Unfortunately, the winter weather kept us apart these past few weeks and delayed our fifth meeting! Once we got together again, it was a beautiful day outside and we couldn’t resist moving our conversation outdoors.
Our first topic of discussion was a video on Burning Man, a festival that rejects materialism, where the researcher used videography to describe his experiences and to capture the culture. Some of our team members are now considering creating a video as our final project because we saw how it communicated much more than a paper can.
We also discussed the paper that went along with the videography. We were able to explore the theories generated in the paper with one of the theories being the idea of a hypercommunity. Some team members related this to their own experiences, either at church camp or on the CORE trip where students canoed down the river in Big Bend, TX. This led into our discussion about the interviews that we had conducted in the previous weeks.
We found these practice interviews to be really helpful in developing our skills. We talked about the difficulties of keeping our experiences and opinions out of the interview and how to conduct better interviews in the future. We also received our new and improved recorders to use at Lollapalooza and learned that we might have a lead on an artist to interview at the festival.
Lastly, we discussed the importance of inscribing field notes and other observational methods. Field notes should be written as soon as possible. For us at Lollapalooza, this might mean ducking into a bathroom or stepping away from the crowd to jot down a few quick notes about the interview that we just conducted. As the date grows closer, we’re starting to solidify our research questions and as a result, we have decided to keep our topic broad. In these last few weeks, we’re compiling all of the different actors in the market and assessing where everyone’s interests lie.
Billie & Rachael, April 2015
