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- Convenors:
-
Sabine Imeri
(Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Matthias Harbeck (UB der Humboldt-Universität)
Elisabeth Huber (University of Bremen)
Lina Franken (University of Vechta)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Knowledge Production
- Sessions:
- Monday 21 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
The panel examines how open science is outlined and realized within current European Ethnology. Considering best practices and future scenarios just as much as difficulties and outstanding issues, it investigates the impacts that digital tools, platforms and databases have on ethnographic research.
Long Abstract:
The concept of open science refers to strategies and procedures that use digitization to make scientific work findable, accessible, understandable and reusable online. Digital tools, platforms and services provide novel opportunities for analyzing, archiving, presenting, sharing and reusing ethnographic data and digitized collections. These datasets and tools can be used to develop and investigate new forms of collaboration between ethnographers, research partners and the general public. For research areas such as intangible cultural heritage, this opens new forms of interaction within the field as well as in the documentation of cultural practices. On the other hand, openness and digital dissemination need new reflections on old topics regarding ethical conducts, legal requirements, anonymization, authorization and property. Not all ethnographic data can or should be open in the narrow sense. How can research and digital archiving be realized within these frictions? How do we as ethnographers make use of tools, platforms and databases with all the intended possibilities and promises, and what consequences does this have for knowledge production? Do we reuse available research data and in what ways? Who takes benefit from efforts to open up ethnography? Does open science bend established disciplinary regulations, or does it only extend their scope? This panel is looking for contributions on how ethnologists meet the challenge to open up their research throughout the whole research process. We invite proposals from research and/or infrastructural projects that share experiences on best practices as well as difficulties and possible future scenarios.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 21 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The presentation aims to outline domain-specific models of Open Science emerging from community practices of arts and humanities. By doing so, it will be shown how the DARIAH ERIC builds an open agenda for arts and humanities research that is firmly grounded in disciplinary realities.
Paper long abstract:
Amidst the fundamental changes in research culture of our days, we see a growing need for scholarly communities to translate the high-level principles and value of Open Science into their own needs and find their own domain-and discipline-specific solutions and paths towards responsible and sustainable research culture. Still, the emergence and design of the Open Science paradigm has been implicitly designed along numerous underlying assumptions about how science operates and communicates and therefore the generic research Open Science guidelines do not always align well with the cultural, conceptual and epistemological complexity of research workflows in the arts and humanities (this includes our dependence on Cultural Heritage data, the challenges around transitioning monographs to Open Access, legal complexities of sharing sensitive qualitative data or copyright protected data, diversity in metadata standards to name but a few).
The presentation aims to outline discipline-specific, yet widely interoperable models of Open Science emerging from community practices of arts and humanities. By doing so, it will be shown how DARIAH, a pan-European infrastructure for arts and humanities builds an open agenda for arts and humanities research that is firmly grounded in disciplinary realities.
The presentation will focus on practical offerings of DARIAH: communities, good practices, tools and services that can support European Ethnology research communities in opening up certain parts of their research workflows in responsible and sustainable ways.
Paper short abstract:
The paper presents some best practices and recent international developments from relevant European research infrastructures and makes a case for ethnographic data sharing by presenting a personal experience of openly sharing ethnographic research data.
Paper long abstract:
Research data availability and accessibility are the main elements of the Open Science agenda. The term open research data is used for data which are “as open as possible, as closed as necessary” (H2020, 2016). In other words, while researchers are striving to achieve openness, they still need to take into consideration the issues of data protection, property rights and security. This is reflected and supported also in the Statement on Data Governance in Ethnographic Projects by the European Association of Social Anthropologists.
The benefits of opening research data in ethnographic research are numerous, such as adding dimensionality to data analysis through collaboration, reinterpreting and reusing of data, improving and extending the use of research resources, complying with new laws and the mandates of funding agencies etc. However, there are also many issues to consider, such as privacy issues, ensuring appropriate data archiving and sharing that benefits research subjects, rewards and credit, weighing between time and effort needed to prepare data for sharing and benefits of sharing, addressing ethical issues and complying with the relevant legislature, assuring appropriate technical infrastructure etc.
The paper will firstly explore the promises and challenges of data sharing in ethnographic research by presenting some best practices and recent international developments from relevant European research infrastructures (e.g. CESSDA, DARIAH, CLARIN). Secondly, it will make a case for ethnographic data sharing by showing a personal experience of openly sharing ethnographic research data, collected during fieldwork in Morocco (ex. video materials, pictures, drawings, field diaries, social media posts).
Paper short abstract:
I will share insights from building a lively archive on the Taiwanese petrochemical company Formosa Plastics. Hosted on an instance of the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), I focus on the legal challenges of doing activist "archive ethnography" on an open infrastructure.
Paper long abstract:
Civic data work has been a key tactic in responding to disasters (fast and slow) caused by the Taiwanese petrochemical company Formosa Plastics. In my presentation, I will share insights from building a lively archive that connects activists in communities affected by Formosa in Texas, Louisiana and Taiwan. The Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE) that infrastructures my research, providing research archive capacity, spaces for analytic collaboration, and allowing new forms of scholarly expression and communication. As a member of the PECE Design Team, will talk particularly about the challenge of tuning this kind of open source, open access research infrastructure further to the particularities of the Formosa case. Examples include legal protection against the companies rogue tactics and other attempts of "data divergence".
Paper short abstract:
Increasing the use of tools and platforms for ethnographic research practices does not come with a stronger commitment or possibility to open up research and consequent data. Based on a discourse ethnography, the paper examines the connections between data sharing and the use of tools and platforms.
Paper long abstract:
Ethnographic research practices today are in many regards digital: we are using different types of software from text processing, audio recording or mind mapping to tools for qualitative data analysis (QDA) or capturing social media data. Furthermore, digital humanities are slowly entering ethnography and vice versa. Within the pandemic, elements of digital ethnography became more relevant to get into interaction with our fields, including an increased use of tools to interact with research participants.
But my research shows that these developments do not form a stronger commitment or possibility to open up research practices and consequent data. First, collaboration is not intended within most research infrastructures. Second, the storage and opening up of data can get even more complicated, since many tools have separate data formats. Not all of them are designed to share, making the data aggregated within the tool unavailable to the outer world – not to say fitting it to metadata standards. Third, since open source tools stay on the prototype level in many cases, data gets fragmented into different tools and formats. Fourthly, browser-based tools seldom have the possibility to store the interactions performed at all, therefore the data produced is not findable or reusable.
How do ethnographers use different tools and platforms for data generation and analysis? Which ways do they find to nevertheless open up their research? Do data sharing considerations play a role at all? The paper presents first insights on digital ethnographic research practices based on a discourse ethnography started in 2018.
Paper long abstract:
The epistemology of social science makes it so that research is produced at a slower pace with grounded approaches in contrast to the life sciences where a more positivist approach is used (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). The FAIR principles in Open Science challenged researchers who work with qualitative methodologies, including ethnography, interview-based case studies, and interpretivist approaches, to make their data inter-operable and reusable. In this article, the authors look closely at the FAIR principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016), and discuss their implementation on such research projects at a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. The paper draws from an ethnographic account of the 26 months negotiations to implement a Faculty FAIR action plan. The negotiations involved positioning the Open-Access-Repositories, and Data-Management-Plans as tools to make ethnographic data Findable and Accessible. The author's speak from their positionalities as Researcher and Data Steward. They examine how this process has led them to re-think their ethnographic methodologies and question their freedom to do Science. They argue that although the FAIR principles are an innovative tool for machine-readable data, the principles and tools, as they stand, are exclusive of certain forms of qualitative data where the researcher, as a knowledge-producer, is inseparable from their data. For FAIR to be inclusive of qualitative Science, it requires a reflexive reimagining of the principles in order to adapt them to a plurality of research approaches in the scientific community.