Humanities Program Spotlight:

Into the Field Workshop

No other subject in the university is as important as fieldwork: the gathering of evidence, the development of an empirical basis for theory and ideas. When Samuel Johnson kicked a stone in front of his participant-observer, Boswell, and said "I refute it thus," his refutation of Berkleyan ideals was based on fieldwork. When W. H. Auden said of his fellow poet, W. B. Yeats, that "The day of his death was a dark cold day," his observation of the chill in the air in January 1939 was based on fieldwork.

The Department of Linguistics recently held a one-day workshop, "Into the Field: A Workshop on Methods and Rewards in Fieldwork," at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies on Saturday, February 9. Co-sponsored by the College of Humanities, and the Buckeye Language Network, part of a College Targeted Investment in Excellence Initiative, the workshop focused on the subject of field research across many disciplines, from Anthropology to Education to English to Geography. The conference was organized by Cynthia Clopper (Linguistics), Galey Modan (English), Mary Rose (Linguistics), and Judith Tonhauser (Linguistics), and included papers by Amy Shuman (English) on research ethics, Mark Bender (East Asian Languages and Literatures) on Chinese folklore, Margaret Mills (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures) on the problems of collaborative ethnographic research, and Dorothy Noyes (English) on U.S. government policy towards interpretive research.