Picking Apart Exemplars

I thought today's class was very helpful, and it was fun to hear what different people were doing and what kind of information they had gotten from their respective observation points. Discussing these exemplars, or "examples" helped me put into perspective some of the details that I hadn't noticed. For instance, I added some questions: "Have you ever met someone by just sitting next to them (on a bench)?" and "Do you welcome newcomers to the area? How do established members react to new people in the area?" "Do you study here? Do you study different subjects (classes, not people)?" I also learned that ethnographists assume nothing, so I added the question "Do you have class back here?"

Since I didn't read my interview today, I thought I would post it...It's not very good because I didn't write the questions when I was asking them, and there are a lot of gaps. My interview mainly turned out to be a lot of really interesting quotes, so I felt, and not so much a storyline dialogue.

Since we already knew each other, the formal introduction was pretty much dropped, but I did let her know that the confidentiality policy had changed. These are the basic questions that went along with the answers she gave me, since I failed to write down the exact questions, and some of the answers are generalized and not word-for-word, but there are a couple that are verbatim.
“So, what year are you?”
“I’m a sophomore.”
“How long have you been going to school here at UK? Where are you from?”
“I’m actually a transfer student, and this is my first year here at UK. I went to school somewhere else (I forgot where) and then I went and taught kids in Japan and then I came here.”
(Here, I suppose, I could have gone on to ask about what Japanese schools are like for a broader ethnographic study, but I didn’t think about that at the time…)
“Why do you come here?”
“Most of my conversations during the day happen here...” We proceeded to talk about how she was able to always find a friend from ESL or from Japanese class to talk to while she was there, and the fact that as she talked to her friends, she was introduced to friends of her friends…at which point she said something I feel is a very important indicator of the presence of a Cosmopolitan:
“A comment here, which goes everywhere and suddenly you’re connected to something you never imagined.”
In a Cosmopolitan society, the possibilities of discovery about the nature of individuals are endless and even unimaginable at times. And the way to unlocking this unimaginable information is by asking a single question or making a single comment, however small.