I traded in Chikara Yokosuka for Warai Omizu, my female alter ego inside of Second Life.We studied a community of practice inside of Second Life – how a group inside a virtual world can supports community. After mulling over a few options, we decided to study geisha culture. One other researcher and I have an affinity for Japanese culture, so it made sense.
We spent some time doing participant observation – training as shikomi, which are the lowest rank in the geisha chain. I dropped out to do more observational research, while the other stayed in and was actually promoted to minarai, the next rank.
Most of what we did was take notes. Notes, notes, notes. After we took notes, we rendered them into categories. The goal was to fill up a category of all kinds of different instances of something happening so we could help explain what this group was doing.
I attended roughly 10 events, spending about the same number of hours in the field, but likely more. I spent more time rendering notes than I did in the field, for sure.
We also conducted interviews with members. I had an informant that I conducted formal interviews with, where I had crafted questions beforehand looking to gain certain information. I have data from about a dozen interviews.
The rest of what we did was observed – watched how other avatars interact with each other, where, for how long, and so on. The difficult part was finding data where we didn't have an effect on it.
Two books that guided us were Coming of Age in Second Life by Tom Boellstorff and The Discovery of Grounded Theory by Anselm L. Straus and Barney Glaser.
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