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Murphy A. K., Jerolmack, C., & Smith, D. (2021). Ethnography, Data Transparency, and the Information Age.. Annual Review of Sociology 47:1, 41-61.

Alexandra Murphy and DeAnna Smith are from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor’s Department of Sociology. Dr. Murphy is an Assistant Professor with research interests include poverty, suburban poverty, transportation insecurity, and inequality. DeAnna Smith is a PhD candidate with research interests in punishment, cultural sociology, urban sociology, crime/law, and gender. Colin Jerolmack is from New York University’s Department of Sociology. Dr. Jerolmack is an associate professor with research interests in ethnography, urban communities, and environmental sociology.

Annual Reviews is a nonprofit publisher since 1963. Annual Review of Sociology began publishing in 1975 and broadly covers the sociological field.

As mentioned, the text discusses four areas to improve transparency and reanalysis. With data collection and recording, the authors encourage researchers to make use of a variety of technological tools such as audio or video recording. They suggest that these tools are used in daily life and that researchers should not take the tools used to collect or record data as a given. Instead, they should explain why such tools were used and others not given the contexts they are working in.

Examples that support the main argument are drawn from how researchers have addressed the reckonings in ethnography. The authors logically connect the methods and arguments made to current issues in ethnography: transparency and verification.  

 An exemplary quote: “External confidentiality is a collective responsibility” (50).

The types of analysis that the texts suggest for my work is that I am obligated to not only build a transparent research design but to be meticulous with the documenting the research process. This responsibility doesn’t leave at the end of the study but I should be sensitive to future implications.

The text advances ethnographic methods by attempting to standardize approaches to recording and collecting data, anonymization, fact checking, and data sharing.

This text addresses transparency in ethnography and the use of new technology. It suggests standards for transparency and discusses ethical implications. It contributes to theory and practice of archive ethnography by building standards for ethnography practice. The paper specifically attempts to answer how ethnographers have answered to the second reckoning in ethnographic research: confidentiality and data verification. They argue that standards for recording data, collecting data, anonymization, verification, and data sharing would bolster transparency and replicability. 

The article in a nut shell seeks to push ethnographers towards thinking about ethical implications of their research and how to develop standards of transparency that are consistent with their relationship with their subjects and scholarship. In this regards the authors focuses on fourn stages of the research writing process, namely:1. Recording and collecting data: The accuracy of any data differs based on the methods that is used to collect it.