Anthropological research is immersive and interactive - working with people on a day-to-day basis to understand the material circumstances people live in, and how their local viewpoint both adapts to and changes these circumstances.
We are extending and developing conventional and computer-based methods for collecting interactive ethnographic data and methods of dynamic data management.
This effort incorporates a substantive project on the creation and transmission of local environmental knowledge. We hope to define aspects of best practice in ethnoecology and computer-assisted ethnographic research and to make these methods accessible to researchers who have limited experience with ethnographic approaches to social research, but who are involved in the application of local knowledge to practical conservation and development initiatives.
This requires useful instruments and procedures applicable outside anthropology and the means for integrating the results in a useful way with those of other disciplines. - We will review existing methods relevant to ethnoecology, identifying ways to amplify our ability to apply these using digital media and computers (particularly hand-held computers), develop new methods which produce results that can be integrated with those of other disciplines, improve our formal understanding of qualitative analysis, and investigate and develop prototypic interactive quantitative methods.
Online fieldwork from Pakistan. Produced in 1998 by Stephen Lyon for his thesis fieldwork. Not currently being updated. His thesis is available on-line at the site.
Avenir des Peuples des Forets Tropicales (APFT) - a large multi-sited project investigating rainforest peoples' adaptations to the degradation of their habitat.
