(1) Data habits/practices as reflexivity and an ethnographic good: The move to locate this text's call for ethnographers to pay attention to their data practices (storing, preserving/destroying, sharing, analysis) as an extension or a recall to the "first reckoning" that called for ethnographers to pay attention to their emplacement, offers an important reason for transparency beyond calls by funders to open data. While it is more common now to see declarations of positionality in ethnographic research (which is very important), t is not common practice for ethnographers to think about their data apart from IRB/funding confidentiality requirements, especially how interlocutors would engage with ethnographic data, informational ecosystems. The authors offer many tactics for ethnographers throughout the text to interrogate their data habits, and it would be quite useful to have a running list/doc for noting down all of those and associated citations.
I found their concluding remarks helpful to clarify their intentions. Italicizations are mine
“at a minimum, ethnographers can be reflexive and transparent around the decisions we make with regard to how we record our data, what quotations mean, whether we follow our participants online, and whether and how we anonymize. We can also, at a minimum, make in-text distinctions between data that come from interviews and data from observations and be transparent around what evidence we use to verify our claims. Other measures, especially making data publicly available, will require collective action and significant institutional support.”
(2) Learning of & from non-anthropological data practices: Throughout the text, I read references to confidentiality, fact-checking, and archiving practices of journalists, lawyers, archivists, quantitative social sciences, and them querying anthropologists in turn about their data practices. These conversations in one place are helpful to clarify differences and alliances between ethnography and journalism, for example, a question that I've often received from people when I tell them what I am doing: "Oh, you conduct interviews. How is that different from journalism?"; or between quantitative and qualitative data practices: "So what's your sample size?". Instead of feeling attacked by these questions or feeling like I have to justify ethnographic difference, this text offers me useful points of comparison.
(3) The concept of "reanalysis": Like other colleagues in this seminar have pointed out, the text's primary argument and intervention for data transparency is reanalysis, which can take many forms: revisiting old sites, revisiting fieldnotes, comparing or swapping fieldnotes; practices that happen clandestinely or in conference meetings anyway. Rather than pushing for open ethnographic data, the authors are pushing for openness as an ethnographic standard. It certainly unsettles.
