Archival and use of field data

The field recordings, interviews, participant observation notes, and secondary documents collected during this field research will be assembled to constitute a digital archive, which will serve to ground the subsequent analysis of adaptive capacity in concrete ethnographic evidence, increase the potential reach of study documents to future researchers and analysists, and enhance the potential intertextual applications of the ethnographic records and narratives. The American Anthropological Association "supports the sharing of research data and encourages ethnographers to consider preserving field notes, tapes, videos, etc. as a resource accessible to others for future study", while noting that "ethnographers should inform participants of the intent to preserve the data and make it accessible as well as the precautions to be undertaken in the handling of the data" (AAA 2004; see AcMn/EthicalConsiderations and AcMn/ConsentFormVideo for details of procedures to maintain the anonymity and confidentiality of records in this project). The archival of raw ethnographic field data, now technically possible at low cost through digital media, offers a richer, wider, and more polyphonic perspective than the ethnographer's synthesis alone. As Fabian (2002, 2008) has suggested, writing "in the presence of texts" assembled in a virtual archive grounds ethnographic writing in direct and substantive evidence of experience or communicative interactions, such that the anthropological text becomes a reflexive or analytical commentary on primary documents rather than a total and authoritative representation. The use of a virtual ethnographic archive also introduces the possibility of direct forms of dialogue between ethnographer, readers, and collaborators around ethnographic texts and the experiences they represent, exposing the situated nature of knowledge positions and in encouraging knowledge-generating discussion.

The type of ethnography thus envisaged closely approaches projects using new media to write histories of the present in the presence of online visual or oral history archives (see below and Cohen and Rosenzweig 2005). Anthropological contributions of this type have frequently been structured as "hypermedia", combining textual modes of written analysis with audiovisual forms of representation accommodating sensorial or other forms of experience (Pink 2006:105; on visual ethnographic methods see also MacDougall 2006, AAA 2002, Collier and Collier 1986). As hypermedia refocuses ethnographic writing on the communication and analysis of complex, deeply-situated data, challenging the single narrative pathway of conventional ethnographies (Howard 1988), anthropologists have mainly used this form to construct polyphonic texts that conflate fieldwork, analysis, and presentation (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007:207), often exploring the intertextuality of photographs, fieldnotes, and other materials by framing these in multiple, alternative narratives (Pink 2004:100). In this sense hypermedia ethnography provides a means of moving away from the authoritative voice of conventional scientific representation--as challenged both within anthropology (Clifford and Marcus 1986, Fox 1991) and more generally by standpoint theorists (Harding1991; Haraway 1988; Smith 1987). Prominent examples of works in this vein have been Biella's ongoing work with Maasai pastoralists (1996, 2010; http://www.maasai-migrants.org/; see also Biella et al. 1997); James and Aston's Voices of the Blue Nile (2007; see also Aston 2010); Coover's Cultures in Webs (2003); Wesch's Nekalimin.net (2003); and Ruby's Oak Park Stories (2006, 2007). More broadly, hypermedia has increasingly been used in a variety of digital ethnography or oral history archives, as a means of providing access to source images and recordings, transcripts, bibliographic details and scholarly annotations, user commentary, and additional resources such as lesson plans (see for example the various projects developed by the GMU Center for History and New Media, http://omeka.org/showcase/). Many such projects share a commitment to presenting and interpreting lived experiences through grounded narratives and audiovisual records, often with the explicit aim of exploring how diverse individuals have differently lived the same events or experiences (e.g., Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, http://hurricanearchive.org/; Bracero History Archive, http://braceroarchive.org/; Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives, http://gulaghistory.org/; in relation to the Mongolian context see the nascent Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia, http://www.mongolianoralhistory.org/).

This project further makes use of collaborative tools to provide opportunities for accessing and discussing the research documents stored in the digital ethnographic archive (see AcMn/AccessibilityGuidelines). Digital access to ethnographic documents will serve to facilitate informed discussions of rangelands governance issues, by grounding discourse among policy-makers, resource users, and others in knowledge of situated everyday practices. Multi-sited discussions will be enabled through a strategy of (1) ensuring that ethnographic documents are publicly accessible in both online and offline formats, (2) operating a discussion feature in the virtual archive allowing readers to post comments through the web or by e-mail on selected documents and topics, and (3) inviting analytical commentary by research participants and colleagues from governance, development, and research organizations in Mongolia and abroad.

There are 25 attachment(s) stored for this page.