E-book Co-learning

Name	Description	Comments	Due
Dried fish stories: Reflections on visualizing social economies of dried fish in the time of COVID (Nireka Weeratunge, Eric Thrift)	Documentation of research findings with images and videos was an intended output of Dried Fish Matters at the scoping stage. However, COVID lockdowns and travel restrictions severely hampered the access of research teams to fieldwork sites. This short essay reflects on the collaborative process of generating stories on dried fish across six country/regional teams, by creatively combining limited material from the field with internet and social media resources. In addition to documentation, this process enabled capturing and conveying of dimensions that are not usually revealed through conventional research methods and analysis, especially sensory experiences, and cultural and symbolic aspects. The essay also discusses the technical challenges of producing a video by a predominantly social science team.	2022-02-14: Uploaded revised draft, which includes more images and a technical challenges section. E-book_NW+ET_Dried_fish_stories_Draft02_2022-02.docx 2022-01-18: Nireka suggests we could include sensoriality here. The section on reflexivity is rather brief here and it would be good if you could expand it and an additional section emphasising sensuality would enrich the essay, as there are references to sensorial experiences in a number of places. If you need to change the style of the chapter or prune down other sections in order to do this, that would be fine with me. However, if you think a standalone chapter is better, that is fine as well. 2022-01-17. Reply from Eric. I also prepared a transcript from the comments about taste and smell we collected over Zoom, with some framing text about reflexive approaches and the importance of sensoriality as a research approach. I’m not sure it fits perfectly within the text here, but perhaps we could present that as a short standalone chapter and work in a cross-reference to it here. From Nireka (to @ericthrift ): Please go through and revise as necessary before submission. A small section on technical challenges needs to be included - I left that to you as you must be having material from the presentation you did for TBTI! Additionally, an appropriate still photo (of the woman pounding the kapi sauce?) from the Thai video also needs to go in there.	--
Researching the researchers: communication and communication effectiveness in an international project (Alexia Pigeault & Fabiana Li)	Have you ever wondered how communication happens in a research team, and how it happens when researchers have to collaborate internationally with other peers? This essay focuses on communication in the international project "Dried Fish Matters” (DFM) and offers lessons on effective communication in the context of interdisciplinary research and development projects. For this study, we looked at internal and external communication in DFM and examined the possible factors influencing communication. Based on a survey, interviews, and observation during meetings, our findings show that open-mindedness, frequent communications, and transparency are all key influencing factors that can be seen as requirements for effective communications. There are also other factors that shape communication, such as having the same definition of communication; social relationships between colleagues; the type of hierarchy in the project and in research teams; cultural differences; interdisciplinarity; personality traits; the number of languages spoken; new technologies; management issues; Global South challenges; the outcomes of the dissemination plan; and people’s thoughts on a project. An important lesson from the study is that self-analysis and introspection can help a team of researchers to work toward better communication and project outputs.		--
SECTION INTRODUCTION: Co-learning (methodological reflections)			--
Online marketing and e-commerce of dried fish in Thailand (Nova Almine and Ratana Chuenpagdee)	(Revised topic) Study of e-commerce. There are several Facebook groups selling dried fish in Thailand. Many of the groups have up to 217,000 group members that are offering both wholesaling and retailing of dried fish products). Some sellers source their products directly from harvesters and processors located in different provinces. The majority of the Facebook groups were created from the beginning of the COVID times in 2020 until 2021, and new groups continue to appear. Some groups are for wholesale merchants only, while many allow every member to post and sell their products on the Facebook group. Some vendors offer to resell their products to group members. Another popular way of selling online on Facebook is called “Live selling”, where the vendor uses video setup (live streaming) to show and sell the products to their live viewers. This is also called conversational commerce or “C commerce”. It enables direct communication to potential buyers. It is effective because the viewer can buy the product by commenting on the code, they are interested in buying, then it will be reserved for that person.	2022-01-25: Nova supplied some screenshots on request, showing dried fish product listings from Amazon, eBay, and Facebook (group and marketplace). 2022-01-24 Submission received 2022-01-19: Update from Ratana At the moment, we're thinking that a study, which she can done remotely, about the E-commerce of dried fish in Thailand will be an excellent contribution considering its prominence since COVID-19. This means, instead of contributing the essay about the Philippines as intended, she's writing a short piece about this aspect for the E-book as a way to get her started on the research. I'm working with her on the piece and we hope to get it done this weekend and will send it you, plus incorporate it in the report that we're finalizing. We can certainly talk about it a bit more after you see the piece and the report, as part of the next steps for DFM Thailand research. 2022-01-18: Asked Ratana in response to the Thailand submission. May need to ask Nova directly.	2022-01-24
Tastes and smells of dried fish (Stories by Gayathri Lokuge, Madu Galappaththi, Mostafa Hossain, and Nikita Gopal; Commentary by Eric Thrift)	This is a brief commentary on the "taste and smell" discussion we held over Zoom and included in the video presented at the MARE Conference.		2022-01-25
Computer-assisted research and the construction of a "dried fish literature" (Eric Thrift with Derek Johnson, Ben Belton, and Jonah Olsen)	Three years ago, we set out on what appeared, at the time, to be a fairly straightforward task: writing a survey of the published literature on dried fish. As we struggled to make sense of the thousands of references to dried, fermented, salted, and smoked fish returned by Google Scholar’s opaque algorithms, we found that technology had come to play a governing role in our unexpectedly formidable project. Instead of simply reading and summarizing an established body of scholarship, we were actively working to define a “dried fish literature” through the intermediary of Google Scholar, Zotero, and additional tools of our own design. In this essay, I reflect on how communicative tools and technologies shaped our reading of this literature, structuring our ways of seeing and interacting with “dried fish” as a category of knowledge.		2022-01-26

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