There was much in this article to contribute to the theory and practice of archive ethnography - I hope to touch on the points that were most influential and helpful for me. First, I appreciated the discourse on reading “against the grain” with existing archives. For me, this is especially useful as much material on California prisons exists in state and federal archives but the voices of prisoners and the emphasis on rehabilitation is typically invisible. I love the idea of using an existing archive for insurrection and subversion. Additionally, there was a direct call for the ethnography of the archive as a way for the curator/researcher to be an active participant and historian, to tie together structures and ideas as they are presented in the collection. I appreciated the discussion about the internet as an archive because it is so far-reaching that it becomes difficult to carefully curate. Additionally, the caution about digital archives was so helpful because I hadn’t considered that technology changes rapidly and archivists should take care to create their archives in a way that is accessible and compatible with new technology or risk losing it.
In the section about fact checking, the authors state:
"At the very least, then, providing a paper trail of one’s verification efforts in parentheticals or endnotes will allow readers to assess whether or not the author has convincingly made the case with the data at hand" (my highlight).
The concrete example of how to include different ways of fact checking is helpful when thinking about traditional ethnographies in the form of books. I think we could add the arguement that the length, scope and readers engagement with this "paper trail" could be creatively built into archives (if not requires a form of archive to keep up with it).
Thinking through different stakeholders of an archive is one way to approach the design question: which paper trail for which audience, with which standards and limits? The article deliberately focuses on ethnographers, but also points to journalists, who have different fact checking expectations. Further, we can ask what a peer-review of the paper trail (or archive) that each author is expected to create will look like -- including but also going beyond scholarly review articles like this one.
What concepts, ideas and examples from this text contribute to the theory and practice of archive ethnography?
Adema describes “radical open access” as a “process of continual critique” (p. 6) that is not confined to one definition or object, but is rather an “ongoing collective and critical project” made up of various “groups, peoples, institutions, and projects” (p. 13) striving to use open access as an alternative to the current neoblieral model promoted by the academic publishing industry. However, in analyzing present alternative models of open access, the author finds some commonalities between the projects: 1) They offer practical and affirmative engagement with open access: providing open access to their research is central to their publishing practices. 2) Their openness allows for collaboration and community building and engagement. 3) They serve to question the (commericial) academic system of publishing (pp. 16-17). Overall, this multi-faceted and "open" concept of "radical open access," can help archival ethnographic scholars explore the various ways they can construct alternative spaces via digital archives, which both challenge neoliberal norms and facilitate community-based collaboration and knowledge sharing, making knowledge production less of a commodity and, instead, more of a community building project.
What evidence or examples support the main argument, narrative or e/affect?
The author provides examples of how different scholars are using open source/access platforms to develop and/or share their work with other scholars and the public such as the Open Humanities Press (OHP), Ted Stripha’s Differences and Reptitions wiki, and Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s experiment with open peer review for her book through her site MediaCommons.
Exemplary quotes or images?
I really liked the way the author uses Balibar’s conceptualization of democracy as an ongoing process to describe radical open access as “not as a homogenous project striving to become a dominant model or force, not as a thing, an object, or a model with prescribed meaning or ideology, but as a project with an unknown outcome, as an ongoing series of critical struggles” (p. 20).
What questions or types of analysis does this text suggest for your own work?
The chapter made me think about how I could use some of these open access platforms to both develop and receive feedback on my writing or projects. It also made me reconsider how “openess” in terms of collaboration and data sharing can help structure my research process in a way that can serve to challenge the dominant neoliberal norms within academia.
What concepts, ideas and examples from this text contribute to the theory and practice of archive ethnography?
Overall, Murphy et al. argue in favor of increasing the transparency of ethnographic research and data, though they recognize that ethnographers may differ in their positionality, the populations they study, and their institutional resources, and, thus, the degree to which ethnographers share their data and make their practices transparent, will be made on a case-by-case basis. For this piece, I think the concept of "reanalysis" rather than replication is essential when considering how tranparency and open access can be applied to archive ethnography. Though as the author's make note of, the level of transparency will depend on a case-by-case basis, scholars can use digital media and open access sharing platforms to their advantage as Adema's (2021) piece demonstrates. Ethnographic archives can be used to share and present data for reanalysis in various formats and, with various privacy settings such platforms offer, in ways that can still prioritize the safety and confidentiality of interlocutors. As Murphy et al. encourage, the least scholars can do moving forward is consider the ways they can make their own research practices more transparent and their data more accessible for sharing and reanalysis.
What evidence or examples support the main argument, narrative or e/affect?
Murphy et al. use evidence from the practices and arguments made by current ethnographers and other scholars/experts who have critiqued the data sharing practices of ethnographic research.
Exemplary quotes or images?
In particular I liked this quote which supports the argument the authors made as it pushes back against the notion that transparency is only important in terms of replication; whereas, the authors demonstrate that for ethnographic work, transparency should be promoted in terms of analysis of the work, not its replication:
“The fact that ethnography cannot be replicated or reproduced in the same way that quantitative research can does not mean that it should be immune to calls for greater transparency—quite the opposite. Transparency is crucial for meeting what we think should be the standard by which to judge whether an ethnography contributes to theory building and the accumulations of empirical knowledge about the social world: reanalysis” (p. 43)
Janneke Adema's chapter on challenges of, and experiments in radical openness (defined by her as "practices and theories of radical open access are critical of openness in its neoliberal guises, but still try to engage with the open in an affirmative way too” p. 5) can offer several interventions for archive ethnography, and I offer a few of those here in the form of questions:
(1) What is the political economy of knowledge production for archive ethnography?
Since the book's departure is a push against the commodification of the book and the neoliberalism of the university (both circulates empty signifiers that reproduce sameness), both projects in which ethnographers are emplaced in, what conditions make archive ethnography possible? The author notes the issue of cost and volunteer labor, for example, that can look very different depending on what model of openness is under question: “Many scholar-led and not-for-profit projects therefore try to redirect this volunteer labor where possible toward more progressive forms of publishing—for example, by shifting it away from commercial, profit-driven publishers and gifting it to developing, not-for-profit, open access projects instead, as Mattering Press is doing.” (39) Since ethnographic fieldwork and archiving involves a lot of volunteer labor, getting at what is at stake for archive ethnography within this political economy, would be helpful.
(2) What publics (following last week's article on civic community archiving that cites Dewey's call to provoke publics into existence) do radical openness and experimentation provoke into existence?
I am thinking about the concept of "hyperpolitics" cited in this chapter: “hyperpolitics “names a refusal to consider the question of politics as closed or decided in advance, and a concomitant willingness to open up an unconditional space for thinking about politics and the political ‘beyond’ the way in which they have been conventionally conceived—a thinking of politics which is more than politics, while still being political” (p. 22). The closure of political space is very real and frightening, but is all closure necessarily bad? Is there a way to think about closure and gatekeeping as a public good, that too, provoke publics into existence? How could archive ethnography hold space for both openness and closure?
(3) What goes into making radical openness and experimentation sustainable, and is that a necessary goal?
When reading about experiments in radical openness, I was curious to know what happened to earlier experiments mentioned in the book but those that are not updated anymore? Considering that most experiments are scholar-led, what happens when those scholars are no longer in the picture for various reasons? I am thinking about the question of preservation (and reanalysis) in a decentralized way: how can archive ethnography support a broad community of practitioners?
"A scholarly poethics, conceptualized as such, would include forms of oppenness that do not either simply repeat established forms (such as the closed print-based book, single authorship, linear thought, copyright, exploitative publishing relationships) or succumb to the closures that its own implementation (e.g., through commerical adaptations) and institutionalization (e.g. as part of a top down policy mandates) of necessity also implies and brings with it" (Adema 2021, 44).
Adema compels the reader to radically reimagine the traditional relationship between the researcher and reader, as well as the ethics that accompany it. While previous works, through traditional book practice, have been exploitative on a number of levels, radical open access (as Adema calls it) seeks to dismantle systems of exploitation bound up in the publishing process. This can bolster the practice of archive ethnography by opening up a pool of who reads and contributes to knowledge production. Radically reimagining access to knowledge production allows us to critically ask questions about whose type of knowledge is legitimated, why, and for what purpose?
(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.
Recording and collecting data: The authors urge ethnographers to be transparent about how they collect data, given the difference in accuracy between different methods (e.g. memory versus recorded interviews). They offer examples of ethnographers only using specific demarcations for speech that was audio recorded, and no demarcations for speech recounted from field notes. They also emphasize the increasing importance of taking digital spaces into account in ethnographic research.
Anonymizing: The authors encourage transparency in their work about the anonymization techniques they employed and why—both in their writing, and in communication with those participating in the study. They suggest this transparency should occur throughout the research and writing process.
Data verification: The authors encourage ethnographers to make transparent “how they know what they know” (52), in order to enable the scholarly community to evaluate the grounds on which an ethnographer is drawing conclusions.
Destroying, preserving and sharing data: Lastly, the authors argue that there is much to be gained by sharing data. They encourage ethnographers to collaborate in developing guidelines for data sharing that are consistent with ethical principles and take into account issues of positionality.
“We are suggesting that the time has come for ethnographers to work together to develop their own set of guidelines for data sharing that are consistent with research ethics principles and that account for issues revolving around positionality” (Murphy et al, 2021:55)
I use the same preface in both of these annotations - please correct me if my understanding and internalization of the article is not representative of the author’s intentions. How I apply this article to the theory and practice of archive ethnography is once again through intentionality of the researcher. It makes practical sense to consider a contemporary digital platform to publish findings and archive data. However, the individual researcher must make a decision for themselves, using their personal orientation to their work and the community they study to publish in an open access space. As an archive ethnographer, one must resolve for themselves if their purpose is to contribute to academic discourse solely or if they would want to engage the broader community. Because data management is central to archive ethnography, the question of radical open access, open politics (the communicative power of the information), and the process of experimentation will be essential to each project. While I recognize that there are significant considerations regarding radical open access, the author demonstrates that there are researchers who are dedicated to shaping the platform and function to be secure, reflexive, and “intellectually reinvigorating”. If the community-subject is comfortable with the open access, it seems to make the most sense that the community should be able to access the work. The push against commercialization surfaces throughout the article and this feels especially related to archive ethnography as the researcher has the ability to position their work to be accessible to the communities that they study (which, in many cases, are not academics).
The call for a scholarly poethics sounds to me like a call for making a record of our scholarly relations just as we would make a record of our scholarly edits. A focus on relations asks us to defocus around static boundaries of book-object and scholar-individual to instead collect and organize data differently.