Questions to Ask Across the Ethnographic Lifecycle
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This presentation highlights questions for anthropologists and other qualitative researchers to ask themselves across the research data management lifecycle, including in finding, annotating, securing, and archiving qualitative research materials.
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Questions to Ask Across the Ethnographic Lifecycle
- 1. Questions to Ask Across the Ethnographic Lifecycle DOING ANTHROPOLOGY IN A DIGITAL AGE AAA ANNUAL MEETING, 2016 CELIA EMMELHAINZ - ANTHROPOLOGY LIBRARIAN – UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY
- 2. Boston Public Library image, at flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/5304557372/, CC license
- 3. College library images, at flickr.com/photos/collegelibrary/10859101965 and flickr.com/photos/vculibraries/12943346023, CC-BY
- 4. Image: Saad Aqeel & R Campbell, contextualresearch.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/the-ethnographic-research-cycle.png * Literature review * Grant applications * Additional literature review * Open access, publicizing, archiving * Organizing materials * Securing materials * Analysis software * Documenting your analysis
- 7. 1. Where can I find research materials? GLAM & Fieldwork Sites •Galleries •Libraries •Archives •Museums Collaborative / Secondary Research •Longitudinal •Team projects •Archival fieldnotes •Qualitative data
- 8. AFO tDAR Left: Ruth Benedict’s fieldnotes at Anthropological Fieldwork Online. Right, fieldnotes from a day’s work at Second Woods, NY
- 9. Malawi Journals Project I: “Can't a person have AIDS in the village?” R: “S/he can have it, if s/he's careless by accepting marriage or having unprotected sex with people from town.”
- 10. 2. How do I keep up?
- 11. 3. How can I organize digital materials? Building a System •Folder and file naming systems •Raw vs. working files •Budget for this! Adding Context •Headers •Readmes •Keep a process log
- 12. 4. How am I securing my fieldnotes? Encryption • Hard drives (Password) • Secure server or VPN • Passwords / Backups • Anonymize pre-coding Exposure • Beware the Cloud • Wipe drives or devices • Train assistants
- 13. 5. Can I still view my notes in the future? Durable Formats •Save to open formats •Export coded docs •Export code system •New storage media
- 14. 6. How am I preparing for archiving? Thinking about archiving • Restrict or embargo • Add to consent form • Secondary IRBs and Data Use Agreements • Fieldnotes will
- 15. 7. How am I publicizing my research?
- 17. In short, you can ask yourself: Where can I find research materials, including others’ data? How can I best keep up with new articles? How do I organize and add context to my field records? How do I secure my fieldnotes, images, and transcripts? Will I can still be able to view my own notes in the future? Can I set things up to make archiving easier in the future? How can I more easily share and promote my research?
- 18. And librarians can help you: Find background material Find and reuse “secondary data” Organize your research materials Secure your fieldnotes Document and archive your records Share and promote your results
- 19. COPAR Online guides Currently revising advice Research Data Office Data management plans Sponsored grants Your Library Liaison librarian Scholarly Communications Data Librarians
Editor's Notes
- Hello everyone! I’m going to talk about questions to ask across the research lifecycle. Now I am a librarian, so I’m stepping back from the scholarly focus of other papers, to take a wider view. First I’ll discuss how libraries’ role in research is changing, and then present some questions to ask yourself about your process. Now, you may be wondering why I care about your research materials, all those fieldnotes, images, and filing systems on your computer?
- Well, I’m a librarian. If I gave you an implicit association test, I’m sure you have a mental image of librarians: glasses, practical shoes, surrounded by books. And perhaps you come to us to find rare books, donate your library at the end of your career--and in between you email when you’re leaving for Kyrgyzstan next week and the library databases just aren’t working. And this role remains valuable. I’ve interviewed researchers on how they use libraries. And as one anthropology professor told me, “I use librarians for the classical stuff - searches of arcane material and obtaining copies of otherwise rare sources.” And a folklorist recalls visiting the Library of Congress, commenting that the librarian’s: “suggestions were extremely useful… he knew what was available, what they had and didn’t have [in libraries around the world]… partly because he knew the primary material so well, and who the publishers were.”
- Yet I want to call your attention to other ways we engaging with research. Because services differ on different campuses, I’ll touch on many questions to ask yourself.
- This is a loose take on ethnographic research. In black, it moves from conceptualizing a project, to doing interviews, taking notes, and then analysis and writing up. In red, I’ve noted where libraries may assist, from the literature review to advice on organizing and securing your materials for later archiving or sharing. This sounds broad, but we feel a sense of responsibility as public servants who try to make your research accessible as well as available for the long term.
- For instance, the Monash University Library (which like all libraries, likes flow charts and diagrams!) provides literature, but also advises on managing references and field records, dealing with copyright and publishing in open venues, and planning for long-term archiving. We’re into this because we want to preserve knowledge—and we know knowledge is constructed out of a messy process in the field and at home—and that process is easily lost. So we want you to find fieldnotes from 1923. We want you to find your own files in ten years. We want readers to find your articles easily. And we want to make sure that a hundred years from now, your scholarly grandchildren can evaluate and build on your research.
- For context, I’m the anthropology and qualitative research librarian at UC Berkeley, where I manage the Anthropology Library and promote ethnographic research on a very tech-oriented campus. I studied under Cynthia Werner at Texas A&M, before publishing on libraries and researcher needs in Kazakhstan. So I’m here with CoPAR not to tell you what to do, but to get you thinking about issues related to CoPAR on a wider scale.
- My first question is the most basic—where are you looking? You already mine cultural heritage institutions and develop your own field projects. Yet there are also many ways of collaborating as scholars, and one is to build on archival materials from earlier researchers—or to explore current “qualitative data” archives.
- For instance, Anthropological Fieldwork Online is a subscription database that indexes and digitizes the papers of Victor Turner, Bronislaw Malinowski, Max Gluckman, and Ruth Benedict; tDAR is an open archive that includes site notes from archaeological projects.
- We’re also seeing more qualitative data archives, especially in Europe. These may include interviews or other contextual, narrative materials which you could build into your own research. Secondary analysis isn’t typical in our field, yet these new digital archives could allow you to explore rich data when you can’t get away for your own fieldwork. Many of these are international, and few focused specifically on ethnography—so building sustainable and secure ways to share selected research is a conversation that I certainly hope CoPAR will be involved in.
- Now I know that was a lot to explore, and sometimes it feels like we’ve already got too much to work with. Yet this isn’t new.
- My next question is, how do I keep up? As one biological anthropology student [Allie] told me: ”Researchers today are buried, we can’t keep up with the important research… and we fall back on reading only the few top journals in our field or articles by authors we know.” If your campus has access, I recommend BrowZine, which lets you make shelves of journals your library subscribes to, and see whenever there are new issues to browse on your iPad or desktop. Publishers’ table of content alerts are another option.
- So now you’ve collected a lot of field records and journal articles, but…how are you organizing your records? Both university libraries and research data offices can advise on systems for tracking changes and adding context to your digital files. This can include things like good file names, which let you easily see date, author, version, and topic or pseudonym for every file. Keeping raw files separate from working files prevents accidental deletion or errors. And adding context in your file names, headers of interview notes, or embedded in image and video files will help you remember the context years later, after you’ve forgotten. Adding a paragraph in a readme.txt file in each folder could also help you reconstruct your process. And I’d also advise keeping a log of your process, edits, and decisions made—again, just jotting a few sentences after each session working with your data—and making your assistants do the same, so you can track what they did after they leave! Of course, this is all time consuming. When possible, I’d add it to a grant budget, especially if the funder requires a data management plan. Data archives such as ICPSR will also do this for you, if you add them to your budget!
- Once you’ve got a system in place, I’d ask how you’re securing your fieldnotes. Anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee has written of being detained and questioned about her research by Bulgarian police—an experience that led her to drop all ethnography from one of her books. So there’s a tension between our code of ethics to “do no harm” … yet to “preserve your records“ and “make your results accessible”. And this starts in the field. Your campus IT may advise on encrypting your hard drives and internet connection. You may want to heavily encrypt—but also leave a list of passwords with a trusted colleague, in case anything happens. I also recommend you anonymize before coding. Although you can’t remove all contextual information, you can take out direct identifiers, either substituting in a similar name or place or noting their absence… and recording your choices in an anonymization log, stored separately. This is much easier than coding 50 interviews, then trying to figure out from an exported list of quotations what’s sensitive and what’s not. Another tip is to note sensitive sections of text in a bold or bright way, so you can better secure them before sharing. I’d also think about accidental exposure. First, I’d check with your campus as to how they store sensitive files; at Berkeley, we recommend our more secure institutional version of Box over personal “Cloud”-syncing accounts with Drive, Box, or Dropbox. Next, make sure you wipe your drives before passing on an old computer, or between respondents when lending out a camera for participatory research. My colleague Anna* had to report to IRB when sensitive videos taken by one respondent weren’t erased, and so were seen by a later participant on the same device. Finally, train and supervise assistants well! Just after a college degree in literature, I worked as a phone interviewer for a grad student’s sensitive study. I’m sure I signed a non-disclosure agreement… but as a 22-year-old, I didn’t think to check my files when the project ended. Imagine my horror as a grad student, five years later, when I found sensitive records about disabled infants still on my computer. The lesson for me was to clarify what assistants can retain and how they should secure files—and to check that files are fully deleted when the project is done.
- Next, can you still view your notes later? As Lisa Cliggett reported in 2013, her team “experimented with digitizing... field notes [into] a fully digital qualitative database... storing them on… a 3.5 inch floppy disk... Now, 13 years later, we have a shoebox of 3.5 inch disks with files saved in 1990s proprietary software.” So the first lesson is to save your files in open formats like PDF, CSV, and RTF, so that you can view them in ten years. Excel can auto-save to .csv, and Word can be set up to save to .rtf. Next, keep your storage media updated to new forms as necessary—no floppy disks in 2016! And last, remember that files from proprietary software like Atlas.ti and NVIVO may not be viewable in the future. You can export your code lists and related quotations to a text file, or export your coded interviews as a colorful PDF, as on the right.
- All of these questions have prepared you for archiving, but it’s good to be aware of options. Your papers or digital files can go into a traditional archive, a paper repository, or a data repository. Sensitive materials can usually be restricted under embargo for a period of time, perhaps restricting fieldnotes but making some images openly available. If you’re interested in sharing some materials, you have several options. You can ask respondents whether they want their story to be shared with future researchers on your consent form. You can require other researchers to apply, sign a ‘data use agreement,’ and get a secondary IRB to specify how they’ll safeguard your partially-anonymized interviews, before viewing. And finally, a fieldnotes will specifies what you want to happen, and who you trust to have access to your notes in the future.
- On a happier note, as a librarian I also work with researchers to promote their research and evaluate how widely news has spread. As one R1 anthropology professor, Sarah, told me: “One thing that comes up in promotion is how to document impact… one of the librarians helped me [use] PlumX to capture internet citations… and put my published work in the campus archive.” These tools let you see how much your work was taken up in the news, blogs, twitter, or Facebook, or even how long a reader bookmarked it on a citation website like Mendeley to read later. Not only is this encouraging, but it can supplement promotion cases when there hasn’t been enough time for your papers to accrue citations.
- So where are we? As a scholar, you focus here [upper right] on doing research and submitting publications, peer reviewing, and publishing. As librarians, we focus on the lower left side--we collect and provide access to your work, preserve it for the future, and make it as widely available as possible, either now or in the future.
- In short, questions you can ask yourself are:
- And librarians can help with these questions by:
- And it’s not just librarians. CoPAR is working on these issues, and research data or grants offices on campus may also advise. Look for words like ‘data librarian’ and ‘scholarly communications officer’ to learn more…
- Thank you, I look forward to your questions.