Dydia DeLyser

Bio: Dydia DeLyser is an academic researcher from Louisiana State University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Historical geography & Scholarship. The author has an hindex of 21, co-authored 39 publications receiving 1784 citations. Previous affiliations of Dydia DeLyser include California State University, Fullerton & Syracuse University.

Authenticity on the Ground: Engaging the Past in a California Ghost Town

Abstract: This qualitative study explores how the concept of authenticity is constructed, experienced and employed by visitors and staff in the provocative landscape of the ghost town of Bodie, California. Bodie State Historic Park, once a booming gold-mining town, now greets some two hundred thousand tourists annually and is widely applauded for its authenticity. In this paper, I explore the meaning of this term in its ghost-town context: while boom-town Bodie was a bustling commercial center, ghost-town Bodie appears abandoned and devoid of commercial activity. Thus, authenticity in a ghost town is not tied to the accuracy with which it represents its past. Yet a version of Bodie's past is what both visitors and staff experience: they employ Bodie's authenticity to engage with the mythic West, a romanticized version of the Anglo-American past that upholds dominant contemporary Anglo-American values. Bodie's false-fronted facades and ramshackle miners' cabins call forth these images, familiar to visitors from movi...

"Do You Really Live Here?" Thoughts on Insider Research

Abstract: ********** One summer Saturday I was sitting at the living-room table in a run-down old house in the gold-mining ghost town of Bodie, a California State Historic Park located in the high-altitude desert east of the Sierra Nevada. Signs on the outside walls of the house identified it as an "Employees' residence." A nearby number post linked the building to the park's self-guided-tour brochure, which described it as "the Gregory House" and detailed the lives of the home's historic inhabitants. I was busy writing when small running footsteps approached: children, some of the 200,000 or so annual visitors to Bodie. A brown-haired girl of about eight and her towheaded kid brother strained to pierce the relative darkness inside the house. What they saw was me. Turning away from the window, the girl hollered to her parents, "There's a guy in there! And he's dead! Lie died writing!" Being taken for dead--and for a man--may seem shocking to some, but this was not the only time that I was seen as a ghost--or as a man--during the fourteen summers that I worked and did fieldwork in Bodie. (1) But experiences like this one led me to contemplate the interactions between my physical presence and my role as insider in the public place that I was trying to study. As a researcher I was interested in how visitors and staff understood Bodie's past and made room for it in their present, in how they made meaning in and from the landscape. But as a staff member and part of the Bodie community, I myself was part of that process. An important aspect of my work became understanding how I was a part of my own research and negotiating the challenges that being an insider" presented. STUDYING YOUR OWN COMMUNITY Because gaining perspective on something you're in the middle of poses distinct challenges, texts on qualitative research methods often advise students not to study communities or situations of which they are already part. Robert Bogdan and Sari Biklen warn that since qualitative researchers regularly focus on the taken for granted, starting with an insider's perspective can make research harder rather than easier (1998, 52). "You may fail to notice pertinent questions or issues because of the inability to step back from a situation and fully assess the circumstances," add Rob Kitchin and Nicholas Tate (2000, 29). The insider researcher may be "over-familiar with the community," leading to "too much participation at the expense of observation," cautions Mel Evans (1988, 205). Furthermore, that can lead to other problems: Anselm Strauss warns that those who literally "live" a study may "know too much experientially and descriptively about the phenomena they are studying and so [end up] literally flooded with m aterials" (1987, 29). Those with a preexisting role can find that role in contradiction with the separate status of researcher; the transition between roles may cause personal difficulties; and ethical issues may arise when studying coworkers, particularly if a researcher is in a position of power over them (Bogdan and Biklen 1998, 52). Flying in the face of all that good advice, some researchers, like me, find topics close to home, or close to our hearts--topics so compelling we can't leave them alone--and we try to find ways to use our "insider" status to help, not hinder, insights. Of course, the distinction between insiders and outsiders is not a simple one. (2) When anthropologists are "adopted" by their communities, they may be criticized for "going native" (Tedlock 2000), and warnings against this are probably even more prevalent than are those against studying one's own community (Strauss 1987; Reinharz 1992). To me, the difference seems significant: Those who "go native" begin as outsiders, whereas those of us who study our own communities start as insiders and are "natives" before the research begins--a distinction not widely acknowledged in the literature. Some writers who describe "complete participation" (Kearns 2000) or a "complete member researcher" (Ellis and Bochner 2000) fail to distinguish between researchers who start by studying their own communities and the really quite distinct circumstance of growing deeply involved in a community after research is begun. …

The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Geography

Abstract: Introduction: Engaging Qualitative Geography - Dydia DeLyser et al PART ONE: OPENINGS Introduction - Dydia DeLyser A History of Qualitative Research in Geography - Meghan Cope 'Throwntogetherness': Encounters with Difference and Diversity - Stuart C Aitken A Taut Rubber Band: Theory and Empirics in Qualitative Geographic Research - Steve Herbert Policy, Research Design and the Socially Situated Researcher - Kari B Jensen and Amy K Glasmeier Mixed Methods: Thinking, Doing and Asking in Multiple Ways - Sarah Elwood PART TWO: ENCOUNTERS AND COLLABORATIONS Introduction - Steve Herbert Ethnography and Participant Observation - Annette Watson and Karen E Till Autoethnography as Sensibility - David Butz Interviewing: Fear and Liking in the Field - Linda McDowell Life History Interviewing - Peter Jackson and Polly Russell Focus Groups as Collaborative Research Performances - Fernando J Bosco and Thomas Herman Visual Methods and Methodologies - Mike Crang Doing Landscape Interpretation - Nancy Duncan and James Duncan Caught in the Nick of Time: Archives and Fieldwork - Hayden Lorimer Textual and Discourse Analysis - Jason Dittmer GIS as Qualitative Research: Knowledge, Participatory Politics and Cartographies of Affect - Stuart C Aitken and Mei-Po Kwan 'A Little Bird Told Me ...': Approaching Animals through Qualitative Methods - Mona Seymour and Jennifer Wolch Performative, Non-Representational and Affect-Based Research: Seven Injunctions - J D Dewsbury PART THREE: MAKING SENSE Introduction - Mike Crang Writing Qualitative Geography - Dydia DeLyser The Art of Geographic Interpretation - Sara MacKian Representing the Other: Negotiating the Personal and the Political - Garth Myers Major Disasters and General Panics: Methodologies of Activism, Affinity and Emotion in the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army - Paul Routledge Reflections on Teaching Qualitative Methods in Geography - Deborah G Martin

Crossing the qualitative-quantitative chasm I: Hybrid geographies, the spatial turn, and volunteered geographic information (VGI)

Abstract: This report, the first of three, reviews methods and methodological approaches, qualitative and quantitative. In an effort to look beyond the qualitative-quantitative divide, two geographers with different methodological background and expertise write together. This first report reviews works under the broader context of hybrid geographies, the spatial turn, and the recent explosive growth of volunteered geographic information (VGI). The works reviewed seek to combine methodological approaches in creative ways, or to create other hybrid research methods, all to address the challenging problems of our times – problems that often demand synergy in methodology, holism in ontology, plurarism/open-mindedness in epistemology, and embracing diversity.

Crossing the qualitative- quantitative divide II Inventive approaches to big data, mobile methods, and rhythmanalysis

Abstract: In this second of three reports on qualitative and quantitative methods we highlight novel methods with particular purchase on the problems of our time. We again focus on scholarship crossing multiple geographical divides, those of neo/paleo geography, qualitative/quantitative methods, and physical/human geography. We do so now by concentrating on three areas: the emerging digital humanities and the rise of big data, mobile methods, and rhythmanalysis. With this broad approach we seek also to encourage consilience, synergy, and a positive embrace of diversity in geographical scholarship.

Qualitative research for education: An introduction to theories and methods

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스크린 위의 삶 = Life on the screen : identity in the age of the internet

Abstract: From the Publisher: A Question of Identity Life on the Screen is a fascinating and wide-ranging investigation of the impact of computers and networking on society, peoples' perceptions of themselves, and the individual's relationship to machines. Sherry Turkle, a Professor of the Sociology of Science at MIT and a licensed psychologist, uses Internet MUDs (multi-user domains, or in older gaming parlance multi-user dungeons) as a launching pad for explorations of software design, user interfaces, simulation, artificial intelligence, artificial life, agents, "bots," virtual reality, and "the on-line way of life." Turkle's discussion of postmodernism is particularly enlightening. She shows how postmodern concepts in art, architecture, and ethics are related to concrete topics much closer to home, for example AI research (Minsky's "Society of Mind") and even MUDs (exemplified by students with X-window terminals who are doing homework in one window and simultaneously playing out several different roles in the same MUD in other windows). Those of you who have (like me) been turned off by the shallow, pretentious, meaningless paintings and sculptures that litter our museums of modern art may have a different perspective after hearing what Turkle has to say. This is a psychoanalytical book, not a technical one. However, software developers and engineers will find it highly accessible because of the depth of the author's technical understanding and credibility. Unlike most other authors in this genre, Turkle does not constantly jar the technically-literate reader with blatant errors or bogus assertions about how things work. Although I personally don't have time or patience for MUDs,view most of AI as snake-oil, and abhor postmodern architecture, I thought the time spent reading this book was an extremely good investment.

Developing rigor in qualitative research: problems and opportunities within sport and exercise psychology

Abstract: Qualitative research has grown within sport and exercise psychology and is now widely conducted The purpose of this review is to discuss three commonly used ways to demonstrate rigor when conducti