What questions to ask myself?

Because I am doing an auto-ethnography i have to think of the questions that I will be looking for in the observations of myself.  I will then have to ask myself what areas I plan on focusing on and researching.

Because I want to focus my research paper on my composition of papers on an iPad some of the questions that I may want to focus on are:

- where I am when I am using the iPad to write (the setting)
     - school, home, work, wherever
- when do I usually write on the iPad (the time of day)
- how do I write when composing
     - sentence structure, spelling errors, do I edit often
- what do I do when I am writing on it (are there any distractions)
- do I let anyone else use my iPad


I realize these are vague but I think that these are things that will come up in my observations so I think that I will be able to expand on them.

Oral History Conversation

I interviewed or more accurately had a conversation with Maritza Rodriguez. She started out conversation by telling me that she had an interesting experience for what she was doing on September 11th. She told me that she was a Sargent in the army at the time. She was 27 at the time and had been in the army for five years. She was in Fort Hood, Texas at the time and she said that she remembered thinking like 'this is what you trained for' and she said that she remembered feeling like she would hope that her training would help her when she would need it. She joked that you could not really say no if you were told that you were going to war. The feeling at Fort Hood went from 'chilly to hot' as in there was now a lot of tension that was arising and America was ready to go to war. She said that the security was heighten immensely; she said that even for her, being a soldier, it was difficult to get onto base because they began checking every vehicle. Her unit went to Iraq two years later but she wound up going to Korea.

Short Analysis Rough Draft

Ok so for right now I am definitely trying my best to analyze the language that is being used in the data set five about the chat rooms. I plan on doing an interview for my final analysis project so I think that it would be beneficial to me to see the type of language that is used by the interviewer in order to not sway the answers of the interviewee.

Something that stood out to me in particular is that throughout both excerpts there were not a lot of questions that were asked. Between both excerpts there were only approximately six questions asked. Not every time that the interviewer talked was a question asked, I think that allowed time for the interviewee to answer fully and made it less like an interrogation and more conversational. Because of the conversational feel I think that as an interviewer you have to have a general questions but I do not think that you should have a list of questions that you only plan to ask because you lose some of the full explanations if you were to cut them off. The original question was asked in the first line of the interview and then the questions after that spawn from the answers that are given, which seems to add to more qualitative and plentiful data.

The interviewer never in these excerpts mentions herself or even says the word I, the focus stays on the interviewee and the topic that they are talking about. In order to be able to keep the interview going along steady it would make sense for both the interviewer and the interviewee to be in the same Discourse community. Being a part of the same community would allow for the understanding of the language that is used throughout the conversation. For example, in the excerpts if the interviewer did not know what a chat room was or had little experience with the computer and internet then the interviewer would become confused and unable to continue on the track with the interviewee. The interviewer has to be well-informed on any topic that could arise regarding the original topic. For example, the original question was a broad topic and could have gone in a variety of directions. The interviewer asked how the interviewee felt about computers, if they decided to talk about the make up of a computer and the different programs that are on it then the interviewer would have to know how to handle that type of conversation which would require understanding of the terminology used.

I think the biggest thing that reviewing this data set has showed me is that it is very important to be in the same Discourse community as the person that you are interviewing. You need to be able to communicate with them in a way that is non threatening and will allow them to give you as much information as they can produce through a method of conversation.

Short Analysis Ideas

For the upcoming short analysis I was thinking about using the information from data set 1, the shaggy dog stories.  I think that the structure of each story would be something to consider in the analysis.  The fact that each one of the jokes is set up in a narrative format is also a unique feature of the jokes.  Even the idea that they are called 'stories' as opposed to jokes.  I think there is a lot of ways to analyze these.