Title: Trips naming conventions
General Information about Item:
- Verbal Folklore: folk speech
- Language: English
- Country: USA
Informant Data:
- The informant is a Dartmouth ’18 female. She is active in the Native American Community on campus, SPCSA, and Sigma Delta. She is a Government and Native American Studies modified with Anthropology double major from Martha’s Vineyard. She went on cabin camping in September 2014, but never led a trip or was on a croo.
Contextual Data:
- Social Context:
- Students become introduced to their trip’s name when checking in with H-Croo upon their arrival to campus. It is how they first find their trip leaders and tripees.
- Cultural Context:
- Throughout trips (for example, when you meet other students on your trip section at the Lodge) and even after (especially during orientation or freshman fall) the question of what trip someone went on can be a common icebreaker. Using the DOC trips notation typically doesn’t have meaning for most people as to which specific activity someone did during their trip (ex hiking, kayaking, mountain biking, etc), but does indicate what section they were on. As trips sections are often broken up by geographic origin and whether students move into their dorm on the official move-in day, or directly after their trip, this can tell a lot about what someone’s first weeks at Dartmouth were like.
Item:
- Every trip is named as a combination of its section (A through J), which denotes the trip start date and the number code corresponding to the trip type and location.
Transcript of Informant Interview:
Collector: If we could start with name, year, and trips section and the trip you went on.
Informant: Sammie, I’m an 18, I was on section F; cabin camping. So it’s like F-50 cabin camping.
Informant’s Comments:
- The informant noted that a lot of section F participants were international students or from diverse parts of the US. She said that this gave a skewed sample and a more diverse impression of the Dartmouth population than what she actually found at school.
Collector’s Comments:
- When asked what trip she went on, rather than just indicating cabin camping, she instinctually included the DOC trips specific naming convention. This suggests the inherent/subconscious significance of this aspect of trips folklore.
Collector’s Name: Clara Silvanic
Tags/Keywords:
- Verbal folklore, DOC Trips, Trips Name, Trips Section