Approximation towards a mission statement of intended purpose

This is an attempt towards creating a phenomenologically orientated ethnography using only resources that can be accessed from the digital sphere.

(Keeping in mind here the following: "[Christopher Tilley] argued that simply by looking at two-dimensional depictions of a landscape, such as on a map, archaeologists fail to understand how peoples living in hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies actually related to those areas - he believed therefore that investigators should enter the very landscape which they are studying, and use their senses of sight, smell and hearing to learn more about how historical peoples would have interpreted it." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_%28archaeology%29) I believe that an archaeology in future may well have to rely on digital data but this need not have to mean that a phenomenological approach has to be discarded. A representation of sensory experience of an area can be achieved through the resources available from an online environment.)

I will here upload links towards a variety of resources that relate to the actual lived experience on the short stretch on New Cross Road as informed by the maps, blogs, articles, and any other sources that appear online. The culimnative of the impressions left by these sources will be written up to represent an attempt towards an ethnography carried out in the digital realm, utilising digital technology but focusing on an actual landscape which provides many people with the backdrop to a significant portion of their lives.

Just as the methodology will be primarily experimental so the method of presentation, primarily the writing style, will be experimental. This is as much an excercise to find out about the sort of impressions the tools available create, how they can be used, and what their shortcomings are as it is an actual attempt for me to find a method of ethnographic writting that suits my purpose. I will try and follow a variety of the voices that I have encountered during my time engaged with anthropology and will take first and foremost that there is no one correct way of conducting ethnography.

Tom Boellstorff attempted to create an ethnography that drew entirely on data collected by his informants in (Coming of Age in) Second Life (Princeton University Press, 2008) and thus never left the sphere of the virtual, arguing in stead that since humans have always conducted themselves through the virtual, be it language or myth for examle, his approach was valid for examing human experience.

In his Cocaine Museum (Pluto Press, 2004) Michael Taussig created a make belief museum to serve as "a vantage point from which to assess the lives of Afro-Colombian gold miners drawn into the dangerous world of cocaine production" (see URL: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=3614045). This here ought to serve as a collection of my own from which I hope to further understand this particular urban space.