8/3/2019 More About the Fieldwork Assignment

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More about the Fieldwork Assignment

This assignment is included because not everything a researcher needs to know is to be found in a book,

in a library. Some valuable information exists in other peoples heads. Interview them. Some is available

in rare or archival material. Find, and copy or note. Some is to be gathered by observation of artefacts,

landscape, architecture. Walk about and take photographs or notes.

For the majority of students it will be impossible to interview authors. Because the field assignment is

to be on a narrow area of your research topic, however, you may be able to interview someone else. For

example, instead of interviewing Naipaul you might explore a historians assessment of the writers

contribution to history; instead of interviewing Hopkinson you might enquire about Caribbean folk

elements in speculative fiction; instead of interviewing Lovelace you might try to find out about mid 19th

century communities in areas he has drawn on as settings; instead of interviewing Hodge you might

gather recollections or colonial education. The exact thrust of the interview would depend on your

topic.

If you are looking at the development of Caribbean narrative or the appearance and development of a

particular theme or character type you might search old newspapers or magazines. If you are working

on Goodison or Senior, you might gather information on Jamaican language or culture from Jamaican

nationals on campus.

Suppose your topic was a comparative study of vampires in literature - I select this because I believe the

student who was interested in it has switched to another topicyou cant interview Bram Stoker but

you would have been reading up on Bram Stokers Dracula (and perhaps Vlad the Impaler), and more

recent work like that of Anne Rice, and then have moved into Caribbean works like Hopkinsons Skin

Folkand Wordsworth MacAndrews Ol Higue. Then your field work might take the form of interviews

for informants memories regarding beliefs and anecdotes regarding the blood sucker in Caribbean oraltradition, or interviews to determine psychoanalytic explanations of this type in literature. Or, you might

collect visual images (painting, sketches etc) through which the folk character has been represented in

different Caribbean territories.

The assignment is entirely manageable and should be fun. Its a short report - no more that 1,000 words.

It is expected to include the following:

1 Aim (What did you want to find out?)

2 Method (How did you go about it?)

3 Data (What did you find?)

4 Interpretation (What did it mean as far as your research project is concerned)

NOTE: Analysis is required in order to move from 3 to 4.

I look forward to your submissions on or before Monday Oct 25, 2010.