question about collaborative research

Because the spaces we look at for our research topics vary greatly, do we have to come up with one coherent conclusion of our findings?

Data Collection Progress

Gay Pride Festival
Jul 31st--Attended Manoeuvre (Gay Pride Chorus), Lutherese Kerk; Photographed the performance.
Aug 2nd—Attended Gay Pride Parade; Photographed and videotaped the event.
Aug 3rd—Attended “Geloog, Hoop en Liefde” open-air church service; Photographed the event; Interviewed with the organizer from Evengelische Roze Vieringen (ERV) and the organizer from Gay Business Amsterdam.
Aug 6th—Visited Gewoon Anders! (Just Different!) at the Cobra Museum, photographed the exhibition.

Kwakow Festival
Aug 9th – Attended the festival from 3pm to 7pm; interviewed the information stand staff; interviewed with one NGO worker at the cultural shop; had casual talks with participants of the festival; tasted traditional Surinamese food; photographed various food stands, dances, singing, religious ceremony, soccer match, and etc.

De Parade
Aug 11th – Attend De Parade theater festival; photographed the setting in the park; recorded show schedule; photographed show ads and theater tents.

Reflection of Public Scholarship

“The teaching and research that occur in university settings matter tremendously, but these institutions are the educational equivalent of gated communities. Not all people can or want to gain entrance. I am now committed to working with people on both sides of the gates.”
--David Domke, “The Something We Can Do”
“Public scholarship provides a field for experiment, in which introspection and invention can be carried out sociably and publicly, yielding new relationships, new knowledge and tangible public goods.”
--Julie Ellison, “The Humanities and the Public Soul”

From Ellison and Domke’s articles, I learned that public Scholarship is the relationship built between the academic world and the public masses. As profound as the former sounds, the link to inform the latter is missing or weak. One used to say that going from easy or difficult is hard, yet going from difficult to easy is even harder, and this is exactly what a public scholar supposes to accomplish.
As a first year undergraduate student, I picture myself in between the prestigious academia and the general public. I’m an audience to my professors and a learner of professional knowledge, yet at the same time I generate my own critiques and skills based on what I am taught in class. In terms of informing the public in an affective way, I could convey the knowledge I have obtained in an academic setting to the public in a less intensive complicated way, because I had to once access and unpack it myself. This skill is critical to our research project in three stages: understand the academic complex; use it to research the public and the city; present it to the public in an accessible way. by feedback to the public, the purpose of our research is fulfilled in a greater sense, for the public is where the ideas lay and the actions taken.

Read Me

Third Person:
As plain and casual as I look today, I’m pretty sure I would not be checked out by another person so closely as this, but here is goes:
Hmmm…another Asian girl: skinny, black hair, with a classical roundish small Chinese face. She hurries across the Red Square, wearing a green stripy shirt with a bow design tightened up in front of her chest. She might have had it for a while, but it looks comfy, attaching to her body closely instead of shaping it with a tight squeeze. On top of the shirt she covers her shoulder with a tiny piece of white top. It ends right below her chest and two pieces of draperies join each other in a knot hanging down. The draperies swing freely as she walks, adding a sense of lightness to her steps.
Jeans and flip-flops—the most popular combo in the early summer, she is certainly well informed of the summery-ness that’s spreading across the campus. Maybe she decides to preserve her excitement of warm weather just a little bit and first observe what everybody is up wearing. Yet she is not afraid to state her anxiety for the real summer to arrive by carrying a bright multi-blue beach bag on her right shoulder.
She pulls less than half of her hair back loosely, two pairs of earrings dangling in the threads of hair: the flower ones on the top have five different colors, small but shining; the silver ones at the bottom matching with the white. Her whole outfit is understated by the first look, yet some tiny details elevate her sensitivity to the season with a sense of subtlety.

First person:
After less than five hours of sleep, it’s Monday morning again. I rubbed my eyes as I climbed down my top bunk bed, peeking out the window. No sunshine today? That crosses off the option of dress or skirt. Better just save for later of the week when I’m thoroughly depressed by all the work piled up as the end of the quarter approaches. But it is summer indeed, maybe a nice shirt with jeans will do? I digged out one of my majorly-worn shirt from last year. It’s been lying in my closet for an entire year as a perfect reminder of some good times from last summer. The design is simple but cute: while and green strips with a bow tight in the front. Then I put on my jeans and a pair of flip-flops, usual and casual.
However, I overestimated the warm weather and was attacked by a breeze of chills right when I walked out of the dorm. After the first class, I went back to my room and put a piece of tiny sweater over the top and tights it ends into a knot. I like the way it flares out my body and tights it all together right below my chest. While the top totally covers up my summery-ness, my multi-blue colored beach bag fits me right into the sunshine. The out-spoken blues balance out my slightly faded green shirt, just like my flowery earrings add colors to the white top. Same as most Mondays, I dress up for no one else but myself, and casual and subtle is always the way to go!

Conceptual Framework

Since Flannery is not any more in the group, I had to narrow down the topic to how tourists interact with Amsterdam and the natives. To make the research question more approachable, I tried to break it down into more specific questions and filled with details. Here are the questions I have come up with so far:
l Where do the tourists go? What do they tend to do there (taking pictures, walking around, buying stuff?)
l What is their clothing like? How is it different from the natives and among themselves?
l What are their impressions of the city? What do they enjoy doing there and what are some dislikes?
l What might one group of tourists differ from another? (You can always tell Americans apart from other tourists. If that’s the case?)
Several conceptual frameworks can serve as the guide of conducting the research. One of them comes from Bal’s writing on “tradition and culture.” Tourists coming from all regions and countries experience “culture shock” as well as “culture clash” with Amsterdam and its people. Sometimes, tourists might find their values contradicting with the ones held in Amsterdam. For example, how would a Muslim woman perceive the prostitutes in the Red Light District? The clashes between what Amsterdam has to offer and what the tourists are willing to get out from it might not always be as correlative as they hope to be.
By employing Bal’s theatrical analysis on “tradition” and “culture”, I hope to gain a better understanding in terms of how people’s perception might be influenced by their cultural background and their values might be altered by the new cultural environment.

?Questions for Mieke Bal?

“Tradition” – Bal
1. Is tradition changed by people as much as people follow it? Take the example of the Dutch Zwarte Piet, do we choose to follow it or change it? How to follow or change it? For what purpose do we need to do so?

As I read through the article, I wonder why a tradition passed down for holiday ceremony is attacked by the same reason that it was inspired of. Does that necessarily mean out society has became more moralistic or just “politically correct” without explicitly calling white good and black evil. If we had to diminish such tradition, are we really destroying our cultural value or are we reforming it into a more modernized context?

Telling, Showing, Showing Off
2. Compare to the real world out there, Museum is a less natural setting in terms of its organization and purpose. What is some unavoidable unnaturalness about museums and how do they hinder/help to exhibit the nature of human society?

Bal talks about how nature is manifested with the space organizations and exhibition patterns in the museums. It helps me to see the connection between space and culture, but I wonder as unnatural as its purpose of showing it all at one place intends to be, how is a museum setting able to integrate past and present, human and animals, Asia and Europe all together with a flow of naturalness.

Forms of Mediums

In our research project, both visual and literate forms of medium will be used to present facts and ideas of our topic. In terms of producing images of the people and events, we could use camera and video taper to obtain a vivid visualization of our researching subjects. The drawback of merely using such recording method alone is an image often cannot tell the full story and its logic behind it. It is limited in one fragment moment of time, which might prevent us from viewing the entire picture of the event. Although videotape contains more fluidity in time than pictures, it also lacks explanation of why and how the events happen this way instead of in another.
Literate form of medium is definitely a good way to communicate ideas and discuss opinions. It is more subjective compare to visual presentation. We as researchers can interpret our observations and convert them into insights of our own. However, the downside of such device also lies under its subjectivity. The facts about the events and people might be distorted by the researchers’ own perspectives and therefore cause bias. Simply recording what happened and what they see without preference is psychological impossible; therefore, Literate form of medium might not be as accurate in presenting facts as visual images.
It is hard to classify what exactly type of audiences the research will be aiming towards, because there might be multiple groups of people who share the same interest in the research topic. Yet as far as research goes, its intended audience would be academic scholars who review the project in an intellectual context where the ideas and opinions are valued based on the facts and evidences you present. Therefore, both forms of mediums are great devices in communicating with the audience.