Contextualizing impressions of neighborhood change: Linking business directories to ethnography

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

City and Community

Publication Date

9-1-2008

Abstract

This article suggests a research tool, the temporal map, for ethnographers to employ in supplementing the accounts of urban change provided by local informants. Such a map, created using city business directories, can provide an external validity check to ethnographic research. The authors' tool allows urban ethnographers to extend contemporary ethnographic accounts backward to a period prior to the beginning of fieldwork. It provides a geooral contextualization by fitting fragmented, geographically and historically specific ethnographic accounts into a broader area and across a broader period of time. The authors show how two ethnographic case studies were enhanced by such temporal maps. Their cases involve a redeveloped central business district in North Carolina and a gentrified neighborhood in New York City. © 2008 American Sociological Association.

Volume

7

Issue

3

First Page

273

Last Page

293

DOI

10.1111/j.1540-6040.2008.00261.x

ISSN

15356841

E-ISSN

15406040

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