biases and predispositions instead of pretending that you are a paragon of independence.
After the lecture I asked Professor De Laet how the students at Harvey Mudd College have changed, since she has been there. Her response surprised me. She said that some of the students who came in with “excitement” seem to lose that as time goes on. This is a very sad comment, especially from a school that is the best in preparing students for a lifetime of research and investigation. Hopefully something can be done to encourage the creativity and the excitement and wonder for the Harvey Mudd students.
Although I did not attend last week's class I don't think I should be excluded from participating in this week's blogs posting... And thanks to Gudiel, who took very diligent notes (as he knew some people may not be able to make it on the busiest travel day of the year), I feel confident I can contribute something beneficial to the group as a whole. And if I couldn't contribute to the topics discussed during class, I would simply discuss something inane regarding my trip to NYC or of the two books I read on the plane (or in the airport thanks to holiday delays).
Anyway, onto my second tangent (which is more subtangent really), Gudiel detailed how Marianne De Laet spoke about the ‘shady’ side of narratives and the difficulty in assessing a narratives value in the cycle of knowledge. Last week, Tomomi emailed me a discussion she had with Daniel during class. I told her that as a historian, she is responsible for what gets written into history, and asked her if she could manipulate her account (or conversation) with Daniel so that I was no longer in the picture (kind of like how Moses was stricken from the history books by Egypt, or so legend goes). But Tomomi, quite the ethical historian told me it would be impossible for her to manipulate facts in such a way… Then I thought, although Steven Hawking believes that it is not possible to travel back in time (for no other reason that we haven’t met any time travelers thus far), writing history is kind of like going back in time, although probably less exciting.
And now for my next tangent (or subtangent)…
I love to squeeze a piece of (meaning all) personal experience into my blogging and if I haven’t done it with the Tomomi story, maybe my next one will be better. I said if I had nothing else to go on, I would discuss my trip to NYC, or maybe one of the books I read on the way to and fro, but ironically enough, one of the books I read to and during my week in NYC is quite fitting for this assignment. During my delay in Ontario International Airport I began reading Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer.
Jon Krakauer is by far one of my favorite writers and Into Thin Air is the harrowing account of the 1996 Everest Expedition that took the lives of several experienced and intermediate mountaineers. He first published his tell-all account in a magazine article for Outsider and received harsh criticism by individuals close to those who lost their lives as well as independent critics. Although I did not read the reviews for the book, nor the magazine article, I found it difficult to read Into Thin Air as anything but objective. Of course the story cannot be completely objective because Jon was one of the individuals participating in the expedition and not some independent researcher, but I greatly believe that his account offers an unbiased account as seen through his eyes. Will history remember his account as history? I think so.
And by the way, there is a great documentary being shown on discovery about the expedition that took place ten years later (this year). Check out http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/everestbeyond/everestbeyond if you're interested. And I strongly recommend the two other books Jon has written by Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven and Into the Wild, both of which are non-personal accounts of nonfiction.
Giant Telescope and Ethnographic, Anthropological Approaches of Professor Marianne De Laet’s Lecture
Professor of Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society Marianne De Laet lectured us on the fascinating Anthropological look at the Giant Telescope Building project on Wednesday, November 22, 2006. Her research focuses on the interaction between technological tool of building a giant telescope and people surrounding the project. Her approach definitely resembles Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of A New Machine that we have read in our class. Instead of starting to lecture on her project, she started asking about our own interest which she diligently took notes. After the introduction of everyone in the classroom, she had commented on how it is interesting to see how each person responds and what kind of things each person includes in their own introduction.
She have started the discussion of her research that looks at the process of how one giant telescope project is coming together. She started with a project start of having an idea of what the scientists and engineers are wanting to make, “Giant Telescope.” She at first started to wonder why anyone would want a huge telescope. She was thinking it was just one of the American tendency to think that everything big is great or something. It is also true that there are those who are technocrats who would want any technological advancement in the US that after completing of the world adventure of discovery, it will sound a great idea for them to further expand its domain into the outer space. Who knows what the scientists will make a new discovery that can lead to advancement of the study of astronomy. On the other hand, there are also people who may see such advancement and using the government budgets and resources obsolete and waste of money.
So the main objective of these scientists and engineers is to create the “giant telescope.” After deciding their main goal, the scientists and engineers had discussed what they need to build such a “giant telescope.” They came up with a budget and plan for the building of such telescope and observatory that came out as a green book. She sees this budget-planning book as a cultural product of these scientists and engineers. Somehow, Prof. De Laet was skeptical of such project existing which she at first wondered who the hell would want such thing as giant telescope. However, after a while being with these enthusiastic scientists and engineers, she became more enthusiastic about such a project to build what they have been dreaming of.
However, the planned budget came out as billion dollars. She was wondering why anyone would want to spend such astronomically impossible to perceive kind of budget for a giant telescope. Some of our students also asked question of what kind of things would cost that much. However, it also includes the research fees by the scientists and the engineers other than getting such space, building materials and so on to make it possible to build such a thing. The Observatory can also the latest available cutting-edge equipments with computers and astronomical research equipments that can enable various researches and intellectual advancements.
Prof. De Laet also talked about local resistance to build them either in Hawaiian or Chilean mountain areas. The local resistances are especially large in Hawaii. The US-Chilean relation with the CIA involvement in the coup instigation attempt and assassination of Salvatore Allende during the 70s is also famous (“CIA acknowledges involvement in Allende's overthrow, Pinochet's rise.” Available at http://archives.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/americas/09/19/us.cia.chile.ap/, “CHILE: 16,000 SECRET U.S. DOCUMENTS DECLASSIFIED.” Available at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20001113/). Prof. De Laet suggests that it is usual to have such political issues come up anyways in terms of such projects. Some students asked her what to do in terms of such situation arises. She have told us that she cannot be too political or too extreme in terms of as a observer, it is important to stick to the primary focus of her own research topic which is looking at the interaction between the scientists and engineers and the project. Still it is good to be aware that there are some issues that can come up as obstacles on the way to accomplish such project since it will be dangerous to build important facilities in dangerous or difficult areas for the scientists to work on major discoveries.
It can get overwhelming when I also notice the cost of such technological products. Last year, I went to see an air show in Pt. Mugu that its theme was on Naval Aviation. I was amazed by the fast moving newly revised aircraft Super Hornet F-18 which each of them costs $60 million dollars (“F/A-18 Hornet-Military Aircraft.” Available at http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/f-18.htm. B-2 Spirit Bomber that I witnessed couple of years ago (before even September 11th Attack occurred) costs $2.1 billion each (“B-2 Spirit-United States Nuclear Forces.” Available at http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/bomber/b-2.htm). I always get a mixed feeling of how I am amazed to see such high tech innovative weapons that is fascinating while I am also aware that there will be environmental consequences, the health issues of service personnel, as well as local resistances.
Write a reaction to Mariann De Laet's guest lecture.
Astronomy is a brain new area to me. Instead of explaining profound and intricate astronomy, Professor De Laet employs the intriguing topic – telescope in order to present her interviewing stories. In actual fact telescope is easier to be associated with astronomy. However, most people simply connect telescope to observing varying sorts of starts in the universe, but rarely link it to other areas such as ethnography. Audiences are always like fancy, interesting, touching stories. Indeed, everyone has his or her own stories in the course of his or her lives. Maybe people are likely to be touched because of watching a plot of a movie. However, they rarely know that they also play roles in a movie – our life. If people become sensitive, every tiny thing may become a part of a move tomorrow.
The difficulty of ethnography may come from that not every person is able to express his or her stories or emotion freely and easily. A telescope itself not merely refers to solving a problem, but has multiple motivations. Through the notion of telescope, we are able to observe interesting things, such as culture differences, from “long” distance. The essence of telescope is to observe long-distance things, which may include people, places, objects, or our social network.
What I also found fascinating in her story was the willingness to allow the research to guide the end result as opposed to following a deductive format. People must be willing to be flexible and almost follow the data and let it take you where it shall. This demonstrates that someone must be open and willing to allow data to take the researcher to an unspecified destination. I can also imagine that this can be frustrating, conducting hours and weeks of research without necessarily knowing where it will lead, can be frightening.
By hearing her story about Caltech moving towards developing a new optical telescope, I know that it could not be justly documented through surveys or numbers. Again, it reinforces my belief that because I work with students in public school settings, quantitative data may not always accurately present people, situations or scenarios in an adequate format and thus it needs to be supplemented by other tools.
One thing she stated is that stories have the ability to tell us things about the world we live in and bring them to life. In addition, these stories need to be put in a framework that sets parameters based on the audience. Furthermore, she also stated something I did not consider in the past, which is that the stories can also be used in a negative fashion by people with specific agendas. Narratives and research can be manipulated to suit one’s needs.
Lastly, the ethical question surfaced. What role does the researcher have when conducting research? Ethical questions and issues will always present themselves and as academics we must be responsible and strive to view things from different perspectives and keep that we’re working with people who deserve respect and confidentiality.
Professor De Laet’s lecture was very interesting. She explained the purpose of studying anthropology. She said that the objective of this subject is to make student think not only what they will accomplish in the future but want them to think about the culture differences. We want to implement: knowledge, induction and insight. We don’t respect something at face value. That is why the social sciences are trying to find out how we create knowledge: quantitative and qualitative are parts that we make knowledge.
She also talked about the Telescope that Caltech is trying to create. Even though they try to tell story of the telescope that is very slow in coming, how important it is to Caltech once the telescope is created matters. It shows the science in the making: studying about something is being made. She concluded the lecture by saying that anthropologists make history of the present while historians make story of the past.
Response to Marianne De Laet
I think it is interesting that Marianne discussed the negatives of qualitative work.
When compared to quantitative research, often times qualitative research does not
hold up to indisputable numbers and statistics. However, we all know there are meanings and messages masked in numerical data that qualitative work can explore more than quantitative research. However, it was interesting to hear how Marianne warned of the events in which first hand accounts can end up in the hands of unskilled researchers who will skew the research. According to Marianne, it is essential to tell the story in such a way that people learn something new and discover something about themselves. With such powerful knowledge, it is imperative not to represent the stories accurately.
Since we live in a society and interacting with many people everyday, I think almost any research study is inevitably influenced by human behavior, culture, polictics and so on, therefore anthropologic perspective is important for us as researchers to pay attention to, even if we don't end up choosing it as the research method for a specific study. On the other hand, anthropologic studies used in science field such as the telescope project Professor De Laet described also needs solid scientific foundation, such as in this case, the scientific motivations of building such a telescope on top of mountains, the altitude of the mountains, the best location, the power usage, the maintanance, the observation methods, the recording methods, analytic methods, and so on. With these sounding scientific facts, anthropologic researchers in science field could communicate such information to the community that is involved into the project, and collect the community's reaction and perspectives to help scientists in the design and implementation of the project, rather than merely studying the community as it is, regardless of the existing of understanding of the project.
Reaction to Dr. Marianne De Laet guest lecture.
Dr. De Laet was beaming with joy since she appears to be doing what she loves to do. As an anthropologist and an ethnographer researcher, she is happy to be working with her tribe (you know those scientists and engineers at Harvey Mudd College) and to have her fieldwork right at home. First, I want to get one thing out of the way, I liked her “idears”, must be an east coast accent or dialect or whatever you would like to call it. Now, we can get on with the meat of the conversation (Claremont Conversation). Dr. Laet’s interest in knowledge making and gaining new insight seems to make a task worth taking.
I enjoyed listening to her presentation about the new 30-meter telescope that Cal Tech is working on. It was interesting to notice the various aspects of the project takings, and how all of these people from various disciplines were attaching themselves to this thing. This was particularly useful after reading the Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder.
To write the qualitative representation of the study is where the challenge lies. In the “monograph,” getting the story out in a narrative that makes it a worthwhile read is what the readers (audience) will be looking forward to. I personally will be very interested in reading about the location factor, and how a decision came about. Although the write up will represent a true artifact (non-fiction), the style might be of a fiction in nature. Hence, the narrative of Tracy Kidder’s. The overall communication of story of the project still holds a scientific value regardless of the presentation. I look forward to reading Dr. De Laet’s monograph whenever it comes out (no pressure).
I’ve always had a vision of anthropologists living amongst isolated tribes in far away places; it was nice to be reminded that anthropology studies humans in their natural element whether it is a college in Claremont or a Polynesian village. Hence, Professor De Laet’s comment about living with “her tribe” at Harvey Mudd College. She described herself as being, “an anthropologist of science, technology and engineering”. In her work, she seeks to discover new dimensions and to extract deeper layers of meaning in what she observes. [It would have been interesting to know what she saw as she observed our class and listened to how each person chose to introduce himself/herself.]
Dr. Marianne De Laet understands (and commented upon) the power that stories behold. She spoke of the connection between the 30 meter telescope and the people whose lives have become, in some way or the other, affected by its existence. She spoke about the idea that an artifact, such as a telescope, can exist as an ontological reality, affect people and be epistemologically viable even before it actually has been built and has become a tangible reality. She spoke with passion about her work and, overall, her presentation was interesting and enjoyable.
I found Professor De Laet’s lecture interesting and eye-opening. Her emphasis on the power of story-telling was compelling. The power of stories to carry on tradition or define a person or group for the listener is one that I never really considered. Maybe it was referring to the “data” as stories that threw me off. When I think of “stories” I think of accounts of events for a personal reason, such as a warning (urban legends) or for amusement. Professsor De Laet brought up the idea that retelling someone else’s story comes with a measure of responsibility to the person whose story you are telling as well as to the reader of the story. This thought flashed in my mind when I was reading Dr. Wicker’s Ghanaian interviews on the web. The fact that they were told in first person kind of bothered me because it felt like the researchers were putting words into the mouths of their interviewees. I can see how Dr. De Laet would have problems convincing others that do not know her that her stories are collected and accounted in a rigorous manner.
Reaction to Marianne De Laet
I thought that the lecture of Dr. Marianne De Laet showed a good example of transdisciplinary research. The processes from funding to building of the 30m telescope in Caltech presented that a modern, technology related project might requires many different disciplines as societies become complicated. Doing successfully a big modern, technology project can be considered as solving a complex problem, because the project is related to not only engineers and scientists but also many stakeholders and cultural and socio-economic factors, and the relationships between factors are non-linear and complex. Therefore, it is not easy to implement the project successfully. Usually it requires a comprehensive approach and a series of painstaking efforts, including solving conflicts between stakeholders and trying to reduce potential side effects caused by the project.
There can many examples for this kind of problems. As Dr. Marianne De Laet said, Hawaii’s antagonistic attitude for building telescope because of tradition and cultural reasons are very natural to Hawaii residents but also very important for the success of the project. There is a similar example in Korea. Korean government had tried to build a facility in a place to store gavages from atomic power plant. It was very important for future electricity of Korea and its national economic benefits were expected be huge. But Korean government failed to build the place because they failed to solve conflicts between related stakeholders. It shows that a comprehensive, transdisciplinary approach becomes more important.
I found Marianne De Laet's talk on the Thirty Meter Telescope to be fascinating on several levels. The first level is that I discovered that I had already "met" her via e-mail. She had taught in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at Caltech, where I have been a systems administrator for the last five years. Also, Thirty Meter Telescope is one of my groups current clients, so we intereact with researchers there ona daily or weekly basis.
Secondly, I found the nature of her work as an ethnographer on a large scientific project to be interesting on several other levels. First, simply the acknowledgement that scientific projects are made of people who have relationships with one another and who exist and work within a particular culture of work, and to hear someone verbalize this was fascinating. I also enjoyed her discussion of her own effect on the project: her presence and questions made the scientists acknowledge the existence and importance of culture.
I hate public speaking. I hate spontaneous unannounced public speaking. I hate spontaneous unannounced public speaking where I’m called on to speak first. I wasn’t kidding though when I said I didn’t have a dissertation topic in mind. Hah hah, yes, I know I’m beginning my third year and I don’t have anything in mind right now, but up until this September, I’ve put off all worrying about a dissertation topic to worry about my Screening Exam, and afterwards I’ve focused on catching up to all the work I put off while studying for the exam. I always figured that for my dissertation, I’d do something related to the SISATspace project Sonya, Kate, Peter and I have been working on, but (and I mean no disrespect to my team-mates by this), blogging just doesn’t seem like a big or important enough issue to write a dissertation on. Maybe I’m only saying this because I’m a little bit green, but there’s some naïve part of me deep down inside that wants to do something at least somewhat Earth-shaking for my dissertation. But don’t take that to mean I’m not proud of the work that I do at the Social Learning Software Lab. I wasn’t kidding when I said Brian and I are in something of a rivalry between our SISATspace and www.claremontconversation.org projects. I don’t actually want his project to “crash and burn” as I joked during class, but we do oftentimes joke about the ways each other’s project are going to fail.
Anyways, about influences this class has had on my outlook on my topic of interest, there have been a few (Being one of the first students called on, I didn’t exactly have time to pull them out of my memory. At least that’s the excuse I’m sticking to). I did enjoy today’s speaker. Being somewhat of an astronomy buff, I was drawn to her example of a narrative concerning a giant telescope. In many ways, the stories of how these great astronomical engineering feats are carried out are just as interesting, if not more so, than the actual scientific results returned from such missions. Case in point: the ongoing soap opera/drama that has been the Hubble Telescope’s existence from day one, from its initial fuzziness and the servicing mission to repair it, to the more recent debate on whether to service it one more time in the wake of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. Every mission has its own valuable story to tell. I was also struck by her point about how stories can be used in a negative fashion by people with specific agendas, and how narratives can be manipulated to serve such an agenda. Maybe I was struck so much by this point because I’m still in a sort of post-election funk. Exploiting narratives for an unscrupulous agenda is probably second nature to too many business leaders and politicians (especially to a lot of politicians whose proficiency with such exploitation wasn’t enough to get them reelected). Tomomi’s tangent in her post about US-Chilean relations and Augusto Pinochet’s rise to power as dictator of Chile brings another example to mind of the manipulation of stories, especially now that the old s.o.b. has finally kicked the bucket (on International Human Rights Day, no less). It seems many on the right are trying to weave a narrative of the dictator’s legacy that skims over Pinochet’s human rights abuses such as the torture, the brutality, and the killings, or a narrative that completely mischaracterizes the reasons he was so widely reviled. Here is an example of such a narrative:
“Anthony Daniels has the best write up I have seen on why the left detested Pinochet so virulently: ‘The reason Augusto Pinochet was universally hated by leftists and many academics worldwide was not because he was so brutal or killed so many people (he hardly figured among the 20th century's most prolific political killers, admittedly a difficult company to get into) but because he was so successful.’ There is no doubt that there was indeed much brutality and hardship in the wake of his coup, but unlike the much less reviled military dictators of Argentina and Uruguay, he actually achieved something worthwhile, namely the prosperity of his country.”
Right… So 3,000 dead and 30,000 tortured and the left hates him because he was so successful? Of course, there is some truth in that, much in the way that intelligent individuals would despise a murderer even more if the killer went on to live a full, healthy, prosperous life, while the murder victim is trivialized decades later by some right-wing douche (pardon my French) who celebrates the murderer’s successes. So 3,000 dead and 30,000 tortured and the right rationalizes it with “he hardly figured among the 20th century’s most prolific political killers.” Now doesn’t that just reek of moral relativism? O.J. Simpson might have killed two people, but he hardly figures among the 20th century’s worst serial killers! Go Trojans!
Marianne De Laet's lecture was inviting and thought provoking. As an anthropologist, her use of story telling experiences communicate well, the need to be knowledgeable about epistemology as well as criticism. Her deep commitment to research was also obvious in the way she approached this topic. I still however don't understand her sympathetic view towards the industrialization and development of observatories. Why wouldn't the locals want a billion dollar facility in their backyard? Wouldn't it promote business and economy ? Are we going to stop the forward path of science to preserve the ideals of the past? There must be a way to make this work in a cooperative and equally beneficial way? It seems like the study of astronomy is so esoteric that it's hard for me to relate to why one would even want to study it? What value does it have in our society? I was hoping to have some of these answers this evening, but it seems that astronomy is a qualitative study of sorts, because you just collect information and hopefully it leads to some discovery or insight someday or along the way provides opportunity for scientists to have a "patron" so to speak while they study, research, and go for the stars...