Tag Archives: methodology

Word herds: are they changing and why?

Get_On_Up_posterRichard Corliss describes Chadwick Boseman’s performance as James Brown in Get On Up as something that “radiates sex, drive, menace and spirit.”

Oh, I thought, that’s kinda new.  Normally, a series like this (“sex, drive, menace and spirit”) would have a little more redundancy.  The “word herd” repeated itself to aid comprehension.  In effect, the terms in the word herd meant roughly the same thing.

Words in the herd might even be near or actual synonyms.  Thus the performance might be said to be “deft, subtle, nuanced.”  The first term sets up the meaning, the last one spikes it.  (To use a volleyball metaphor.)

But these days it is much more likely to see word herds that are diverse, with meanings working not together but happily in opposition.  Each word does it’s own work.  These word herds are heterogeneous.  If terms used to be synonyms, now they are a little closer to antonyms.  And the pleasure of reading comes less from going “Oh, that’s what she means.  Got it.” to having to read the whole thing through, admiring the bumper-car effect of unruly language.  Good writers aim for whip lash.

The methodological question: could we examine a large body of texts and see if indeed word herds are changing?  The tricky part, I’m guessing, picking word herds out of millions of words of text.  If this problem can be solved, then the question is whether there is some technique for judging the semantic distance between terms.  What we are looking for, for the sake of this suspicion, is a “before” with relatively little distance and an “after” with lots of it.

Not to rush things, but I think there probably confirmation is waiting to happen.  And not to really rush things, but my guess is that word herds are more heterogeneous for the same reason that so many things in our culture are more heterogeneous.

If once we were monolithic as a social and a cultural order, now we are various.  And we are learning to live with this variousness.  Homogeneous word herd are really training wheels of a kind.  They were designed help us grasp the meaning of a text.  And now they feel like a tedium tax the author is forcing upon us, as an unreasonable condition of entry.

It does feel like everyone is getting smarter.  Certainly, and against the odds, popular culture is getting smarter and this lifts all boats.  But the reason might be there in the everyday act of thinking.  There was a time when we staggered beneath a weight of unanswered questions.  Yes, we could go to the library and find an encyclopedia, but, Dude, really?  All that indeterminacy created, to shift my metaphor, a film, a gauze.  Meaning was hard to see.  Distinctions hard to make.  So it was left to the author to make everything clear, definite and precise.  Got it?

Got it???  How laborious.  Now that we can answer almost any question almost instantaneously, some of that film is gone.  The world is windexed.  The homogeneous word herd just feels like we are being struck about the head and shoulders by a schoolmaster who resents the fact that we are more interested in stray and playful meanings than his lesson plan.  This is language acting like genre, setting up meaning over and over again to remove all doubt…in the process removing all surprise.  We don’t need training wheels.  Not any more.

This is a question for people with methodological skills I do not have.  Maybe Tom Anderson  might care to have a look.  Or perhaps Russ Bernard might have a student who cares to take this on.   Please, if you have a way of solving this problem, sing out!

Ethnography, a brief description

I just banged out a description of ethnography for a client.

Here it is:

Ethnography

The object of ethnography is to determine how the consumer sees the product, the service, the innovation.  Often, this is obscure to us.  We can’t see into the consumer’s (customer’s, viewer’s, user’s) head and heart because we are, in a sense, captive of our own heads and hearts.  We have our way of seeing and experiencing the world.  This becomes our barrier to entry.  Ethnography is designed to give us a kind of helicopter experience.  It takes up out of what we know and lowers us into the world of the consumer.

Ethnography is a messy method.  In the beginning stages, we don’t know what we don’t know.  We don’t know what we need to ask.  We are walking around the consumer’s world looking for a way in.  Eventually, as we ask a series of questions, we begin to see which ones work.  We begin to collect the language and the logic the consumer uses.  And eventually, we begin to see how they see the world.

The method is designed not to impose a set of questions and terms on the discussion, but to allow these to emerge over the course of the conversation.  We are allowing the consumer to choose a path for the interview.  We are endowing them with a sense that they are the expert.  We are honoring the fact that they know and we don’t.  (Because they do!)

Eventually, we end up with a great mass of data and it is now time to stop the ethnography and start the anthropology.  Now we will use what we know about our culture, this industry, these consumers, this part of America to spot the essential patterns that make these data make sense.  “Slap your head” insights begin to emerge.  “Oh, that’s what their world looks like!” “That’w what they care about!”  “This is what they want!”

And now we begin to look for strategic and tactical recommendations.  Now we can help close the gap between what the consumer wants and what the client makes.

(For a more technical description of the method, please see my The Long Interview. Sage.)