Another interesting application of SSNA connected to my project (as kindly suggested by @matthias in our call) could be on The Autarky Lab. There seems to be a lot of material that could be connected to the broad topic of my research (i.e. sustainable cities - although the word “sustainability” is rarely used in those conversations): food, energy, waste management, etc. @alberto (or others), what do you think about it?
Sounds good.
The words “sustainable” and “sustainability” in Edgeryders are most often used literally: “able to endure over time with little or no external investment”. Therefore, it is used sparingly. “Sustainable” has become tainted with greenwashing in the 1990s, and some people have an instinctive dislike for it – though it has its uses when it’s meant literally.
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Yes, totally agree, that’s why makes no sense to look for occurances of either sustainability or its semantic field. On the contrary, the content of the conversations in The Autarky Lab seem to fit very well with the aim of the research project. I’ll delve into those conversations and start trying to code them, then I’ll get back to you
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Super curious. 
Some material close to Autarky Labs ended up in The Reef , which has also the advantage of being (1) a live project, with a small but active community and (2) in Brussels.
The Reef was one of my very first options, when I started trying to understand how SSNA works and how I could apply it. So, are you suggesting I could use both categories? In that case, I do have a concern (i’ve already shared it with @matthias): what about all those topics that are mainly organisational? In The Reef there I found many conversations on, for ex, meetings, trainings, and the like. What would be their ‘place’ in a SSNA?
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That’s an organization anthropology question, not a data analysis one. I am a massive newbie in anthro, but if I were you I would look at this data and ask myself what kind of culture is likely to have generated these discussions and their associated behavior. As someone who is knee deep in that particular project, I am still enough of an ethnographer to make remarks like the following. I am asking @chiara.certoma and, dare I ask, @Nica to have a look at them, and shoot down anything that is way off the mark to not complicate your work.
- The Reef is investing in process (recommended readings, trainings etc). Moreover, we do it because other cohousings told us to do so. It seems to be a feature of cohousing.
- The Reef is a totally grassroots initiative, and no one in the group is a construction industry professional. And yet, it is run very professionally, with highly structured meetings, active online channels, good documentation. To someone like me, who has founded a few companies, The Reef feels like a company. But again, the tools seem to emanate from a culture that is not startuppy at all: they are short on hype and jargon, and long on simplicity and minimalism. The process that is being invested in includes things like non-violent communication and sociocratic decision-making, but not, for example, SWAT models. Overall, I suspect, we are culturally much closer to a 1950s cooperative in Modena (or a 1990s one in Zapatista Mexico) than to a Silicon Valley digital startup.
I would then use these initial intuition to code the data, then step back and look at these particular coded data in the context of the rest, and see what makes sense, and probably go back in and redoit all over again, in the spirit of iterative angagement with the data typical of ethnography. Makes sense?
Hi all, yes, I’ll have a look at it and talk with Samantha today.
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Hi everyone (again)! I’m back from maternity leave and I’v been getting back on track with my work on SSNA. Many months have passed since I started coding…but I cannot find the annotations I made months ago. Would it be possible that they have been deleted? Thanks!
Congratulations, welcome back! Your annotations can be found like this: OpenEthnographer => Annotations => select yourself as creator. Here: https://edgeryders.eu/annotator/projects/1/annotations?creator_id=7595
What happened is that we have rolled out a projects functionality for Open Ethno. Discourse tags still work, but projects are a tidier way to work, as you recoding something does not have any impact on other researchers using the same materials.
The Open Ethnographer manual should document the new functionality.
Thanks, great! I noticed the projects functionality you mentioned and I created a new one for me as a test.
Speak to you all soon!