Authors : Timothy Elfenbein, Marcel LaFlamme, Andrew S. Hoffman
This article explores some current efforts to reconfigure research practices in the field of social/cultural anthropology, in ways that intersect with the open research movement but cannot be reduced to its local implementation.
We highlight three initiatives—the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), Experimental Methods for Ethnographic Research, Gathering, and Exchange (EMERGE), and xcol: An Ethnographic Inventory—seeking to make knowledge practices that are presently tacit or invisible in published research outputs more explicit and available for critical reflection.
Drawing on edited excerpts from unstructured interviews and a group discussion with participants from the three projects, we find that the primary driver for these efforts is a desire to increase the generativity of research materials, rather than regarding openness as a means to ensure reliability or reproducibility.
While directed at different steps of the knowledge production process, all three initiatives invite researchers to engage with some version of « light structure » for documentation, which aims to enable comparison and iteration while respecting fidelity to the source material. These findings offer insight into a distinctively anthropological culture of openness that prioritizes the proliferation of interpretations over the corroboration of fact.
URL : Emerging Forms of Open Research in Social/Cultural Anthropology