The in-between

As I said earlier, thanks to the muslim women I got into online research as a method to do anthropology, even in a moment where my college fellows didn’t approve it as a method.

Well, I didn’t care. And at that time it meant that I had to find my own theories, methods and tools to apply on qualitative online research. To do so I decided to get closer to other fields of knowledge and began a Post-Grad course on Digital Media, to understand a little bit more of journalism and marketing thought of the world.

At this course I had my first contact with many methods and tools that are useful until today, like low fidelity prototypes, information architecture, innovation, agile methods and even a dive in of how to structure my own company — which I did, as I’m going to tell lately.

Well to end the course and get my degree I had to write an essay of the result of a research done with what I learned at the course. It was 2017 and recently a concert of Ariana Grande in Manchester was the target of an attack.

Since 2001 when terrorist attacks began to be noticed in Brazil, because of the 11 of september attack at the World Trade Center. Our massive media reported stuff with imperialist bias, which meant that muslim or arabic people were never listened or even reached out in order to give their opinion about what happenned. Not only that, but the information given to the public sent the image that all muslim were violent and that terror was an intrinsic part of the religion — which, in case you don’t know, it’s a lie.

Me presenting the results to the advisors.

I decided to research and write about how a big news portal of Brazil reported this specific attack, relating it with all the context I just told you. To do so I first made a pre-analysis, where I organized all the information that was going to compose the actual analysis. Then I exploited the material, codifying the data based on the categories created on phase one. To end the research I treated the results and interpreted them based on the common characteristics they had presented and the relation with the bibliography related.

Slide presenting the methodology used — the one I told at the previous paragraph.

This experience was important to build my experience of online desk research, a skill that is really useful in my actual work as UX Researcher.

This research was also my first published book, that can be bought here. The entire presentation can be found, in Portuguese, here.