We’ll give you some more time for collaborative analysis in your groups. Ideally, you’ll find patterns and potential organizational structures that will inform our subsequent discussion about how to share our work with OHNY.
You’ll recall that OHNY has invited us to prototype various “indicators,” modes of assessment, and forms of presentation that could shape its own future annual reports. Today we’ll consider how we can share our analysis in a form and style that does justice to our efforts, interests, and commitments (e.g., do we present one unified report or an integrated collection of group projects?); serves our pedagogical and professional purposes; and meets our collaborators’ needs. V. will lead a workshop on possible treatments.
To Prepare for Today:
- Continue “open coding” your own notes. Bring your work-in-progress to class, please.
- Optional: Writing ethnographies warrants its own class, so we won’t discuss the subject in depth here. Yet if you’re new to the practice, and you’d like to know a bit more about it, you might want to skim Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw, “Writing an Ethnography” in Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2011): 201-242. You can focus on emboldened and italicized passages.
- Now, how do we adapt this approach for collaborative writing? Let’s keep in mind that “writing together” is an ethical choice. Please skim through Mounia El Kotin, Lydia Z. Dixon, and Veronica Miranda’s collection of short essays, “Co-Authorship as Feminist Writing and Practice,” Cultural Anthropology: Fieldsights (February 6, 2020). How can we design a collaborative process that embodies our values? UNC offers a few practical tips for managing the collaborative workflow.
- How can we rethink the annual report? Check out these unorthodox examples!
- And how do we think beyond writing? Let’s consider our audience, our argument, our expressive purpose. There’s a rich tradition of ethnographic film, photography, and sound. Might they have a place in our final report? What about comics, maps, graphs, and data visualizations? Does our subject matter call for interactivity? Check out some of these examples from our Spring 2021 “Digital Ethnography class.” And read Paolo Favero, “Curating and Exhibiting Ethnographic Data” in Larissa Hjorth, Heather Horst, Anne Galloway, and Genevieve Bell, eds., The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography (Routledge, 2017): 275-287.
- The critical concepts central to our analysis should be reflected in the form and aesthetics of our report – so please make sure to review our Concept Library on Notion and identify theories and concepts that could inform both our ongoing analysis and write-ups, and our presentation of that analysis in some media form.
Supplemental Resources:
- Jenna Burrell, “Persuasive Formats,” Ethnography Matters (May 10, 2013).
- Maria Cury and Michelle Chang-McGrath, “Screenplay, Novel, and Poem: The Value of Borrowing From Three Literary Genres to Frame Our Thinking as We Gather, Analyze, and Elevate DAta in Applied Ethnographic Work,” EPIC (n.d.).
- Danielle Elliott, “Writing” in Danielle Elliott and Dara Culhane, eds., A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies (University of Toronto Press, 2017): 23-44.
- Marieke A. Frassi et al., “Ten Simple Rules for Collaboratively Writing a Multi-Authored Paper,” PLoS Computational Biology 14:11 (2018).
- Wendy Hsu, “Ethnography Beyond Text and Print: How the Digital Can Transform Ethnographic Expression,” Ethnography Matters (December 9, 2013).
- Hanna Kuusela, “Writing Together: Mapping the Terrain of Contemporary Collaborative Writing,” Scriptum 1 (2015): 103-35.
- Anand Pandian and Stuart J. McLean, Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing (Duke University Press, 2017).
- Let’s acknowledge, too, several decades’ worth of “digital humanities” and “multimodal scholarship” in various humanities and social scientific fields. Media studies, in particular, has long recognized the potential for a wide range of formats to serve as scholarly media and argumentative and expressive forms.