Some thoughts on (Collective) Ethnographic Practice

[alberto]

@melancon

That would inevitably bring those coders to share their codes. Which in turn would probably bring in additional work to make sure coders have a collectively coherent approach to coding, and a convergent approach to use codes, introduce new ones, modify existing codes, etc.

Trust @melancon to zero in onto The Problem. The Problem is that ethnography is very far indeed from being a collaborative discipline.

As @alex_levene mentions, @amelia and I are now talking of something called an open codebook. This maps perfectly onto my idea of a “coding wiki”, with the great advantage that ethnographers relate to it: they know what a codebook is. The paper codebook serves as a metaphor for my wiki idea, just as the paper address book we used to have pre-computers serves as a metaphor for the piece of software called “address book” or similar.

The difficulty with that stuff is the obviously non-open culture of the discipline:

@amelia

But this codebook is usually kept private, often on pen and paper, and doesn’t get published alongside the final product. Asking an anthropologist for her field notes or codebook, in usual disciplinary practice, would be strange. Further, as ethnography is usually a solo pursuit, the ethnographer only has to make the codebook make sense to herself.

I found exactly the same thing among archaeologists. They also have a problem of “what exactly constitutes evidence”; they also have developed their own private repositories of knowledge that precede the writing of a paper (“field notes”, “gray literature”, etc.). And they also are very private about them and never share them.