Thread by @timelfen

OK, some summary & commentary on this article, coming from an anthropological-inflected point-of-view (amongst, but not quite of, the anthros, if you will).

https://twitter.com/jerolmack/status/1379963891262849025?s=20

Murphy, @jerolmack, & @DeAnnaYSmith are trying to understand how critiques of ethnography—from its representational fidelity to the power-laden relations between researchers & subjects—intersect w/ new data gathering & sharing technologies, & the effects of online social life.

The authors specifically narrow their focus to the expectation that ethnographies “contributes to cumulative social science,” so the main issues tackled are epistemological (justification) as limited by the ethical (protection of research subjects).

Justification: Usefully, the authors distinguish between quant & qual social science in their testing procedures: while replication is the gold-standard for quant, reanalysis should be goal of ethnography. In both cases, more transparency—of data, methods, contexts—is required.

Transparency for the reanalysis of ethnographic research is then explored in 4 areas: data recording & collecting; anonymizing; data verification; & data sharing. The consequences of the digital/online are discussed in all but the data verification section.

A few anthro resources that could've been helpful, especially on the consequences of the digital: *eFieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology in the Digital Age* upenn.edu/pennpress/book… (the 2016 sequel to the 1990 *Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology* jstor.org/stable/10.7591…).

Research Ethics: The limit of transparency is often figured in the article as the ethical protection of research subjects. While the authors are pragmatic, arguing that each research project requires its own balancing of transparency & ethics, one clearly hinders the other.

The general thrust of the argument is that protective measures are: (1) becoming less effective; (2) not respecting subjects' autonomy; & (3) norms are changing w/ expansion of recording/dissemination technologies. So they want to tip the balance toward more transparency.

While I appreciate the authors' arguments, & they have lots of good ideas on how ethnographers can better describe what they did & how they know (ethnographers beyond sociology, take note!), there are interesting disconnects w/ similar discussions in anthropology.

In anthropology, the animating purpose of changing data practices is not justification. Instead, it centers on the idea of collaboration w/ fellow inquirers, a category that includes fellow scholars & the people formerly known as research subjects. Sociology ethnogs, take note!

What does this mean? Well, some in anthropology are building data infrastructure to enable fellow inquirers to collaborate on data collection, intermediate analysis, rethinking of directions, rethinking of outcomes, multiplication of end uses, etc.

Here is my thread on one excellent articulation of this picture of data practices/infrastructure as part of broader disciplinary reform in anthro:

https://twitter.com/timelfen/status/1252300641587822592?s=20

. Note that the research platform discussed (PECE) was built to deal w/ a situation of too many inquirers.

One of the fallouts of the Writing Culture debates is anthropologists' new-found understanding that their fieldsites are populated w/ all sorts of groups in search of knowledge: anthros stand in their midst, not above, in pursing their inquiries.

So whether our colleagues/subjects are anthros, housing activists, Indigenous elders, policymakers, geneticists, migrants, disaster victims, they all have a stake in the knowledge that could be produced of the shared situation, even when purposes & epistemic practices differ.

Here's one articulation: "Imagine a world in which troves of ethnographic data could be made available, searchable, and reusable with privacy protection and ethical care by anthropologists and research participants working in a shared problem space." doi.org/10.1111/aman.1…

Some similar worries, but "working in a shared problem space" is more expansive on the possibilities of reformed data practices, beyond the vision of transparency to facilitate post hoc ethnographic trials by juries of scholarly peers. The juridical metaphor doesn't work here.

I would think reanalysis—who it's for, what it entails, how it handles multiple lines of flight, why it's valuable—is the place to hash out some of these disciplinary differences, but also where productive interdisciplinary conversations, perhaps even learning, could happen.

[The article cites anthros in relation to the 1st reflexive reckoning of ethnography (Writing Culture, PoMo, PoCo, etc.), but doesn’t follow up on ongoing repercussions of the 2nd reckoning in anthro (critiques of research extractivism, refiguring research/subject relations).]

[While I understand it's difficult to keep up with adjacent disciplines (a common gripe), the sociological ethnography I've read is still stuck in the anthropological 1990s. I'd be happy to have sociologists prove me wrong or point me to the right works.]

[One last contrast: Compare the reformist challenge posed by sociological ethnography's pet legal scholar (Steven Lubet global.oup.com/academic/produ…) to anthropology's (David Westbrook press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book…).]

[The difference in these outsider visions of what each might become is pretty staggering.]