My recent ethnographic research has turned out to be an ethnography of ethnography. I entered my research site with the intention of studying the talk that surrounded the writing of an evaluation report in a post-secondary institution. I observed two administrators of a department in a college conduct an internal review and evaluation of a group of their educational programs for children. The administrators interviewed the program coordinators and the teachers involved in the programs, took notes on the interviews, compiled the notes, and then wrote a report detailing their findings and making recommendations for the programs. They sent their report to a senior administrator of the college and discussed the findings with the coordinators and teachers. They then made changes of various kinds to the programs. I attended, taped, and transcribed all the interviews with coordinators and teachers and all meetings between the two administrators at which they discussed the evaluation. I also collected copies of the notes the administrators took during the interviews and copies of all drafts of the report itself.

By the time I was done, I realized that I was in a position to say something about the doing and writing of ethnography itself and the way in which ethnographic writing practices produce knowledge. Some readers might contend that what my research subjects did was not really ethnography. As members themselves of the social setting in which they were conducting their research, they could hardly be regarded as neutral observers of the situation. I believe their research has much in common with what is generally regarded as ethnographic research. They talked to members of a social setting, recorded the experiences of those members, and then wrote a description of those experiences. My purpose here is not to define the boundaries of ethnography, but rather to examine the process of knowledge construction in the doing of ethnographic research.

As is usual in this kind of study, I have more material than I know what to do with. For this brief article I want to focus on one aspect of the practice of  ethnography -- the writing and reading of "field notes." Field notes might be regarded as a genre in their own right, as there are specific writing and reading practices associated with them. But I want to examine the role of these notes in the construction of the purportedly "objective" knowledge that the administrators in my study were gathering as a basis for decision making about the programs they were evaluating.

One short example will illustrate the way in which the field notes were implicated in the construction of knowledge in this study. What follows is an analysis of one brief question and answer sequence from an interview between the administrators and a teacher. D is the administrator who was speaking at the time; T is the teacher.

D: How do you feel about the general quality of instruction within the program?

T: Like each teacher, what they do?

D: Yeah, not asking to break down each teacher individually, but are you generally comfortable that there is a good standard of instruction, good teachers doing good work, or do you have concerns about it?

T: I would think they do good work, but I have never seen anybody. I saw a few of Mary's and Crystal's [not their real names] students, so that is what I can say I saw. So this is it, I don't know exactly how many we have in the program, who is in the program. I saw Mary and Crystal's students because we had a few recitals together, so what I saw I liked, but I am not sure, is that it or is there more to it, or did everybody perform.

The second set of notes captures some of her uncertainty with the words "not sure she knows from the outside." But this is not the language the teacher used. She said "I have never seen anybody," meaning that she had never actually seen any other teachers teach and so had no direct personal knowledge of the teaching abilities of other teachers. This is presumably what the director was trying to record with the word "outside" in his notes, but without the context of the interview for reference, "outside" does not convey this meaning with any certainty. It could, for example, mean that she has not heard any comments from people outside the program.

In any case, because of the way the field notes were amalgamated in the list of notes which the administrator used when writing the report, the point is moot. The amalgamated notes that he worked from and that are appended to the final copy of the report read as follows: 'Think they do good work. Teachers have different approach, some H. some reading. Sees other teachers' students in recitals, what she sees she likes." (The remark about the different approaches comes from a later section of the interview.) The director's phrase "not sure she knows from the outside" has disappeared and with it any indication of the teacher's reluctance and uncertainty. The notes now convey the sense that she thinks the other teachers are doing good work because she likes what she sees in recitals.

The notes that the administrators took in the interviews thus condensed and transformed the teachers' answers. The answers that appear in the notes therefore cannot be taken to represent the answers the teachers gave. They can, however, be taken to represent what the administrators regarded as relevant to their administrative concerns. They selected from what the teachers said on the basis of what would be important and relevant for the construction of the report they would write in which they would assess and make recommendations for the various programs. It would have been impossible for the administrators to do otherwise; they could attend to everything that was said in the interviews only if they taped and transcribed them, and even then they would have had to select from the material in some way in order to produce a report of reasonable length. When it came time to write the report, the administrator had access only to these transformed versions of the teachers' answers, not to the words the teachers said. He may also have had memories of the interviews, but, as six months passed between the beginning of the interviews and the beginning of the writing of the report, these were likely not vivid. Whether or not he could actually remember what was said in the interviews, however, the notes now stood for the interviews. The notes at that point were the interviews and formed the basis for the managers' version of the organization as presented in their report.