1. Learning by doing
Watch someone work in a video online (playing a video game, cooking, painting walls, fishing, coding, etc.). Do a drawing or sketch about a specific aspects of the work. As you interact with the video and your drawing, reflect on the practice: How does the fact that you are taking visual notes of the activity influence your watching of the work? How does your sketching guide your understanding of the following quote (Hendrickson 2008, 129):
“Producing visual along with verbal field notes […] has allowed me a different sort of active engagement in the worlds of people and places ‘‘out there’’ as well as ideas ‘‘in my head’’; the two are brought together–shown to be inseparable–as marks on the page trigger thoughts, which in turn push me to draw and look and converse and think more and in different ways.”
2. Ethnographic drawings v. photos
In what ways do you think fieldwork notebook drawings are different from ethnographic photos? In other words, if the purpose is to visually represent what we observe in the field, why should we draw sketches and not take photos instead? What advantages field sketches offer that photos can’t offer? How does the following excerpt from Taussig (2011, 21) may guide our view on advantages of drawing over photos when taking fieldnotes
“Photography is a taking, the drawing a making, and although there is much to quibble about with these words, there is wisdom in them too. John Berger certainly thinks so, with his enigmatic notion that a photograph stops time, while a drawing encompasses it“?
3. ETHICS OF ETHNOGRAPHIC SKETCHING
What do you think about ethics of research involving drawings and sketches? What ethical considerations do field researcher need to considered when creating sketches and drawings as part of the process of knowledge production? Can field sketches and ethnographic drawings help with ethical issues related to confidentiality and anonymity?