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From Noise to Signal

Someone somewhere values that niche thing you know so much about, enough enough for a friend to ask a friend to buy a book in London and bring it to Helsinki. This issue of understanding what has value echoes a challenge we face during field studies: given that the value of what is recorded is often apparent after returning from the field how do you know what to document?

The answer is a valid reason for doing at least some of this kind of research in-house. When you out-source qualitative research the subcontractor is paid to present signals and filter out noise. But some of that noise does in fact have value, it just doesn't have value at the time of the report writing, or is not apparent to the report writers. Recording all photo/video/metadata is both impractical - too much data processing, boring - a trained monkey could do it, and morally dubious - how to protect the privacy of the people who feature in your data collection?

Writing from Helsinki | November 14, 2006 | Permalink