Although the Boyer Commission (1998) lamented the lack of research opportunities for all undergraduates at research-extensive universities, it did not provide a feasible solution consistent with the mandate for faculty to maintain sustainable physiology research programs. The costs associated with one-on-one mentoring, and the lack of a sufficient number of faculty members to give intensive attention to undergraduate researchers, make one-on-one mentoring impractical. We therefore developed and implemented the "research-intensive community" model with the aim of aligning diverse goals of participants while simultaneously optimizing research productivity. The fundamental organizational unit is a team consisting of one graduate student and three undergraduates from different majors, supervised by a faculty member. Undergraduate workshops, Graduate Leadership Forums, and computer-mediated communication provide an infrastructure to optimize programmatic efficiency and sustain a multilevel, interdisciplinary community of scholars dedicated to research. While the model radically increases the number of undergraduates that can be supported by a single faculty member, the inherent resilience and scalability of the resulting complex adaptive system enables a research-intensive community program to evolve and grow.

A B S T R AC T The article is an analysis of the methodology used to study a community spawned from an Internet website devoted to a television serial. In the five and a half years the site was in existence, its real-time, linear, archived Posting Board spawned a community. Herein, we discuss how our work at the site offers insights into significant concepts in the practice of ethnography. In particular, we are concerned with such questions as: How much distance is necessary between the ethnographer and her site/subjects? Is distance necessary? Who is inscribing whom? We also discuss the generative problem of anonymity and how this concern has opened up our perceptions of ourselves and our field site. K E Y W O R D S : ethnographic methods, internet community A RT I C L E 1 7 9 Q R Ethnography online: 'natives' practising and inscribing community Qualitative Research

The article is a sociologically informed approach to understanding the author's own place and identity. Questions of personal identity serve to highlight larger insights about a crucial reality in the United States. The author engages a standpoint at the crux of America's racial dilemma, combined with a specialization in research on race and ethnicity. First, the interactive and overlapping set of methodologies within which her own narrative of identity fits is discussed. These data are systematically collected and analyzed field notes, historical documents, and the embedded interactions from within a larger culture of literature, scholarship, and popular understandings. The body of the article consists of three examples that she characterizes as confronting her Blackness, confronting her multiracialness, and confronting her Whiteness.

The author was a member and participant observer of a community that was initially exclusively based in online interactions. Over time, the community developed several regular offline interactions as well as a rich and extensive set of online interactive communication spaces. Herein, the author explores the symbolic meanings of members’ practices on choosing names for their initial and ongoing self-presentations to the community. These practices are discussed with regard to the matching of online to offline (so-called virtual vs. so-called real life ) symbolic identities or statuses such as age, gender, race, geography, and occupation. The idea that meanings emerging from everyday interaction are discovered through close observation and intimate familiarity with participants’ cultural settings are explored in an Internet setting. The author concludes that a rendition of the online persona as inherently less truthful—or at least less dense/rich/full—than offline presentations is problematic at best.