Antonio Johnson

Alice Nicholas

Writing for Social Sciences

                                                         Observation

For my research, I attended New York City Architecture part 3: Symbols and Monuments Webinar on Wednesday, September 6th 8-10pm which is sponsored by the New York Adventure Club website and David V. Griffin will be the Host to present the architecture in the meeting. The purpose of this event is to people about the structure of buildings in New York City, telling them why and how they built the way they are. Also, this event will be revealing the history of the architecture in New York along with how it changed overtime. My purpose for observing this event is to assess how it is set up and how effective it can be towards the participants. My plan to do so was by observing the reactions of the viewers and the questions they have regarding the structures of buildings being shown. I also observed how the speaker is describing the buildings, whether he is listing the features of them or simply describing the overall structure.

I made observations for this event by participating in the meeting so that way I can have a clear idea of what is being presented and how the audience will react. This type of observation was a semi-structured observation because I already knew what the event was going to be about. One part of the event that I didn’t know from before is the type of people that will participate so I could only assume that it’s those that are interested in architecture. Despite me being in the online meeting, I did not plan to engage which means I wasn’t going to be one of the people to ask questions or say anything in the chat. This is because I am focusing on mainly the host and the participants to see how they interact without any form of interruption. I paid attention to what the host is saying when presenting and how he is describing the architecture. The limitation is the chances the audience will text in the chat box. If that doesn’t occur then I won’t fully understand the engagement of the participants.

Once I joined the meeting it started with David V. Griffin introducing himself as the host for this meeting. He revealed his credibility as the CEO of Landmark Bonding LLC, Former Senior Associate Thomas and Associates inc, and affiliated with Vassar Club of New York. Then Griffin gave us a preview of what will be presented through the course of this meeting, listing the buildings along with the cities and symbols that come with it. After the preview, Griffin proceeded to describe each of the buildings in the same order, describing its background, the names of the people who designed the buildings, and what inspired its design. 

As the event comes to an end, Griffin goes back to the list of the buildings which were already talked about and then provided links to a site in case people want to know more about the architecture that was presented. After the event I was able to gather information about the host and how the event was set up. However, I was unable to make observations about the audience since the scheduled meeting was prerecorded and nobody spoke in the chat box. 

The purpose of this observation was to know the types of people who are interested New York architecture, as that was the main subject of this online meeting. I made observations by watching through the entire presentation and I mostly gained information about the person hosting the presentation but as for the audience, I was unable to do the same.