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- Convenors:
-
Hanne Pico Larsen
(Tuck School of Business)
Sigurjon Hafsteinsson (University of Iceland)
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- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
Unprompted visitor verbatim such as guestbook writing, online reviews, blog posts, and postcards are challenging for the ethnographer to use as sources. In this panel, we examine the methodological concerns regarding these often whimsical utterings and discuss how to include them in our research.
Long Abstract:
In the age of market-driven economies, guestbook entries have received increased attention from scholars and professionals as valuable documents for research on demographics, social and cultural trends, political and educational contexts, democratic participation, manifestations of experiences, opinions, values, interpretation, performances, bluffness, humor and affect, just to name a few. Such socially situated products and poly-voiced data create various methodological challenges for folklorists and scholars from other disciplines: How to address them as sources and how to work with this kind of material?
In our work with guestbook material from two museums (The Museum of Broken Relationships, Zagreb and the Phallological Museum, Reykjavik), we have encountered various challenges in using such fascinating guestbook material, which, in both cases has been made an integral part of the museum experience. The often freestyle, creative, graffiti-like, multilingual, emotional doodles and drawings are not only idiosyncratic, but the authors are mostly semi-anonymous and untraceable, making it impossible for us to ask follow-up questions probe deeper and twist the material to fit our research questions. The authors of visitor/guest verbatim set the tone and agenda for their own reflections, which are often written in the spur of the moment. However, an increase in the amount of such sources, both physical and online, makes it impossible for the researcher to ignore. We invite all papers discussing methodological concerns regarding visitor/guest verbatim, describing new methods of dealing with e.g. online reviews and handwritten guestbook scribbles.
This Panel has so far received 2 paper proposal(s).
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