History/Herstory

I found this week's Knight reading to be pretty interesting. I really liked the discussion of how history never really changes, but it seems to because our attitudes, and the attitudes of researchers change. I think that is something that most of us have probably come across when doing research for any number of classes, either in humanities and social sciences, or outside them. This was even a factor at the screening of Night of the Living Dead that some of the class went to on Friday. That film has been interpreted in different ways depending on who is watching it and when - it could be about race, about attitudes towards women, about the breakdown of society - people all see it differently and all probably believe they are correct.
The small section on image analysis was really interesting as well, and I wish there had been a little more, or a few examples. I really like Colin's post below about the images of Sandy - the internet has made it so much easier to be fooled nowadays. I've never actually done an image analysis, and I'm not sure I'll ever get the chance to, but I think it would be very interesting. Hmmm, I wonder if I can completely change my proposal for my final project...
Lastly, it was almost a throwaway line in the reading, but I want to know more about garbology (109).

Image Analysis

From the reading I glean that there are both benefits and drawbacks to studying images for the purposes of research.  Knights explains that analyzing images help researches notice significant aspects that do not show up in printed news paper or text.  Visual images can help researchers uncover complex understanding of social phenomena.

One of the main drawbacks is that image based research can be difficult because "images are information rich and difficult to analyse in any systematic way" (2002, p. 102).  Selecting an image set to include in research is problematic because it needs to be justified in an objective and systematic way.  Furthermore, developing a methodology for sifting through multiple images is difficult to develop and administer.  It is also a very new form of analysis in social science and there is little in terms of publish methodology guidelines to guide researchers in undertaking valid image analysis.

A methodology that Knight mentions that researchers should try to uncover the understandings of images of participants who are the intended audience for the image.  But there are layers of convolution in this suggestion because how is the researcher supposed to know who the intended audience is for the image, or what if the image is a historical artifact and the intended audience is no longer able to provide a face-to-face interview.  

Gaining background knowledge on how the image was produced can also be helpful, but Knight cautions researchers to take a holisitc and complete view of context when analysing images by considering "the conditions of production and the meanings that audiences might have attached to them" (2002, 104).

I also found the section on Documentary Analysis interesting since I completed a project in my undergraduate degree that focused on analysing song lyrics of a Carribean genre of music called Chutney.  I was looking for ways in which this genre of music reflected and also constructed mainstream discourses of the Indo-Trinidadian identity.  The problem with my study is that it failed to establish causation   I was unable to understand if the music lyrics informed the discourses, or the discourses informed the music.    

Past Experiences with Content Analysis

I think of all the methods that we have covered so far in the course, I have the most experience with content analysis. This week’s readings reminded me of some of the assignment that I have done in the past. The section on image-based research in the Knight reading reminded me of the American civil war photograph assignment that I once did. I remember the lecture where the professor talked about how the photographers would move around the bodies of soldiers or objects in order to create a scene that will send a particular message to their audience. In a way, she was telling us to not take our chosen photographs literally and to think about the message that they want people at the time to receive. That was why we needed to contextualize the photographs through research.

Another assignment that I remembered from this week’s readings is the document study that I did in my first year of university. I chose a book that was written around 1136 on the early histories of Britain. The advice that my TA gave me when doing the assignment was to think beyond the fantastical events, and to think about what the texts reveal about the author’s time period and not the time period in which he is writing about. Looking back on this assignment, I can see how it was used to train students how to interpret and contextualize primary text for historical research. Even though I was able to relate some of my experience to this week’s readings, I feel that I saw some differences in how content analysis is conducted for social science research and it was interesting to get a new perspective on a method in which I am somewhat familiar.

Image Analysis

The Knight readings for this week talked about photo analysis for research purposes. As a history student, I found this particularly interesting. History research for modern periods often includes some degree of image analysis. However, while Knight talks about the importance of gathering contextual information about images, in order to use them to understand a bigger picture, in history research gathering that contextual information often is the research. The image merely fits into the larger puzzle of understanding of the subject. That said, we were constantly warned against taking images at face value. History is full of images that have been manipulated and historians who have been fooled. Gathering as much information as possible surrounding the images is important in every discipline.

This was particularly relevant last week during the hurricane. A ton of incredible photos were circulating on the internet, especially via twitter. While many of them were proven to be legitimate, including the Dumbo carousel, the Hoboken station flooding, and tanker that washed up on Staten Island, there were countless fakes mixed in. Photoshopped images of sharks swimming in the flooded streets, pictures of a seal in downtown New York which were from a prior incident, and even screencaps from the movie The Day After Tomorrow were all released by people as purported Sandy images. Some of the more realistic fakes were even published by overzealous news outlets.

If you have some time, there are many sites out there who took some of the best images and analyzed both the images themselves and the contextual information to see which are real and which are not. It's really fascinating stuff, and a reminder that, today more than ever, you can't believe everything you see.

Peer review reflections

Following the discussion in class last week, I tried to create a checklist of things to do in preparation for my first ever peer review. Since we are supposed to primarily focus on reviewing the research method for the purposes of this assignment, I decided to select the article on Cuban News as I am interested in Content Analysis. The first “to-do” I had on my checklist was to learn about the pros and cons of the research method applied in the article, and to research some good articles where Content Analysis was applied successfully.  I discovered very quickly, that I would have to agree with Jesse’s blogpost discussed in class last week – there is so much more to Content Analysis than simple categorizations and frequencies, and neither Luker nor Knight really address the various ways it can be applied in different scenarios.

I found the Sari Thomas article to be quite helpful in evaluating Content Analysis as a research method in general. Although this article did not directly address analyzing newspaper articles, I was able to generalize the idea of artifactual study to a broader approach in applying content analysis to any type of text including newspaper articles.  I was especially interested in the comment that content analysis (along with other methods mentioned in the article) can only provide information that maybe “interpreted as reflecting a behavioural process” and that there is no real “direct access” to a person’s “meaning-making” process.  I believe this idea is something that will stick with me forever in my (potential) future career in research – to remember that any type of analysis I may choose, the best I can do is to interpret a reflection rather than TRULY reflecting the TRUTH.

Note: I wrote this blogpost a couple of days ago before I actually started working on my peer review. Having now completed the first draft of my peer review assignment, I had to update my blogpost to include the fact that I found it very useful to stay positive while reviewing the article. And I also found it very useful to remind myself over and over again that I really do want this article to get published, and I’m actually helping the authors to make it better – rather than intending to find problems with the article!  

What is an "Ideal-Type" anyway?

I had a similar reaction to Davidson this week while working on my peer review. I found myself reading the article “Bridging and Bonding in Emergency Management Networks,” and trying to find something to criticize in every section. This was difficult as I don’t know much about Emergency Management or the research method used. I found myself looking up everything I didn’t understand in hopes of finding an error to pick on. I am beginning to see that some time spent on the strengths of the paper will help me to present a more balanced and constructive review, rather than a nasty one. After all, as we discussed in class last week, we should only write something that we wouldn’t mind receiving ourselves.

The method used in the paper has proved more challenging to assess than I originally anticipated. It was presented as an “interview” based method, however, there is also the use of ‘ideal-types’ as an analytic approach. I have consequently spent most of my research thus-far in trying to understand what an ‘ideal-type’ is and how they should/are used in research. It has been an interesting concept to research, although I am not yet convinced of its validity as a method. It seems to me to be a very subjective method, as the researcher is the one who determines the “ideal” that the case is being compared to and thus bias must be called into question. For a better explanation of “ideal-type” see http://go.galegroup.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/ps/i.do?action=interpret&id=GALE|CX3439400159&v=2.1&u=utoronto_main&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w&authCount=1… I’m still trying to wrap my head around it.  

My first peer review

This is my first time peer reviewing an journal article. I find it quite challenging in terms of what is expected and how is one written.  I decided to pick the survey of podcasting due to personal interest and started working on it prior to the peer review lecture.  After going through the lecture, I realized how differently I had partially written my review in terms of tone of voice or how to address the author for example.  While the research design was simple, I had a hard time transcribing the reliability and validity from the study. It has been a hard concept for me to digest as I continue to read up on its definition and examples given.  Going back to the peer reviewing process, I learned that we need to have a positive approach rather than criticizing everything we see as flawed and that we should provide constructive criticism to point out what the strengths are.  Essentially, it is trying to collaborate with the author by providing feedback to assist in getting the paper published.