Saturday, April 26, 2014

Taking a Break

The academic year is coming to an end. My last class is Wednesday. And then I coast into summer mode. I have some things to work on which will require a lot of attention. So, I will be taking a break from blogging. If you wish to be notified when I start again you can follow me on Twitter. My account is DrJohnArtz. I don't tweet much so you won't get a lot of traffic. But, I will send out a tweet when I start blogging again. Enjoy the summer. I will be thinking deep thoughts. ;)

Saturday, April 19, 2014

Ethnography

A colleague of mine suggested doing an ethnographic study of an organization where he is doing some consulting work. Somehow, the idea of learning more about ethnography caught my attention. I am not sure how this happened. I ignore most things. But, now and then, an idea will get stuck in my head and I can't get it out.

The term ethnography comes from two Greek words which translate, roughly, into writing about people. It is probably better known as cultural anthropology. What an ethnographer does is to move into a foreign culture, attempt to understand it from the inside, and then document that understanding. Historically, the was done by people who wished to understand other cultures from large countries to small isolated tribes. More recently, organizational cultures have attracted attention as well.

The philosophical justification for this approach is articulated in Martin Hollis' The Philosophy of Social Science One of the dimensions that divides the assumptions made by researchers is Explanation vs. Understanding. Those who seek explanation looks for relationships between variables in describing a culture. For example, money spent on one's self versus money spent on others might be a metric to describe a society. Further, if there is a relationship between money spent on others and longevity, then those who seek explanations have found what they are looking for. But, what is it like to live in a culture where one spends more money on others? Those who seek explanation cannot answer that. For that we need understanding. And ethnography is a means of achieving understanding. While researchers holding different sets of assumptions might have harsh words for those holding other assumptions, it really isn't a matter of right or wrong. Different sets of assumptions yield different knowledge. And one can only argue that a set of assumptions is more or less useful in obtaining certain knowledge.

I found ethnography appealing for three reasons. First, the quantitative/technical part of my brain gets tired and  ethnography provides a way to use a different part of my brain when the other part needs a rest. Second, unlike many academics who drill deeper and deeper into a niche, I am quite the reverse. I want to know about everything. Finally, I believe this approach might have great value in studying certain aspect of Information Technology. For example, there are definitely software 'cultures' that produce information systems and those cultures need to be better understood. Further, we see unique cultures developing in virtual worlds and massively multi-player role playing games. And those unique cultures would bear some scrutiny as well. In addition, I think I might be uniquely qualified to do that as it is easier for an expert in IT to learn ethnography than it would be for an ethnographer to learn information technology. So, I am off on another tangent.

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Presenting, Sequential Art, Archetypes and Abstrations

I mentioned a whole flock of books on presenting that came out in the past 5 or 6 years. My favorites include  The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting by Stanley K. Ridgely and HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations  by Nancy Duarte both of which emphasize the use of stories as the backbone of a presentation.

But, when it comes to advise on how to construct a story, there is precious little help. We get such tired heuristics such as Beginning, Middle and End. But, that is not particularly useful to one trying to figure out a narrative argument to bolster their presentation. So, how does one construct a compelling narrative? Once again, graphic novels come to the rescue. For example Will Eisner the man who coined the term "graphic novel" provides two works Comics and Sequential Art
and Graphical Storytelling and Visual Narrative which do provide some structure.  If we think of a presentation as sequential art they provide a framework for thinking through the storyline.

Another benefit that the graphic novel format provides is the use of archetypes. Archetypes are symbols for bundles of human behavior that tend to occur together. Archetypes provide us with a high level of intellectual economy where we don't have to read long passages which describe behaviors that we have to infer character traits from. Instead we are given an archetype with which we are familiar that is customized for use in the story. One might argue that this is a response to the short attention span that we have developed in this age of text and distractions. But, I see it as stepping back another level of abstraction in our knowledge

To understand this level of abstraction consider a simple cognitive function of counting. First we count on our fingers, then pencil and paper where numbers represent quantity, then on a calculator where the computations are done for us and finally on a computer where the computations are embedded in a procedure. As our knowledge grows it become increasingly important to organize our knowledge base into levels of abstraction and select the level of abstraction that is necessary for educating us with the things we need to know. It seems like graphic novels may be the next level of abstraction for a rapidly expanding knowledge base.