[Air-l] Re: ethnography

[Nafus, Dawn]

Dear All,

I'm new to this listserv and have been enjoying the fact that there is
actual debate rather than just announcements. So my two cents will take
the form of raising a new twist on the issue-- on this 'unintended
effects' business.

One thing that's going on with UK researchers is a major research
council is considering (or have they made it mandatory now?) requiring
people to deposit their 'qualitative data' into a bank to be used by
other researchers. Depositors can put restrictions on other users'
access to the data, but it's to encourage data recycling. Part of me
likes the idea of opening the books, so to speak... I believe that there
is a student at (Kent??) that is blogging his fieldwork which seems an
admirable way forward. Nevertheless, this 'depository' strikes me as
HUGELY controversial, not only for reasons of informant confidentiality,
but also because it requires some consensus on the part of depositors to
agree on what 'data' is and does--not something we could say exists even
within disciplines. Ethnography raises a special point with regard to
this, because it's always meant to be more than transcripts. The
ethnography is not even the fieldnotes, or even the being there itself,
it's (in my book anyway) the dialogue between the categories the
researcher thinks she's hearing and the categories meaningful for the
audience she's writing for(maybe I've deconstructed my own craft to the
point of oblivion! It's always a bad idea to say ethnog is this or
that...esp. on a first posting). This is what gets published anyway. 

This qualidata project seems to multiply the 'unintended effects' by
asking in what way can 'data' be circulated as a stand-alone entity. But
then again how much 'intention' do authors really think they have in the
first place? In our texts, perhaps, we can represent context but I work
in contexts like Maxmilian where any 'representing' I do is more
marginal than the people I 'represent'. Does anyone see any merit in
'depositing' data, and would depositing data actually make you think
twice about the kinds of textual representations you make? I so much
prefer to share rather than deposit...but that's idealistic I suppose.
You are welcome to my fieldnotes, but I reserve the right to share a cup
of coffee with you first:). 

An example of what disturbed me. I went to a one day workshop on this
sort of thing. There are a number of projects already in place, outside
the goal of making a megadatabank. Interestingly though, in one
(http://www.icbh.ac.uk/icbh/witness/welcome.html) the transcripts of
elites sitting round a table were considered narratives in and of
themselves. They are complete, un-break-apart-able pdf documents, which
readers are meant to read through. They usually do. Another project on
everyday life in the Edwardian period generated much discussion about
how to do the metadata
(http://www.qualidata.essex.ac.uk/edwardians/about/introduction.asp).
Ordinary Edwardians had to be searchable. The decisions on the metadata
did not bother me--what bothered me was that ordinary Edwardians could
only stand for pieces that needed to be added up (searched, categorized,
etc.), while elites' speech only had to amount to itself. I'm not one to
harp on everyone's voices getting heard (to whom? For what? I usually
find myself asking), but still there's a mathematics here that just
doesn't seem right.  Sorry I can't put my finger on it more than that.
Maybe it's the attempt at standardizing scales of knowledge when these
two projects clearly show there is no agreed scale.


Hopefully someone else can do better...

Dawn

Dawn Nafus
Senior Research Officer
Chimera Institute for Socio-Technical Innovation and Research
University of Essex
Adastral Park
Martlesham Heath, Suffolk
IP5 3RE
http://www.essex.ac.uk/chimera/people/dawn_nafus.html