Hold on, are you still with us on the Hipster tour? Don’t hesitate, of course you are!

You have seen the pictures and the interviews, so I bet you feel special and a Hipster expert. But not yet honeybee. As a group we have a lot of ideas and visions that we want to discuss with each other, but this is not very effective during meetings. At the moment we have a huge amount of information that needs to be discussed and analysed. To make this information valuable we will use an ELLA analyse from now on. An ELLA analyse stands for Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analyse. This method suits our project, because we need to do a lot of fieldwork for our precious hipsters. The method has three steps. The first step is the pre-fieldwork, in other words collecting information of our subject Hipsters. The second step is the fieldwork. In our fieldwork we did participatory observation, made photo’s and conducted interviews with relevant people. In our project we have arrived to step three. Step three is the after-fieldwork. In this stadium we are writing and analysing our information. In our fieldwork we had to make a distinction between the micro and the macro context of the research object. As a result we concentrated on the Hipsters in Tilburg but we also analysed the semiotics of the general Hipsters.

As I already mentioned we have a lot of ideas and visions. During our meetings we try to brainstorm, because we are convinced that everyone’s idea is valuable and important. However, during our group brainstorm a lot of perspectives gets influenced by other ideas and as a result we don’t have everyone’s clear share. Therefore we agreed that every group member will brainstorm and will write its own form of an ELLA analyse in a few words.

The subjects in the ELLA analyse were infrastructure, nationality, language, job and profession. With these subjects every group member formulated its idea. The outcome had mostly similarities. When it came to the online infrastructure we all thought that that the main media platforms are Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. We did have other ideas when it came to the offline infrastructure. A part of the group had the idea of cycles and old vehicles. The other group was more convinced that the public transport was popular in the specific group.

The outcome about the job and profession was also equal. We assumed that the young entrepreneurs all finished a higher education. The entrepreneurs try to start-up and expand their own brand. The nationality subject was very clear. Everyone agreed that it was in this case Dutch, because we are doing research in Tilburg. Although there are a lot of influences from foreign student hipsters. These hipsters also mingle and mix with the Dutch hipsters in the city centre of Tilburg. The language subject was also an element we agreed on. In general we think that the most common used language is Dutch and English. The workers in the store have a Dutch nationality so that is the first language that they use. But they often switch to English when foreign customers visit the store. Besides he language switch, the store use English terms in their store. An example are the menus in the store that have English names.

After this eye opening experience, we had a clear image of everyone’s thoughts. With all the information we made a draft for our project. It is now getting less vague and more specific for people that are interested in our Hipster project.

For our research we also read various articles that are valuable for our research. The articles that we read are; Ethnographic linguistic landscape analyses and social change: a case study by J. Blommaert and I. Maly. The second article is: Detecting social changes in times of superdiversity: An ethnographic linguistic landscape analyses of Ostend in Belgium by I.Maly. The last article is: The 21st – century hipster: On micro-populations in times of superdiversity by I.Maly. These articles gave us an insight on how to make a draft and how other case studies have been done.

Our group had a hard time starting with our ELLA analyse and needed a helping hand. Even though we had a rough start, with multiple meetings we made a beginning and continued our project.In the upcoming weeks we will dive deeper in our project and come with new results. So stay there, don’t move and enjoy the Hipster tour.

To be continued…