This week was consumed with initial preparations for ethnographic ‘fieldwork’ on the www.Coursera.org MOOC on Scandinavian Film and TV Culture. It is a five-week course which coincides conveniently with the time span of the EDC ethnographic learning activity. As a participant in the course, I viewed the six, 10-minute video lectures on the Week 1 syllabus that focused on the main trends of Scandinavian cinema, early age of Scandinavian cinema, and the influence of Swedish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, in particular. This immersion into the course as a participant gave me some insights into the requirements of the course and the discussions amongst the learners in the course. I also spent some exploring different digital tools to represent the ethnographic research. I registered for a few different tools recommended at: http://50ways.wikispaces.com, but I have not settled on any one in particular to use at this juncture. Initially, I was looking at timeline tools, but after experimenting with them I don’t feel that they will useful for the representation that I have in mind. This lead me to more of a Twitter analytics methodology which is represented by this Tweet Archivist link, with key words ‘Scandinavian Film”: http://www.tweetarchivist.com/f68475ca/17691

I will try to conform to Dr. Jeremy Knox’s advice to narrowly focus the scope of this ‘micro’-ethnography. Currently, my approach is to focus on the students’ discussion forum comments and threads related to the Danish director Lars Von Trier, and perhaps just one of his films (e.g., Dogville, Melancholia), or the Dogma 95 movement. I have set up key word searches on these parameters with Tweet Archivist. Based on initial data sets, I’ll determine how to refine the scope of the research even further, while also continuing to explore and experiment the digital representation tools; probably focusing more on slideshow type tools.

Force Majeure (Swedish: Turist) is a 2014 Swedish drama film directed by Ruben Östlund.