III. The Four-City Study: A Template for Field Research
The final element in the field research infrastructure is a pilot research project between cities, organized as a template for how to do comparative field research in the digital era. The four city study will address substantial questions of the impact of the new economy on poor communities that may be of interest to further study in themselves. However, the underlying purpose of the pilot studies is to experiment with web-based knowledge management and organization of multiple research sites by use of the world wide web. The principal question is: How can the digital library be used to improve the research process?
After a year of discussion, four cities will be selected to carry out pilot field research studies on the impact of the new economy on different kinds of neighborhoods. It is expected that Chicago (UIC), Milwaukee (UWM), New York (Columbia or John Jay), and Boston (Harvard) will be the research sites, based on willingness of prominent field researchers and theoretical characteristics of the research sites.
Theoretical Basis of the Studies
The life and death of cities is an on-going historic process (Hall 1998; Jacobs 1961). The decline of the industrial world has left cities like Detroit struggling for survival (Sugrue 1996), while New York, Los Angeles, and to a lesser extent Chicago, are experiencing a rebirth (Abu--Lughod 1999). The ostensible signs of the replacement of the factory by the computer network (Castells 1989; 1996) however, conceals a significant expansion in various informal means of living, which are less open to quantitative description (Sassen-koob 1989).
Two polar types of informal urban economic systems apparently have formed (Sassen 2000; Portes et al 1989) which may exercise a major effect on social indicators, such as homicide and infant mortality rates (Hagedorn and Goldstein 1999). While the theory is complex, the hypothesis is that in areas mainly adjacent to the new economy, unskilled workers find construction and service jobs as well as accessible links to training in high tech skills. Most jobs created by the information economy, Sassen reminds us, are not high skill, and many are "off-the-books." In these "trickle down" areas adjacent to new wealth, service and construction jobs are created mainly in response to the needs of a booming formal economy. Drug sellers find a more well to do customer base and social control in these areas is tight, responding to the needs and fears of a professional clientele.
However, things are different in socially isolated areas more distant from the new economic developments. Here, drugs and the production of illicit goods and services are less related to the needs of the formal economy, and more central to the survival needs of the poor. Drug sales are a main employer of young men in both African American and some Hispanic communities (Hagedorn 1998a; 1998c), who see few opportunities in the formal economy. Many gangs have shed their alienated adolescent clothing, and have become economic units, dominating the drug trade in some neighborhoods (Fagan 1996; Venkatesh 1996; Schneider 1999). Violence is a necessary tool to enforce contracts (Black 1983; Fagan and Chin 1990), and social controls from authorities are more repressive and at the same time less responsive (Kennedy 1997).
To understand the variations in the shape of the informal economy and how it may effect the behavior of young males calls for comparative field work in different types of cities and in different types of neighborhoods within cities. In order to provide baseline information and to see whether the hypothesis has merit, a pilot study in four cities will be undertaken. The participating universities must demonstrate both prior access to suitable neighborhood research sites, as well as willingness to experiment with a web-based methodology.
A Digital Template
The digital library will be used as the organizer of the entire research process. One historic problem of field studies has been their limited comparability. The four city study aims to overcome that limitation through the digital library, videoconferencing capacity, and the Internet2 Consortium.
To begin with, as we have done with this proposal from its inception (http://www.uic.edu/orgs/kbc), the project description will be posted on the web and advertised through field research networks, NSF announcements, and professional meetings. When the research teams in the four cities are selected, consultants will link the four sites by a H323 videoconferencing system to allow staff meetings to take place simultaneously across the sites. Beginning field work can be shared not only by streaming video meetings, but by the entry of baseline data on the study neighborhoods in GIS software, as we described above. Thus each neighborhood can be "seen" by researchers in other research sites without the expense of regular site visits.
The entry of photographs and various kinds of qualitative data will take place in each city and shared. As the issue of developing a common electronic interface is solved, text and other data can be shared between sites, and researchers in each city can compare their field notes and data to those of researchers in other cities through protected web sites. The possiblity exists to run a joint field methods course in two or more of the cities, thus teaching the comparative method while we are learning how to do it.
Public access to preliminary information and feed-back from residents in the study communities themselves will be essential components of this project. It is anticipated that public libraries and schools will become partners in organizing feed-back and input into the research process. Regular staff meetings between sites will be devoted to the practical problems of the research, plus the technical problems of taking full advantage of the web and the digital library.
The final reports of each pilot study and the entire project will of course be posted on the web. The digital library, however, will archive not only the reports, but contextual material, like photographs, interview transcripts, and field notes, ever mindful of confidentiality. GIS software will be used to merge quantitative and qualitative data, as we have described above.
This four city study is an experiment in how to use the web to assist in field work, and how to go beyond the case study approach. Like the rest of the proposal, we do not profess to have all the answers, but we intend to solve clearly defined problems as we go. We believe we have the social science and technical personnel to accomplish our objectives.