First Interviews

Today was our first day of formal interviewing....five interviews, which took up most of the day. A picture of our office at the OK society is below. Today's folks were primarily those from the elder's focus group we did last Tuesday. They all went well, with one very kind compliment from a long time Nain resident saying that he had done many of research interviews over the years, and this was the best he'd done. I'm not sure, but my sense was that he appreciated that we were taking time to talk to people about what was happening in Nain, and what they thought about it. Usually, he said, the interviews were very rushed and only looking for one or two things--without getting very far into things. So it looks like we are off to good start. We also had one respondent ask if we had any time to talk more, and listen to some old stories. That would be great, of course, and I asked if we could call her in a couple of weeks, once things were running and Josh was here, to make a time come and talk....she said yes, so we have a good lead for stories.


The story part of the project is actually very simple: we are hoping to be able to collect as many stories as we can here, record them, and produce a series of texts that we can analyze. Of course the texts are very valuable in their own right, and have all of the obvious connections to what anthropologists usually do. And they can show us alot about what has happened here...in the ethnohistorical (rather than conventional historical) sense. But we are also hoping to be able do some new text analysis on them, and do some cognitive mapping of the ideas they contain and deploy. This sounds more complex than it really is...the real point is to use the stories to see the relationships between the ideas contain, and to produce a map of the clustering and interdependency of those ideas. The idea that underlies this (from C.S. Peirce originally) is that it takes at least three independent items to make what people usually call "meaning"...a sign, the thing that it stands for (the object, often another idea), and the thing that connects them (still another idea that connects them (the relation or, as Peirce referred to it, the "interpretant"...which is still yet another idea). Put another way, any sort of thing that might qualify as "meaningful" is usually, minimally a triangle of ideas.

We do alot of interpreting with tone and gesture and lots and syntax and lots of other things that are difficult to capture in a text, of course. But alot of the time we do it with words...using a word that can point to alot of things, and using other words to do the pointing, picking out which of the many things it might refer to. In the maps we make, we try to find the clusters and interdependencies of clusters of ideas, where a group of ideas partly points to one another, and partly also supplies the pointing. In effect it is a mapping exercise, but of ideas.

In effect the maps look alot like the social network maps we make, except they show dependencies between ideas instead of people. So we are going to try to collect as many stories as we can...of any sort: stories about the old time, funny stories, short stories, long stories. I really have no idea how this part of the project will turn out (hope our funder isn't reading this section), but I am excited to see how it turns out.

News on the weather front: we are supposed to get up into the single (negative) digits, and perhaps even up to +2C this week. More weird weather, people are nervous.