WEF Response

The author of this article claims that part of what makes ethnographic research successful is a way of organizing thoughts and ideas within the notes known as coding.  The author uses ethnographic notes as examples, as well as using the idea of the field notes as "data" that needs to be categorized and sorted out.  I completely agree with the author here.  I think that the only way that Boo could have possibly made her book successfully is to organize her thoughts into ideas and themes.  She keeps a lot of the characters separate when telling their stories from their point of view; however, she definitely shows the connections between all of the characters throughout each vignette and perspective.  While I doubt that my ethnographic research will be as personable and story-like as Boo's I think that is vital for me to code my notes as well.  I think that this is the only successful way to try and draw conclusions from my research.