WJ Clancey — Visualizing Practical Knowledge
features and previously placed objects, which they can conceive as being edges, and
position themselves accordingly.
The tents are placed along a “cliff,” the edge of a river terrace. The three similar tents at
the top left might have been placed coincidentally together. But in fact they are the tents
of three people from a robotics lab who travel together, work together, eat together, go to
bed at the same time, and so on. They are a subgroup within the camp, partly isolated
from the rest, as even their placement on a corner shows. They work at 3 am (the sun
never sets in July) on their robotic helicopter, when the winds are light; they don’t go out
with the rest of the group on geology and biology traverses.
The placement of tents illustrates that identity of people can be visible in how they
arrange themselves in a physical setting. For example, I placed my own tent near the tent
of the National Geographic writer, because that’s someone I wanted to know. Thus the
environment itself becomes socially structured, reflecting and promoting the relationships
people desire.
Ethnographic study of expedition activities
An ethnographic study of scientists working in the field (“scientific fieldwork”) is not
common in anthropology. However, the methods I employed are quite similar to the
ethnographic study of office work (Greenbaum and Kyng, 1991), which in turn has been
based on methods employed by anthropologists throughout this century in the study of
non-Western cultures:
• Participant observation: Learning about the culture by participating in everyday
activities
• Field notes: Extensive written documentation of everyday activities; these notes are
reorganized, sorted, and culled over extensively in months or years following the
observation, as new patterns are revealed
• Video interaction analysis: Extensive use of cameras, both still photographs and
video, detailed and wide-angle, to show relationships of people, artifacts, and
environment over time
• Interviews: Talking to people during or immediately after apparently important events
to understand their conceptions of what is occurring and how they are interacting with