tschuetz Annotations

What concepts, ideas and examples from this text contribute to the theory and practice of archive ethnography?

Thursday, October 7, 2021 - 9:23am

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.

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What is the main argument, narrative, or e/affect

Thursday, October 7, 2021 - 9:09am

Together, the two reverberating reckonings (1980s reflexivity and 2020s data transparency) prompt us to think again what the quality criteria for ethnographies (as text, theory-generator, experiment, archive) could look like. The text is animated by the urgency to keep up (with technology, the "information age", new data risks) but also a generosity, knowing that ethnographers will neither arrive at shared standards (for fact checking, data sharing, etc), nor will they likely have the resources to keep up. However, the authors call for a minimum standard that links reflexivity and transparency. If reflexivity asks us to be aware of fieldwork tropes or design our ethnographies in a way that they feed back intto the practices we study, new quality criteria can be derived from asking "how we record our data, what quotations mean, whether we follow our participants online, and whether and how we anonymize" (56). 

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