shifting meta-data to the textSome of the authors suggestions seem to be pushing ethnographers to pull meta-data and other ingrained analytical tools into the audience's purview. For example, the authors promote using different quotation marks (single or double) to differentiate within text the source (e.g. a recorded quote versus a recalled quote) of an example.
What concepts, ideas and examples from this text contribute to the theory and practice of archive ethnography?In particular this article is speaking to the tensions that have arisen between the practice of ethnography and the availability of new technologies and the call for more transparency and data sharing. The tension exists between traditional ethnography in which data is de-identified before being shared and now more contemporary practices (facilitated by technology) that create fewer degrees of separation between researchers, their subjects, and audiences.
What is the main argument, narrative, or e/affect?Ethnography is experiencing growing pains and that the research method and researchers are in a period of reflection while trying to understand how to practice ethnography in a digital world where technological advances are great tools but come with their own limitations and considerations. Ethnographers are undergoing methodological developments as the demand for data sharing and transparency increases, along with the rise of technology (meaning tools to record/store data and the platforms and ability to share it).
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.
Murphy et al.
(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.
With recent advancements in technology and calls within the social sciences to make data transparent and accessible, the authors claim that ethnographers need to reconsider their data management and sharing practices. Murphy et al. argue that transparency of ethnographic data collection and sharing processes is important not for replication of the research, but for reanalysis.
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.
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.
