Abstract
In this chapter, based on fieldwork with the Research Data Alliance and our work designing the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), we elaborate on the concept of data ideologies and examine how they have informed work and data-sharing practice in academic research, and in cultural anthropology more specifically. Data ideologies refer to people’s underlying assumptions about data, the way they operate, and the consequences they produce. We argue that, while many cultural anthropologists have been reticent to share their data, making anthropological data more open and accessible affords new possibilities for multi-perspectival analysis and re-interpretation of data—practices that can make ethnographic narratives more robust and pluralistic. Metadata is key to encouraging re-interpretation of archived data, as it situates data collection and analysis in a particular time, setting, and cultural context. We demonstrate how we implemented data-sharing infrastructure and metadata standards in PECE—not to advance reproducible research practices, but instead to encourage collaborative hermeneutics and iterative re-analysis of data. We conclude that attending to complex contemporary problems will demand linking undervalued and underfunded infrastructural work to the cultural work of shifting the discipline’s data ideologies.
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Notes
- 1.
David Ribes (2019: 524) writes that “domains refer to those fields (often scientific, but not exclusively) concerned with worldly and specific matters, for example, linguistics is the ‘domain science’ of language, biologists are the ‘domain experts’ of organic life, and so on. The logic of domains parses the world into two main categories, one is either ‘in a domain’ or one is working ‘independently’ of any domain.” Typically, according to this “logic of domains,” the computer, data, and information scientists designing data infrastructure for domain communities are considered to be working independently of any domain.
- 2.
Within the RDA, most of any group’s work, including our own, occurs in the “spare time” of individual members in contact via electronic communications, but twice a year there is a large RDA “plenary” at which groups can meet face to face. We have used these plenaries (13 to date) in part as opportunities to convene sessions with other empirical humanists interested in advancing data infrastructure that is attuned to the specific challenges and needs of preserving and sharing such research. We have also attended the plenaries so that we can communicate our unique commitments and challenges to more technical groups attempting to develop data infrastructure that can facilitate data sharing across disciplinary borders.
- 3.
When querying a particular research community’s data ideology, we consider questions such as:
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What does a particular research community seek to understand, and what kinds of data and analysis advance such understanding?
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How does a particular research community leverage theory and comparative perspective?
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What does a particular research community seek in collaboration?
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What does a particular research community seek to accomplish through their data representations, and what understandings of language, knowledge, and communication underpin their efforts?
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- 4.
A reductive fetishization of sharing has structural parallels with at times naive mobilizations of “ecological” approaches, or a simplistic valorization of “connectedness” that can gloss over how connections need not always be symbiotic and just; relationships can also be predatory, abusive, extractive, parasitic, and so on.
- 5.
In addition to numerous colloquia at a number of universities, PECE has been presented, reviewed, and discussed as a collaborative opportunity at meetings held by: the American Anthropological Association, the Society for Cultural Anthropology, the Society for the Social Studies of Science, the Swiss Anthropological Association, the National Science Foundation, and the Research Data Alliance.
- 6.
In an early ethnographic moment in the prehistory of PECE, we attended an interdisciplinary conference on asthma, a complex example of “coupled human-natural systems” par excellence, and learned about just how difficult this interdisciplinary “team science” can be in practice. This ethnographic moment sparked our sense of the need for The Asthma Files (theasthmafiles.org), the first instance of PECE before it was formalized into a stand-alone digital infrastructure that can be downloaded and installed to support a range of ethnographic projects. In this case, form (the platform) quite literally followed function (an assemblage enabling collaborative ethnography). The Asthma Files networks a wide variety of research and researchers all focused on asthma as a complex environmental health condition.
- 7.
Abduction was Charles Sanders Peirce’s term for a third mode of reasoning, a necessary companion to deduction and induction. It can be loosely translated to “hypothesizing” or, more loosely, “imaginatively guessing.” See Helmreich (2007) for a brief discussion in relation to anthropology.
- 8.
Sutcliffe-Braithwaite writes that “it can sometimes be impossible to recover all the contextual information surrounding a particular interview. Yet it is still possible to re-use archived sociological data where not all the contextual information is available in the form we might want it.” We agree about this possibility, of course, and would argue that it is always impossible to recover all contextual information (or metadata) and that, as Derrida puts it in Limited Inc., all communication and meaning exists only in context, and that that context can never be “saturated.” The idea that the context ever could be saturated, or fully “recovered” points to a particular language ideology that, we think, can be a barrier to more data sharing and iterations of analysis.
- 9.
The archive in which the interview was deposited in a collection called “Social and Political Implications of Household Work Strategies.” It was fortunate that Sutcliffe-Braithwaite had broad interests in labor and work, in addition to her focus on gender and sexuality, or she likely would not have encountered the interview she so deftly re-analyzes here.
- 10.
This division primarily manifested in debates over whether users should be able to “qualify” metadata fields—that is, whether they should be able to attach additional attributes to metadata fields to specify how they were defining/using that field in their own particular context. Minimalists argued that the core metadata elements should be as simple and consistent as possible; structuralists argued that indexers should be able to qualify these metadata elements.
- 11.
On “civic science,” see Fortun and Fortun (2005).
- 12.
Mukurtu (mukurtu.org) is a digital platform similar to PECE (worldpece.org) that fulfills many of the same functions and aspirations to give communities a place to archive cultural heritage in diverse forms, and share it in ways they deem appropriate.
- 13.
In other words, we too want to make our data “FAIR”—but, we also acknowledge that (like all metadata standards), as the concept of FAIRness begins to make waves in new research domains such as our own, its meaning will inevitably evolve. In the context of a cultural anthropological practice attuned to the re-interpretive possibilities afforded through metadata, FAIR may stand for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-interpretable, may be guided by commitments to epistemological pluralism rather than reproducibility, and may signify the ethico-political sensibilities that anthropologists hope to advance through data sharing.
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Acknowledgments
The development of the PECE platform and the writing of this chapter were made possible through the support of the National Science Foundation (Award #1535888), “Environmental Health Governance in Six Cities: How Scientific Cultures, Practices and Infrastructure Shape Governance Styles.”
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Poirier, L., Fortun, K., Costelloe-Kuehn, B., Fortun, M. (2020). Metadata, Digital Infrastructure, and the Data Ideologies of Cultural Anthropology. In: Crowder, J., Fortun, M., Besara, R., Poirier, L. (eds) Anthropological Data in the Digital Age. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24925-0_10
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