I. Virtual and Physical Concentration of Field Researchers
The first essential element of an infrastructure is personnel. The center needs to be the physical home to a cadre of top field researchers. It also needs to be the hub for a network of many of the top field researchers in the country. But more importantly, it needs to have both a standard and a web-based strategy to train and mentor young social scientists and develop new, web-based pedagogical techniques.
The program of the newly founded Clark Center at UIC includes the promotion of field research in Chicago. The working core of the Clark Center includes a cadre of respected field researchers and social scientists from several disciplines, including Paul Goldstein, Darnell Hawkins, Lisa Sanchez, Beth Richie, David Perry, Bill Ayers, Ralph Cintron and John Hagedorn (representing Public Health, Sociology, Political Science, Anthropology, English, Women's Studies, African American Studies, Urban Studies, Education and Social Welfare). A series of field work seminars have already begun, aimed at promoting field work and training graduate students and junior faculty.
At the Clark Center founding, April 26, 2000, Joan W. Moore was the keynote speaker and she focused on lessons from three decades of her field work and collaborative methodology. We've reprinted her address and other materials from the event on our web page (see http://www.uic.edu/orgs/kbc/FieldR.html). On October 16 and 17, 2000, a two day seminar on field work by Elijah Anderson, one of the nation's preeminent ethnographers, will continue our training and promotion of field work. Anderson will be joined at his public lecture by noted ethnographer Mitchell Duneier as a respondent. Anderson will also facilitate four smaller seminars on specific topics. In November, Jim Short will speak on his gang research in the 1960s in Chicago, as part of the Clark Center's Chicago Gang History Project (http://www.uic.edu/orgs/kbc/ChiHistory.html). Short, Duneier, and Moore, Sudhir Venkatesh, Diego Vigil, Eloise Dunlap, Ric Curtis, Laura Fishman, Jeff Fagan, and many others have agreed to do seminars and participate in the promotion of field research through the Clark Center.
This proposal adds to our existing program by building a national scaffolding for the promotion of field research. Chicago, the historic home of field research, is the natural physical home for such a center. We intend to run a steady flow of different kinds of seminars with prominent field researchers. But we do not intend this to be just some well-funded speaker series. Rather, we propose to record these seminars in various ways in order to build a digital archive of materials on qualitative research and establish the Clark Center as an intellectual center in the field.
Our plan is to first document the seminars by transcribing text, video-taping key sessions, and/or editing some of the video of seminars for posting key portions on the web as streaming video. Topics will be picked for importance of debates in the disciplines, but also to fill pedagogical needs. The existence of a variety of audio and video tapes of field work seminars in a variety of web-based formats and posting the text of key presentations will be an invaluable aid to the teaching of field methods. Video-conferencing software will allow us to run some seminars in several cities simultaneously.
Second, we intend to use a small pot of money to compensate senior field researchers to work in an on-going way with graduate students and junior faculty. A suitable mentor in field research, particularly with minority students, has not always been available at a specific university. But through the web and video-conferencing we can link mentors with students and break through some of the isolation felt by minority and/or female students. We can also add experienced field researchers as mentors and thesis committee members through regular web-based contact and video-conferencing or streaming video. We intend to publicize the availability of mentors through professional associations and at professional meetings. The availability of a pool of field researchers to aid graduate students in itself is bound to promote field research theses and upgrade their quality.
Third, we intend to use the seminars to debate topics of methodological and theoretical interest in the field. For example, at UIC a concentration of postmodernists around Stanley Fish, Dean of the College of Letters and Science, will add to the attractiveness of UIC's Clark Center as a place for academic debate on postmodern critiques.
The capacity of the web to make raw data available can be a great boon to researchers, but raises new questions of confidentiality. For example, posting raw data on research cites on the web needs to be carefully checked for breaches of confidentiality. Publishing extended segments of even edited transcripts may aid other researchers, but could lead to the inadvertent identification of respondents. We intend to organize and archive forums on confidentiality and the web as part of our seminar series. Lisa Sanchez will be in charge of setting up the field research seminars.
It could be that the field research seminars will evolve into the qualitative analog of the University of Michigan's quantitative, summer Institute for Social Research (ISR). Whether the center evolves as a physical summer institute or becomes more web-based –or both – is not yet clear.
Like many other elements of this proposal, we: 1. Have already begun work on what we propose here; 2. Will be able to expand and improve our existing efforts through the NSF funds; and 3. Expect to experiment with different methods, techniques, and concepts as we go.
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