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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:
We present a detailed empirical account of interdisciplinary ethnographically-driven research contexts in order to clarify critical aspects of the OS agenda and how to realize its benefits, highlighting three gaps: between policy and practice, in knowledge, and in tool use and development.
Paper long abstract:
The Open Science (OS) agenda has potentially massive cultural, organizational and infrastructural consequences. Ambitions for OS-driven policies have proliferated, within which researchers are expected to publish their scientific data. Significant research has been devoted to studying the issues associated with managing Open Research Data. Digital curation, as it is typically known, seeks to assess data management issues to ensure its long term value and encourage secondary use. Hitherto, relatively little interest has been shown in examining the immense gap that exists between the OS grand vision and researchers’ actual data practices. Our specific contribution is to examine research data practices before systematic attempts at curation are made. We suggest that interdisciplinary ethnographically-driven contexts offer a perspicuous opportunity to understand the Data Curation and Research Data Management issues that can problematize uptake. These relate to obvious discrepancies between Open Research Data policies and subject-specific research practices and needs. Not least, it opens up questions about how data is constituted in different disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts. We present a detailed empirical account of interdisciplinary ethnographically-driven research contexts in order to clarify critical aspects of the OS agenda and how to realize its benefits, highlighting three gaps: between policy and practice, in knowledge, and in tool use and development.
Paper short abstract:
In recent years Finland, Norway and Sweden have developed different ethical strategies for qualitative research methods. In this paper we aim to discuss some of the different effects these standards may have on “good research practice” in these three national contexts in relation to Open Data.
Paper long abstract:
There are currently two juxtaposing principles for researchers in the humanities to observe. One is that science and data should be transparent, reusable and available for the general public. The other one is the protection of personal data, recently sharpened through the law of GDPR. For ethnologists, these contradicting principles are particularly acute in that qualitative methods generate data that often is classified as “sensitive”, hence requiring particular care.
The three countries of Norway, Sweden and Finland have diverging application of ethical principles. The crux of the matter therefore lies in the framework of “good research conduct”, as these ethical principles limit the room of manoeuvre in different ways. In this presentation, our aim is to compare the ethical guidelines in these three countries in direct regard to openness.
We argue that before asking how open science is outlined and realised, one must raise the question of how national standards differ, and how this impact on ethnological research conducted within the different states. Do the more precise principles of Norway or Finland allow more than the more general rules in Sweden? Do qualitative methods of research conducted in these countries lead to different opportunities in contributing to Open Data?
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses the pros and cons of mass digitization projects concerning ethnographical material from imperial times (1860s til at least 1950s) with the aim of creating awareness for pending infrastructural questions and of initiating a dicussion on the linked ethical questions.
Paper long abstract:
Research infrastructures such as the Specialised Information Service for Social and Cultural Anthropology (FID SKA - www.evifa.de) are increasingly involved in mass digitization projects to provide researchers - not only with an ethnological background - with historical materials otherwise not that easily accessible. Since many of these materials at the FID SKA and also from other institutions (museums, libraries, archives) come from imperial(istic) contexts contents, language and images reflect the colonial Zeitgeist. Discriminating language and dehumanizing or otherwise (in todays perspective) unethical depictions are represented frequently. To transform these materials from physical items into a digital open accessible format means to open up possible ways of distribution and potential range - and provides opportunities or rather bears the risk of being taken out of context. How do researchers with anthropological backgrounds evaluate this situation? What solutions would they rather prefer in the light of restricted ressources? The paper wants to enter an engaged debate on solutions and develop recommendations for infrastructure institutions together with the research community.
Paper short abstract:
Ethnologists and folklorists use a range of strategies to share the data they collect while protecting individual identities and respecting community preferences. Could a novel approach to analysis developed by biomedical researchers help us to responsibly open up our own fields?
Paper long abstract:
Ethnologists, folklorists, and scholars in adjacent fields have long sought to withhold portions of the data they collect from public circulation, in order to avoid disclosing the identities of their interlocutors and to respect community preferences. This field-level norm poses a challenge for open science, which offers the prospect of more robust and collaborative inquiry facilitated by the sharing of research data. Strategies for sharing qualitative data in keeping with these restrictions have included reprocessing data to conceal certain details or appointing a gatekeeper to filter data requests by their purpose and the social location of their initiator. How should ethnologists and folklorists think about the relative merits of these strategies? And could digital innovations in other fields help us to share our data in a responsible way while also advancing possibilities for meaningful reuse? This paper outlines an approach known as nondisclosive federated analysis, sometimes characterized in terms of "taking the analysis to the data, not the data to the analysis." Here, a researcher initiates a query that is routed to different servers where datasets of interest are securely stored, and then pooled results are returned to the researcher under certain parameters that prevent identity disclosure. The approach was developed in the context of computationally intensive biomedical research, but this paper explores whether and how it could be adapted for use with qualitative data, addressing issues like the need for ongoing markup. It concludes with a call for collaborators who might be interested in testing the approach's viability.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the challenges and difficulties of making ethnographic data public. Inspired by affective scholarship, it takes into analytic account the role of affects and emotions in ethnographic research.
Paper long abstract:
Researchers are increasingly expected to make their research data findable, accessible, understandable, and reusable. However, data sharing within contemporary European Ethnology is still uncommon (Imeri 2017), and sharing ethnographic data has particular challenges. Previous research has focused on infrastructural, ethical, and policy issues surrounding the sharing of qualitative and ethnographic data. Inspired by our work at the CRC Affective Societies, we propose affects and emotions as a core analytical means for gaining a deeper understanding of ethnographic knowledge production (Stodulka, Dinkelaker, and Thajib 2019) and the challenges and difficulties of making personal data public.
This paper argues that ethnographic data may be considered highly private and personal. Ethnography involves the immersion of the researcher in a particular community. For ethical reasons as well as to ensure the quality of the ethnography, researchers build mutual and close relationships with research participants (O'Reilly 2009), which can further grow into personal and intimate ties and even long-lasting friendships. This particularity requires a greater responsibility for the management and ethical handling of data (Imeri 2018) and creates a close bond between ethnographers, their research participants and their data.
Taking as a starting point the ethnographic approach, this paper discusses the relationship between the private and the public, and deals with the question of what the private and personal is, or should be. In doing so, the paper examines how Open Science shifts the boundaries between private and public and challenges ethnographic knowledge production.