Blog 8

13 Dos And Don’ts For Attending A Kentucky Horse Race

http://www.buzzfeed.com/hillaryreinsberg/13-dos-and-donts-for-attending-a-kentucky-horse-r

The buzz feed that I will be analyzing is actually on my ethnographic location, Keeneland.  While this is the same place, it is not the same way that I will do my meme presentation.  This particular buzz feed is on what you either should or should not do while at Keeneland.  The author for the buzz feed was pretty accurate but I am not sure how original it really was.  The main topic was on what you should or should not wear while at Keeneland.  For example, the author states that you should not wear a Harley Davidson shirt at Keeneland.  They also show a picture to give an example of what they are talking about.  Since I have gone to Keeneland several times I can definitely relate to this specific meme.  There is not necessarily a dress code at Keeneland, but there is kind of an unwritten rule that you are supposed to try and look nice while you’re there.  The meets only happen two times a year so you might as well dress the part.  The author then discusses things that would be good to wear or to bring.  They say that a do for going to Keeneland would be wearing a seersucker suit or to wear a bow tie. With these statements there are two memes showing both.  I can definitely know the truth in this because if you make it out to Keeneland you are very likely to see plenty of both.  The last meme that stuck out to me was a ticket that had a bet on it.  The statement says, “Don’t place a bet without having an idea of what you’re doing.”  This meme is extremely accurate.  There have been several times where I have been at Keeneland and seen people throw money on a horse that they know nothing about.  This is a horrible strategy if you are trying to leave with more money than you came in with.  But then again, if you win off a blind guess, it feels pretty good.    

Blog 8

My first revision for my final draft of the ethnographic paper will be on the description of the place and culture that I visited.  I will be using a lot of the information from the descriptive web text from the beginning of the semester but I will change up some of it.  For my description of Keeneland, I went on a day where there were not any races going on.  While this gave a good idea of the space I was in, it didn’t quite give the full picture.  The atmosphere when Keeneland is and is not racing is totally different.  For my final draft I will be sure to include the descriptions during each time. 

The next portion of the final ethnographic draft that I will be revising will be on the interview I had with the professional horse trainer.  When I did the interview I was very surprised at how interesting it actually was.  But during the interview, my interviewee ran off track a little bit.  In my rough draft I saw that some of the information that I had put in it was really not very relevant to my cultural space.  It was also brought to my attention that the flow of the interview portion of the rough draft was very poor.  This meaning that I had a constant occurrence of statements like, “next I asked” or “first I asked”.  For my final draft I will make sure that these statements run together and sound more professional. 

The last revision that I will need to make for my final draft will be a better analysis of the entire paper.  I realized after reading over the paper again that it didn’t have a whole lot of criticism or extra thought on certain points.  I think that instead of analyzing the cultural space I have had a tendency to just give a summary of what it looks like.  This is also similar to the interview.  Instead of actually dissecting the interview, I basically just restated what he said.  Also with this aspect, I need to make sure that my paper has good flow and that I am pulling out points from all of my sources that are actually significant to the ethnographic space. 

Blog Post 7

For my secondary source I have chosen to use a thesis paper called "A MODEL RACING PLANT": FOUNDING AND ECONOMIC HISTORY OF KEENELAND RACETRACK, by Scott A. Carmony.  One of the main reasons that I chose this source was because of its large amount of content relating to the role of sports, especially horse racing, to America.  Another reason that I picked this source was because of the vast information on horse racing in Kentucky, more specifically Lexington’s horse and racing traditions.  This paper is also full of helpful content on the history of how Keeneland was created and how it became to be what it is today.  This paper discusses some things that I would not have thought of until reading it. A historian named John Rickards Betts argued that "the roots of our sporting heritage lie in the horse racing and fox hunting of the colonial era."  While this is just one man’s opinion, it is interesting to see that horse racing was one of the first sports of our country.  This is just one of the many quotes that would be helpful for my ethnographic project. 

Carmony, Scott A. ""A MODEL RACING PLANT": FOUNDING AND ECONOMIC HISTORY OF KEENELAND RACETRACK ." Department of History University of Louisville. (2004): n. page. Print. <digital.library.louisville.edu/utils/getfile/collection/etd/id/472/.../473.pdf>.