All my favorite characters were journalists. When I think about the kind of journalist I want to be, I think of Dr. Ruth Behar. Dr. Behar was an anthropologist who practiced ethnographic research - research where the researcher lives among the studied population and observes them as a participant-observer. Dr. Behar asked why ethnographers were supposed to keep themselves separate. She argued that we should follow our passions and document where our lives intersected with our subjects. Quantitive research generates numbers - it fills spreadsheets and databases - and this is what we need to form our theories and our applications. But it’s qualitative research that lets us connect our work to stories. Ethnography allows us to take theory and wrap it into he emotions that make other people care about things.