voyeurism

case study, revised

ok, six days after having received the feedback from Case Study One, i have revised it and have also written up the remaining three case studies.

hopefully i'll get the green light on them, so i can incorporate them into their respective chapters :-)

case study - feedback

got john's feedback on the case study.

- tentatively agreed to have only four case studies (two from pilot, two from main study).  they will be put in the respective 'results' chapters, so explanations / discussions should be kept to a minimum in the case study itself.  so, for example, the description of the performance of the students in the pre-tests should be placed in the discussion chapter, as evidence of the claims made therein.  likewise with the various usage patterns of the discourse categories.

- i need to give him a streamlined discourse categorisation.  again, something i was avoiding, but i do agree that that needs to be settled quickly before much else can be properly achieved.

- for the orienteering transcripts, i need to reproduce the entire transcripts, not just the interesting bits.  at least, i have to do this for the very first case study.  i am allowed to break up the transcript into bits, though.  also, i have to add a fourth column in the transcripts, where i am to put my own comments (not necessarily explanations).

- the second case study for the pilot can be truncated to highlight only the best bits.  similarly (hopefully) for the second case study for the main intervention.

- for both the orienteering and SAC transcripts, i have to 'translate' the singlish and SMS patois into something intelligible.  i am to do this in parentheses within the existing cells, to differentiate them from the 'comments' column.

- i am to eventually have a comparison table in the respective 'results' chapters so that one can see not only the functional loads of the pilot and main participants, but also how typical the case studies were of the overall population.

- i need to include a map for each case study, and this map must have the checkpoints marked out, so that readers will be able to compare the true map with the mental maps (which are in turn to be appended), as well as to ascertain the degree of accuracy of the wayfinding.  from the map, an overview of the key issues for each locale can be drawn (both in terms of what was important to me, and what was important to the students).  other locales which do not have an associated case study, should also be briefly but similarly described. 

- i need to include the entire SAC transcript, at least for the very first case study.  subsequent case studies can have just salient bits of the respective transcripts.  for the SAC transcripts, i am to incorporate my italicised comments into each cell, as opposed to appending a column.  this way would be easier for the reader to understand which cells my comments pertain to.

- generally, i was reminded to skew the whole thing more towards geographical concepts and less towards pure discourse analysis.  in this respect, the case studies should concentrate on description, with the explanations put in the respective 'discussion' chapters.

case study

as mentioned in the past couple of entries, i have had to do a bit of rewriting / additional writing :-P

so today i wrote my first case study, and i have sent it off to john to see what he says.

actually, i am pretty chuffed with it, even if i do say so myself :-P

i think the case study has turned out well, and looks to my layman's eyes to certainly add value to the overall thesis (and this is most likely just the first of several! :-) )

for this first draft, i chose the Little Guilin group from the pilot school. what i like about it is that, by adopting the neighbourhoods as the units of analysis (as opposed to the various parts of the intervention like i had done previously), it really allows the complementarity of the various parts of the intervention to show through. this is basically because the case study tracks the progress and activities of the team (in this case, seven students) from pre-test, to their two fieldtrips, and concluding with the peer critique round. using the neighbourhood as the conceptual skeleton has allowed me many more hooks from which to hang off the various bits of data, including many bits which i had previously not known what to do with, such as the photographs taken, the sketch maps, and the comments from the peer critique.

now everything seems to gel together very well, and as john would say, i think i am spinning a rather good yarn :-)

at least this way, the reader has a much clearer idea about what the students did during the entire intervention.

i've also come up with new notations which i can easily append to the existing messaging transcripts. i've already been so impressed that the way that i was led to represent the messaging exchange was flexible enough to incorporate time indices, information on sender and recipient, and, of course, message content (both text and pictures). more recently, i used coloured text to indicate the categories of discourse modes that each message belonged to. the breakthrough today was that i realised i could also use cell colour to highlight the instances when allocentric Frames of Reference (that is, spatial references which are linked to specific objects in one's environment) were used.

you see, i have realised that the picture-messages represent the communication of egocentric Frames of Reference. but such communication is not sufficient during wayfinding. the trick is to pin such egocentric Frames of Reference to allocentric ones as well.

but even then, today's case study has helped me realise that even such a combination is not necessarily a guarantee of success in wayfinding. this is because other factors, such as impetuousness and making invalid assumptions, also play a part.

Technorati Tags: discourse, navigation, wayfinding

a chapter closes, another opens

i returned the four SIM cards to starhub today - i remain very grateful to them for their sponsorship of the accounts, without which hardly anything would have gotten off the ground.

i scanned in the usable route sketches from the pilot study, in preparation for a more narrative-style approach to the data.  i'm supposed to try the new approach on the pilot data first, then if my supervisors approve, i'll roll it out to the main data. 

i've had an insight that the pre- and post-tests actually are the key to answering a question that came up during my confirmation seminar which saw me temporarily stumped - namely, how does the study bridge the naïve geography of the adolescent mind and the geography of the formal curriculum?  well, anyway now that i've realised it, i've made the link more explicit in the thesis.

because i feel more and more sure that the pre- and post-tests have their place, i'm toying with the idea of reducing the narratives to sub-units of the existing 'discussion' chapters, rather than replacing them altogether.  true, this approach seems terribly kiasu and bao-ka-liao, but then i think it's very similar to one of john's original suggestions anyway (which i did not implement because i could not have a clear understanding of how to weave a narrative from the data - i have a better idea now, and will try to work on it tonight).

:-)

dress rehearsal

okie had my first year confirmation seminar today :-)

present in the panel were allan, chorboon, cherping and jeanette. john was there too, and so were several fellow graduate students :-)

started promptly at 2 pm, i talked for about forty minutes, then had questions for half an hour. then they sent me out of the room while they deliberated.

in a nutshell, i have to rework the chapter organisation somewhat - john suggested constructing narratives based on the neighbourhoods instead, so that the way the various pieces fit together might be made that much more explicit.

it was also suggested that shift the emphasis away from pure discourse analysis, to a focus more on the actual geographical and spatial perceptions.

allan introduced me to a metaphor which i don't think i will forget in a long time: this is not the Indy 500; this is just the driving test. my job is to stay within the lines and not hit anything :-)

by 3:30 pm, i was given the tremendous news that i had passed from MPhil to PhD candidate :-)

all thanks and praise be to God :-)

show and tell #2

finished crafting a presentation file for Monday's seminar :-)

decided that of all the conference presentations i've given on my research so far, the best one to base Monday's on was the NILE one that i gave in Edinburgh.

so i used that, updated the findings using the more robust statistical tests that i've since been able to run, and tied it back to the research questions.  under john's advice, i'll just be talking about the pilot.

finally, because it's such an important presentation, i'll be using Keynote from Apple, instead of PowerPoint :-P

watch this space

a happy and blessed New Year to all :-)

today i finally got news that my confirmation seminar (from MPhil to PhD) will take place in exactly a week's time.

it has been three and a half months' since i first got wind of this seminar.

i'm supposed to prepare a forty-minute presentation, with the remaining twenty minutes set aside for questions.

who exactly will be there, i really have no idea :-P