This week in class we read a writing from Kahn. He talks about ethnography, which is not something that I had explicitly heard about before. To an extent, ethnography is common sense; don't portray communities negatively when you do a work about them, do your best to not offend anyone. It is more complicated once you go beneath the surface, however. For example, our documentary is going to be going up on the internet, which makes it available for anyone to see. This means that we need to make sure our work is not offensive to the Purdue League of Legends club, as well as making sure to make it inoffensive to potential viewers.
There is also the concept of imperial and colonial critiques. The imperial critique is likely the one that is preferable for us to use for our project. This is where we actually interact with the community and try to get to know them a bit during the process, hopefully in this process we will somehow leave the community better than we found it, either directly or not. This could be accomplished by actual interaction, or by their viewing of the documentary. Colonial critiques are not as helpful for anyone, this would be if we went in and filmed the community without interacting with them at all. Colonial critique is like the silent observer, this does not help the community or you at all as you do not interact with the community so no one involved gains anything from the process.
This gives us a lot to consider as we need to make our documentary entertaining, informative, inoffensive, and hopefully while doing all of this we have learned something about the community and helped the community gain something.
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