carsten knoch - essays + ideas
A blog about technology, politics, business, anthropology and (occasionally) music written by Carsten Knoch.
About two years ago, I wrote a post here describing a simple and cheap method of coding text documents such as interviews. (I’d encourage you to go and read it first before you continue. I won’t repeat the original argument here.) To my surprise, […]
A personal reflection on the death of Johnny Clegg, giant of South African music, in July 2019. … I met him once, very briefly. In my mid-20s, when I was living in Johannesburg, a colleague and I bumped into him holding court in a […]
Across the social sciences, including business ethnography, the so-called “best practice” for qualitative data analysis is to use coding, the process of categorizing data by applying tags to portions of it. These tags, and the data they label, can then be used […]
The following is an excerpt from the introduction to a forthcoming master’s thesis in anthropology which I am working on at the moment. This quasi-autoethnographic piece looks at why I am interested in ethics and ethnography in the context of management consulting. I’m sure […]
Recently, I experienced the following scene during a client meeting to review preliminary research results from the “ethnography” phase of a short service design consulting engagement: The research team, having been deeply engaged in fieldwork for several weeks, has worked up some preliminary findings […]
The CBC’s Fifth Estate, a documentary show that presents a weekly 60 Minutes style documentary, recently aired the corporation’s official public reckoning with the Jian Ghomeshi affair. (We know there’s perhaps some sort of report still to come from the CBC’s third party probe […]
Leading up to the impending start of my graduate program in anthropology, I have gotten myself involved in an initiative which—based in the Department—will explore ‘real-world’ and sometimes non-academic applications of ethnographic research. While that initiative continues to be mostly under wraps because it […]
Anthropology is, with music and mathematics, one of the few true vocations; and the anthropologist may become aware of it within himself before ever he has been taught it. (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 1961) It is a notable curiosity that many anthropologists who made […]
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