Author: aalinds

 Questions about answering the research question:  

• What barriers may be problematic? 

• What can we accomplish within our allotted time? 

• What we will adjust if the plan isn’t feasible? 

• How will we make sure our final product is accessible? 

Geographic Focus and Stakeholders: Garden Visitors 

Data Collection : Focus group questions towards tower grove house tour guides.  The goal is to tell the stories of the people who were enslaved there. Getting more access to the archives to see if there’s anything we could use for information about the enslaved. 

• How can we bring the aspects of the exhibit from the basement throughout the house? 

• How much information do we have and what do we need to tell these stories accurately? 

• How much of the house do we have access to in order to make our exhibit? 

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Implementation:  

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Section 1: Research Questions Explain what specific problem or issue you are addressing. Be sure to do this work in consultation with your partners. What research questions do you have about the problem? What do you want to test? What can you feasibly act upon? 

I’m not sure what research questions we have about the problem that I haven’t covered in the first section. We want to see how we can engage the garden’s visitors in learning about such a heavy topic as slavery. We can feasibly act upon this by connecting more explicitly with the resources availiable to us. 

 Section 2: Geographic Focus and Stakeholders This could be as specific as the docents at MOBOT or as broad as the Tower Grove Neighborhood. Explain why you have chosen the focus and who your key stakeholders are. Tell us what you know about them and what you still need to know. Explain the role and level of involvement of each stakeholder.  

Our group would like to focus on MOBOT visitors to be Stakeholders. We would like to share our knowledge and educate people who visit the garden about the African American history at MOBOT. Our geographic focus would specifically be the house within the garden. We would like to reach out to as many visitors as possible, our involvement is especially important. 

Section 3: Data Collection What data do you need to answer your question: secondary research, interviews, surveys, focus groups, oral histories, ethnographies, scientific experiments? Drawing on your experience from your other CODES courses, develop plans for specific data sets that need to be collected. Each member of the team will be responsible for collecting and curating one data set. Raw data should be maintained in a shared drive accessible to the entire team. Determine what data you will need to collect and who will be responsible for the work. For each data collection activity in your plan, consider why you are collecting it, how and from whom you will collect it, and what methods will be most effective. 

We will need secondary research, oral histories, and ethnographies.  

Secondary Research: Li  

Oral Histories: Priscilla/Aydien 

Ethnographies: Shelby 

**** we still need to answer the HOW**** 

 Section 4: Implementation What will be the outcome of your research? Will you develop an exhibit, engage students in a learning activity, or design a digital project? Why is this the best plan for implementation? What do you need to know to make the implementation successful? How will it meet the needs of your audience? Who will do each part of the work? How will you assess its success? 

The outcome of our research would be creating an exhibit that focuses on the lives and experiences of the slaves and African American connected to the house. Visitors will gain a greater understanding of both the everyday events and the difficult circumstances they had to face thanks to this exhibit. Creating this exhibit would give visitors a more direct and immersive way to interact with the history of slavery connected to the garden. I will need more specific information about the particular people who were kept as slaves in the house, as well as an understanding of their day-to-day activities, to successfully execute the plan. Finding out which rooms in the house are available and which ones are not will also be necessary. In order to learn more about the house and obtain the tax information for the slaves, it would be imperative to get in touch with Sean and Robbie. The exhibit’s success will be assessed based on visitor engagement, feedback, and whether it improves visitors’ awareness of African American history in the home. 

SURVERY PROCESS REFLECTION

The creation of our surveys was a very iterative process requiring great amounts of patience and meticulous refining.  Gathering thoughtful and thorough answers from our survey’s participants proved to be quite challenging. It appeared that we had recieved a whopping thirty-three responses but after further investigation, we only had 11 complete responses. More than half of the respondants didn’t finish the survey but instead only paritally completed it. Thankfully, the 11 responses provided us with adequate amounts of insight.

The overarching goal of the survey questions was to gain an understanding of how the current employees at MOBOT perceive the lack of African American representation and knowledge within the herbarium. To get a scope of this we asked questions such as ” What barriers do you perceive in intergrating AA knowledge into the garden?” and ” How well do you think the gardens currently represent AA knowledge and contributions?” Our responses varied slightly but primarily the answers consisted of similar perspectives.

My group also thought it was important to define specifically what we mean by African American knowledge so that their was minimal confusion. We defined it as ” the collective experiences, history, culture, and contributions of people of African descent in America.”

FOCUS GROUP REFLECTION

This was the second step in the process of collecting our data. A well-executed focus group should “help you understand how a particular trait or identity shapes responses to your research question, see how ideas and opinions are formed and shaped through conversation, and allow participants to collaboratively work through a problem.” All three of these criteria were not just met but exceeded. I found that the focus groups were a lot more informative, honest, and in-depth compared to the surveys. I feel like this was because they had no other choice but to sit down and think of a response whereas with a survey you can just exit out of it. There is a fresher, more intense version of accountability imposed onto the participants in a focus group setting which produced more authentic answers.  

The way the groups were set up was also really neat as well. The timer being in place to regulate the rotation of the employees was perfectly executed. It allowed us to get a well-rounded set of responses and ideas. We learned about new people who could be potential resources in the future such as Matthew Norman (the rosarian) and Daria Mckelvy. One of the participants highlighted the fact that MOBOT has all of the names of the donors and botanists but not the names of the slaves who helped build it and that stood out to me. I liked that she was able to comfortably highlight the hypocrisy in that. Another thing that stood out to me was a question that Nicole Smith asked. She asked us ” What medium or tool would be most effective for telling the stories and what are our goals as CODES students in telling these stories? ” and I was stumped at that moment. I think the answer to this question is something that we are currently trying to configure.  

Attached here is the audio from the focus groups : 

Andrew focus group 2.m4a

First focus group.m4a

Morgan and John focus group.m4a

Morgan maul Smith.m4a

DATA CLEANING AND VISUALIZING REFLECTION

Data cleaning is the process of identifying and correcting errors, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies in a data set to improve its quality and reliability for analysis. These steps can include identification of errors, correcting inconsistencies, and handling potential outliers. Data cleaning is a crucial step in the data analysis process as it helps improve the accuracy and reliability of analytical results, leading to more informed decision-making. This process was the most tedious when it came to transcribing the audio from the focus groups to ensure that everything properly corroborated.

Similarly, data visualization is the graphical representation of data and information using visual elements such as charts, graphs, and maps. The primary goal of data visualization is to communicate complex data in a clear and concise manner, making it easier for users to understand patterns, trends, and insights within the data. Me and my group members were able to achieve this through a site called Voyant. Voyant is a text analysis and visualization platform that identifies word frequency. It also provides options such as bubble lines, word trees, and scatter plots, to explore textual data in different ways. Attached below is the result of our engagement with Voyant. 

This trip to the Garden informed a few parts of our research team’s goal but not in as depth as we would have preferred. In the archival traces worksheet, a concept called “instances of possibility” is mentioned which basically translates to possessing potential. I found that there was an ample amount of room for possibility and potential after reviewing some of the documents. While listening to the employee of the garden describe the details of the specimens, we found that there were not many details at all that would answer our questions explicitly. So instead, we chose to not make evaluations based on what information we had but rather the lack thereof and how this unavailability further informs our search for African American knowledge in the garden. The specimens did have a few common themes such as being used for medicinal purposes. There was even a specimen containing red seeds used as spiritual protection by a specific culture of people. I noticed that the creators of the specimens were mostly the same although this was intentional as the archivist sorted through the archives to tailor to our group’s needs, I thought it was important to note. The worker who went through the specimens with our team mentioned to us how rare it is that the common names and usages of the plants were rarely included in the archives. This does carry that theme of “silencing,” but I am not sure how we would begin to effectively address this in our research teams. The workers in the garden seem to struggle to attain this information and they are trained in this. If the lack of information is the root issue and we either cannot attain it or it is really difficult to, it is not apparent to me how we will get over this hurdle.  

What is a current state analysis?

A current state analysis is a process used to evaluate and understand the present-day situation of any given system. Looking at the Missouri Botanical Gardens, our system is the wicked problem of inequality in plant knowledge. There are 4 questions that we should ask ourselves as researchers for this process: 1) Where are we? 2) Where are we headed? 3) Where do we want to go? and 4) How do we get there?

A system can be best described as a set of interconnected components organized in such a way that they cannot act individually and achieve the same results. Regulation of these systems is conducted through direct drivers and indirect drivers. Direct drivers unequivocally impact the overall behavior of a system. Indirect drivers influence the system’s behavior in a more diffuse and subtle way. (Make sure to refer thinking in systems back to the textbook)  

Our research problem in The Missouri Botanical Gardens is an example of a complex adaptive system meaning that it develops over time to adapt in a way that ensures its survival. When you approach this system using reductionist thinking, you can more clearly see how the components interact with each other on a smaller scale. Pictured below is a system of a few direct and indirect drivers that contribute to the issue of plant inequality at MOBOT.  

One of the most impactful direct drivers in this situation is the practice of colonialism extraction used to retreive the plants. This selection process is biased in every aspect incluidng where the plants are collected from, what plants are collected, and who collects the plants. Usually, white men get to decide all of these things which means that the plant selction is often rooted in personal biases and preferences. This breeds an indirect driver of cultural insensitivity. The people who depend on these plants locally often get no say in the extraction of these plants that have medicinal and nutritous uses for them. Taking these plants from their space and transporting it for research else where might provoke strong feelings of anger and despair.

The prioritization of western science is another direct driver for our system. The complete disregarding or minimization of indigenous knowledge of plant has resulted in a collection of plant knowledge curated almost entirely by the minds of white men. Western science is based on things such as global verifacation, quantatative written record, and mathematical models. Traditonal Native knowledge is rooted in things such as qualitative world record, practical application, and holistic thinking. These two approaches to research and science should be carefully integrated and applied when collecting plant specimens and when the binomial nomenclature process is being conducted. Although these systems of thinking should be combined its essential that their is emphasis placed on the traditonal native knowledge because the plants are local to their areas and are heavily relied upon by the native people.

The names given to plants by the Native people are particularly important to understanding not only the cultural knoweldge surrounding it. It also gives entail about the uses of the plant.