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FRIDAY HISTORICAL READINGS
Oct 10: Pioneers
Oct 17: Expertise
Oct 24: Cliffords
Oct 31: Danger
Nov 7: El Dorado
Nov 14: Emotions
Nov 21: Natives
M Dec 1: Assistants
Dec 5: Summary
MONDAY EXERCISES
Sep 29: Experience
Oct 6: Observation
Oct 13: Interview
Oct 20: Discomfort
Oct 27: Formal
Nov 3: Survey
Nov 10: Photo
Nov 17: Video
Nov 24: Digital
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Your fifth class exercise is due for today. It deals with formal methods. There are many kinds of formal methods, including surveys/questionnaires (next week), psychological or projective tests (these require too much training to be practical for a class such as this), and ethnoscience methods (bingo!). Ethnoscience methods are structured activities to determine how people classify things, including but not exclusively plants and animals. They include pile sorts, triad tests, preference rankings, and many others. For our exercise today, we'll try two simple methods:
- Free listing. Find at least ten people (preferably 20) and ask them to list the first 25 kinds of trees that come to mind. This means what the ethnobotanists call "folk generics," such as pine, oak, cedar, etc., not "folk species" Ponderosa pine, pacific whitebark pine, etc. Note for each consultant some basic demographic info (age, gender, occupation, perhaps where he/she grew up). Compile data and tally common answers (this can be done in Excel). Do you see any interesting patterns in the data? Does demographic information help explain any of the patterns? Are there other explanations you should consider? Do this by 9 p.m. on Thursday, Oct 23, and then enter your results in a Google spreadsheet that will record all the answers from the class.
- Pile sorts: take the 10 most frequently mentioned trees, and write the names on index cards or other small pieces of paper. Ask the few (2-4) most devoted people out of your sample to sort these into piles based on similarity. Then ask your consultant why he/she sorted as he/she did; record replies. Inquire if there are names for the groupings that he/she chose. Do this and post some results by 6:00 p.m on Sunday, Oct 26.
- By 9:00 a.m on the day of class, post a brief description of your experience with these methods, along with any interesting results that came out of your experiment.
We will spend our class time with a real-live Ethnobotanist, Dr. Denise Glover (Ph.D. UW 2005), who will comment on and critique your methods and results.
In preparation for this exercise, read the following:
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