This is a very crude mockup of how the finished work of my digital ethnography will look. On the left is a menu listing the conponents - written, photographic, and video. A click on any one line will bring up a component and in turn will have links to other conponents. On the left the video will be displayed. While a video conponent is running items in the menu that are relevant will become highlighted so that a viewer can stop the video and pursure a concept or obtain more information about a particular subject. The logic of keeping the video small is that it will prevent viewers from being seduced by the image. Hopefully the final product will look a whole lot better than this beginning schema.

Progress Problems

This quarter has been a frustrating one for me in that I did not make the progress I had hoped for. Unfortunately it mirrors the last quarterly report. I, again, underestimated the demands of teaching and other university duties. In addition some minor health problems slowed me down even further. I continue to transcribe and to convert my newspaper clipping files into Acrobat PDF files and catalog them. I read relevant works. I continue to try to learn Final Cut Pro - the video editing system I employ. I edited a short piece about the Taylor family looking at some family snapshots and commenting on them so that I could have something to experiment with. Most edited video work ends up being transfered on to a VHS tape in a relatively straightforward manner. I wish to convert video into a form usable on CD-ROMs or DVD. To do so means compressing the material into a file size that can be burned on disk. I find this process frustrating and confusing and have yet to produce something that I would considerable viewable. I also continue to watch the development of software that will enable to me produce a multimedia piece and can be viewed on most people's computers. At the present time, it looks as if I will need to use Director, software that takers months to learn. It may be that what I want to do will require the services of a professional designer. My plan is continue to edit some video units; to write some of the other components (I have done that for the section on the African American family) and wait to organize them together. In addition, I have produced some Powerpoint presentations that serve as a kind of story board with outlines of the various components. I am hoping to be able to show those dealing with one family ethnographic portrait this summer when I am in Oak Park to get some feedback. As they are large files, I will not be able to place them on the web for additional feedback. I am beginning to feel a bit defensive about my lack of progress and have silly paranoid dreams of spending the entire summer in Oak Park, answering the question - "Why aren't you finished? It is easy to confuse ethnography with journalism and then reasonably expect completion is a short period of time. I will we struggling with this material for years. I am not reporting on current affairs but attempting to say something about this community that is not time sensitive.

Oak Park at the Anthropology meetings.

I have organized a panel of scholarly papers for the American Anthropological Association Meetings in November, 2002 on suburbia. There are two papers in the panel about Oak Park.

My paper is entitled When is a Suburb not a Suburb? When It's Oak Park. The paper contrasts the preliminary findings of an ethnographic study of Oak Park, a Chicago suburb with the stereotypical portrayal of the suburb in the U.S. by social scientists, novelists, photographers and filmmakers who see these places as vast wastelands of malls and sprawled subdivisions; of bored drug dependent housewives and teenagers; living in uniformly dull "little boxes." This myopic distaste contrasts sharply with the consistent and overwhelming movement of people out of cities and into suburbs. It could be argued that those who are in the business of portraying the suburb are merely voicing their bias and are out of touch with the attitudes of the majority. Lost in this denunciation are communities that give lie to the cliché. Oak Park, a first ring suburb of Chicago, founded over 100 years ago, has no malls, subdivisions or many little boxes. Instead it is the place where Frank Lloyd Wright invented prairie style architecture. Contrary to the notion that these communities dull the mind, Oak Park been home to an impressive list of creative people from Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Doris Humphrey to Carol Shields. Forty years ago, Oak Parkers decided to proactively integrate. They have succeeded in making their suburb one of the more interesting social experiments in the U.S. As we are a suburban nation, it is time to replace our scorn with an attempt to discover what we can learn from these communities.

In addition Evan McKenzie, a political scientist at the University of Illinois, Chicago and Oak Park resident will present a paper entitled The Perils of Suburban Ethnography:Reflections on Scholarship, Identity, and Community. His paper's abstract is as follows: Ethnography has been described, archly, as "anything anyone wants to do that has no clear problem, no methodology, and no theory." (Spindler 1982:1) However, the project described in the proposed paper began with all three. It was to be a study of an innovative public policy experiment, a gang and delinquency intervention program in Oak Park, Illinois, which is a middle-class, racially integrated, suburb of 52,000 people located on the western border of Chicago. It was to be based on interviews and documentary research, and appeared to be a good case study to test research-based theories promoted by prominent delinquency experts. Seven years later, the project is nearing completion, but only after expanding into a full-blown study of the complex intersections between race relations, public policy, and community. In the process, I have learned a great deal about the special perils of suburban ethnographic research, which dictated the changes of course in the research project. The proposed paper would examine how the peculiar nature of suburban ethnography influenced every aspect of this project, including the problems to be examined, the methods employed, and the theoretical approaches brought to bear during the study. In the paper, I will examine the ways in which suburban ethnography tends to differ from ethnographic studies in rural and urban settings, exacerbating some of the perennial identity issues and problems of conscience that trouble the responsible ethnographer. The paper will focus on implications of the problematic roles that the suburban ethnographer is forced to play.

Summer Plans

My wife and I will be coming to Oak Park in late May and staying until the middle of August. Bobbie Raymond Larson and her husband Richard have graciously offered to allow us to house sit for them while they go to their Door county summer home. Our address will be 141 So. Scoville Avenue, Oak Park, IL 60302 and the phone is 708-383-3955. My email address will remain the same. I have high hopes that by having three months without any other distractions, I will make great progress on this project.