One of the experiences that has stayed with me is coming across an example of a grant application where in the “data sharing and ethics” section the author described not sharing their data as a result of (something along the lines of) norms/standard practices in anthropology. That shaped my early interest in data sharing and questioning how that might look in my own project.
As I’ve gone through the IRB process as well as fieldwork & gathering/uploading archival materials, I’ve been concerned and questioning how to balance research participants/ willingness to share data, their priorities when it comes to privacy, with the institutional frameworks that exist for how that data can be shared, with who, through what bureaucratic processes, etc. In many ways, I think these processes don’t account for or are not designed to accommodate researchers for whom research sharing is a key practice and part of their research plan, and I’m not sure how that can be changed moving forward.
From my narrative bio: "A recurrent focus of my research has been on ways knowledge infrastructure subtends both environmental vulnerability and capacity to recognize and address such vulnerability. I have thus become increasingly invested in understanding and helping build knowledge infrastructure (including innovative educational programs at all levels, supporting technical infrastructure, public data resources, analytic and visualization capabilities, and the organizational forms needed to support and connect these). Knowledge infrastructures powerfully shape how societies anticipate, characterize, and deal with collective problems. Given the tangles of problems contemporary societies face -- and need to work on together -- building deeply interdisciplinary knowledge capacity with global scope is a high priority. This will be far from straightforward, depending on inventive project designs linking researchers across disciplines, generations, and geographies; linking research to education at all levels; and building new connections between universities, schools, governments, international organizations, businesses and other social actors. These have become key aims of my work, interlacing my research, teaching and organizational interests."
Supporting the above, for many years, I was involved in the work of the Research Data Alliance, through the Digital Practices in History and Ethnography Interest Group.
In many instances throughout my research I have found it difficult to find databases/resources on topics like historical facility information in the city of Santa Ana. By creating an archive that would track all relevant data on these facilities it will be easier for not only me but hopefully others to find information on these facilities. The archive format allows a good opportunity to share data in a concise and detailed manner that is hard to find for the research I have done.
Access to research, libraries, and/or journals is incredibly restricted. As I engage in research outside traditional academic pathways with other scholars in similar circumstances, I have become more attuned to these restrictions and have learned some ways to circumvent them. In my professional training in Education Research Departments, research data sharing was never discussed or raised as a possibility. In fact, data protection, data security, and data ownership were the operative practices.
My interest in research data sharing is the result of personal experience, feminist STS scholarship, and my encounters with the Fortuns who are leaders in this effort.
Social media use; interest in creating and curating archives; my identity as an artist and storyteller; my negative experiences with the IRB, specifically being asked to use protocols designed for medical research; the hegemony of quantitative research fields and positivist disciplines; the data needs of community organizations, community members, and nonprofits – although I think as researchers we often make assumptions about what these desires, needs, and capacities are, and how we can respond.
I first became interested in data sharing through fieldwork with open data and free software movements in Europe. In Germany, groups like the Chaos Computer Club and Open Knowledge Foundation play important roles to debates about civic technology and increasingly work in consulting roles for political parties. In turn, I became interested in the role of digital infrastructure in and for public anthropology -- what Jiminez (2021) calls "wild archives".
1) Feeling excluded from research data and publications due to paywalls due to my location; using "pirated" and printed textbooks; relying on an informal publishing economy for my reading and writing needs
2) The strangeness of not comparing fieldnotes in ethnographic data collection and analysis even when people work across thematically and geographically.
3) How early career scholars from geopolitically marginalized fields desire research data sharing even though they are well-aware of their work being stolen and not attributed
4) Questioning the imaginary of data sharing as being free-for-all and open-for-everything (which it often is not for very good reasons)
My interest in data sharing took a while to… um… let’s say, cultivate. I came to UC Irvine with very static and somewhat traditional ideas about fieldwork, data, and ethnography. Because, to be honest, I was less interested in anything to do with method than I was in the history and future of anthropological theory. I am a big fan of (maybe even a junky for) shattering my contemporary worldview (or what Foucault called “getting free of oneself”), and I had always assumed that consuming and producing theory was the best way to achieve this “shattering” effect. Ironically, however, this fetishization of theory has been (and still is) the most stubborn and shatter-resistant “pillar” of my perspective, though I am hoping the archive can help me crack it!
An important step towards cultivating a deep interest in data sharing came when I recognized the “question” as a discarded middle between theory and method. This came out of my reading and writing for my qualifying exams, where Kim Fortun taught me how to “read for method.” Through this new style of reading (a new way of punctuating the text), I came to completely re-interpret my interest in the discipline. That is, I became less interested in the (theoretical) answers that scholars generated than in the problems and questions that anthropologists had been able to ask. That is, I became interested in data production as a theoretical problem.
This “question of the question” dominated my fieldwork (i.e. I generated about 41 different research questions during this period, and discarded many more) and has also haunted my efforts to “write it up.” I spent the first few months of post-fieldwork revisiting the (now canonical) anti-canon that was the “Writing Culture” moment. It was the first time I really felt the depth and the gravity of the “crisis of representation,” living through my own version of it (which I’ve still yet to escape). In this struggle, I ended on a “meta-modeling” mode of dissertation writing, where I am attempting to construct four chapters as unique (Naven-esque) wholes; that is, each chapter serves as a different-yet-repeated vantage point into my ethnographic material (differentiated by scale of attention, rather than theory), hoping that the reader can develop their own arguments and interpretations of the material by reading across them. In doing so, I am trying to resist that ever present demon of the “question of the question:” its answer.
Which finally brings me to my rather meandering and round-about answer to the question posed here: my interest in data sharing (which I equate to my interest in the archive) lies in the added capacity to keep ethnography open by always approaching closure (like an ethnographic asymptote), both through continually refreshed angles of data analysis and also more meta-analyses of the ethnographic process. The archiving tactic also refreshes the relevance of ethnography, by opening up an new question of how and what it means to maintain this archive and continue to keep it lively, rather than "nail it down" in a book.