Anthropological Data in the Digital Age

New Possibilities – New Challenges

Jerome W. Crowder, Mike Fortun, Rachel Besara, Lindsay Poirier, Jerome W. Crowder, Mike Fortun, Rachel Besara, Lindsay Poirier

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030249243
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030249250
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

For more than two decades, anthropologists have wrestled with new digital technologies and their impacts on how their data are collected, managed, and ultimately presented. Anthropological Data in the Digital Age compiles a range of academics in anthropology and the information sciences, archivists, and librarians to offer in-depth discussions of the issues raised by digital scholarship. The volume covers the technical aspects of data management—retrieval, metadata, dissemination, presentation, and preservation—while at once engaging with case studies written by cultural anthropologists and archaeologists returning from the field to grapple with the implications of producing data digitally. Concluding with thoughts on the new considerations and ethics of digital data, Anthropological Data in the Digital Age is a multi-faceted meditation on anthropological practice in a technologically mediated world. 

© The Author(s) 2020

J. W. Crowder et al. (eds.)Anthropological Data in the Digital Agehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24925-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Jerome W. Crowder¹ and Richard B. Freeman²

(1)

Institute for the Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, TX, USA

(2)

George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

Jerome W. Crowder

Email: [email protected]

Deceased

Keywords

Digital Preservation and ArchivingData management plansBorn digitalResearch ethicsOpen Access

End Abstract

Down the street from the Denver convention center, I sat down for some Pho with a long-time colleague, Richard Freeman, to discuss a few of our common interests: photography, ethnographic research, Latin America, and music. We were both in town for the 2015 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and had found a moment to grab some food and catch up. Trained as a photographer, Richard attended graduate school in anthropology and conducted his doctoral research in Buenos Aires, Argentina. After retooling himself, he was now the anthropology librarian at the University of Florida, and recounting to me some of the research classes he was offering faculty and students as well as the various projects he was working on that were taking him to places like Mexico and Haiti.

Earlier in the week I had shared with him a paper I co-wrote about file-naming practices among social science and humanities faculty (Crowder et al. 2015). “I like your paper,” Richard said, “it covers a lot of material most scholars in anthropology don’t regularly think about. I’d like to share it with our faculty.” We continued discussing our mutual interests in digital organization, metadata, and data management plans (DMPs), a common issue he found faculty grappling with while grant writing and seeking the library ’s services to resolve. “How did you learn about these things?” he asked, “especially since you didn’t get a degree in Information Science?” I had learned about file organization and various conventions through my work with computer scientists during a research gig in the early 2000s. “On the fly, really, I was making so many digital photos, I had to create a way to keep them organized, and that led me to learning more about storage and archiving digital files.” During that time I also met the digital archivist at the University of Houston (M. Reilly, this volume) who broadened my perspective about Digital Preservation and Archiving (DPA) and all of the work Information Scientists had already completed on the topics I was just broaching. There was a lot to learn and I wondered why basic digital skills were not being taught to graduate students and faculty as part of their research methods and training.

Richard and I concluded our lunch by brainstorming about a potential panel on digital data, broadly conceived, at the following year’s AAA. We scribbled down the names of potential participants and themes we would like to cover, and then headed back to the convention center. Later in the afternoon I made my way down to the book fair and meeting hall where I found Deb Winslow, Program Director in Anthropology at the National Science Foundation (NSF), at the NSF booth. I queried her about data organization and what she knew about it in anthropology, figuring discussions were in their nascent stages. Deb agreed that the topic needed further and broader discussion within the anthropology community ; she recommended the names of several professionals who were working on data organization issues in the discipline, and expressed her interest and ability to participate as a discussant on a panel the following year. About that same time NSF sponsored a series of meetings to develop teaching modules about data management for anthropologists. That product is the five-part on-line publication, “Digital Data Management for a New Generation” (Dwyer et al. 2016) which addresses principles and practices of digital data management and further explores specifics for each subdiscipline, offering discussion on different types of data and examples of DMPs generated within those subdisciplines. The fundamental skills, challenges, and questions of anthropological data, its treatment, and its possibilities were coming increasingly into the foreground.

Early in 2016 Richard and I drafted a series of abstracts, finally settling on a title, “Organize this! Data management for anthropology in the digital age, preserving our evidence for future discovery.” Our intent was to open the panel to anyone who had developed, or could comment on, unique means for organizing and sharing their digital materials and the issues they had doing so. By inviting examples from across anthropology’s subdisciplines (archeology , biological, cultural, linguistic, and applied), we hoped to expand the conversation as well as call awareness to the ethics surrounding anthropological data and suggest strategies for our colleagues to follow.

From requests for data management plans to archiving textual, visual and audio data, we consider how to deal with our anthropological digital evidence and the many accidents that can befall our research and the data we collect, analyze and store. This panel seeks contributors who can speak to their specific work regarding organization, preservation, metadata cores, access and retrieval (public and/or personal or selected group), archiving and policies at individual, institutional and federal levels. … Understanding how to manage our digital data is not an afterthought, but central to the morals, and ethics of any practicing anthropologist and her success.

The response to our call was surprising and reassuring, as sometimes you never know what you will receive when placing an open abstract into the anthropological community . Numerous proposals and emails arrived from colleagues stating that they found the topic fascinating, but could not contribute at the time. For those who did, our selection criteria prioritized a diversity of representatives from across the discipline as we valued input from all corners of anthropology. Secondly, we wanted persons whose work addressed data in unique and creative ways, so our audience could be inspired by innovations in the discipline, recognizing the many facets of “data” and how it is accounted for at many stages and scales of anthropological practice. Ideally, we wanted participants’ experiences to enlighten or anticipate scholars dealing with similar issues, as a means to educate and encourage our colleagues.

Whenever Richard and I taught or discussed data management and/or organization with students and faculty, we both received many eye-rolls and distant stares, as there seemed to be little understanding of the profound impact these “nuts and bolts” of file naming and archiving have in contemporary research. Instead, people would tell us they just wanted to talk about their proposed work and its theoretical implications. Data then, it seemed, was just the media for thinking. Our question to all of those bored by the “nuts and bolts” would be, “what are you going to think with if you cannot find your data?”

Following the AAA meetings, Palgrave approached Richard and me inviting us to develop our panel into an edited volume to further explore and elaborate on the many challenges and promises of digital data in anthropological research. All of the original panelists were interested in the idea and agreed to expand their papers into chapters. The book became an opportunity to amplify, thicken, and expand the discussion through both broader framing and greater detail. We capitalized on Richard’s training as both anthropologist and librarian, and invited our colleagues in Information Science to provide a base-line discussion about practice and organization, as well as demonstrate how Information Scientists collaborate with researchers from across the social sciences. Such a combination, we imagined, would be generative for our readers rather than simply informative: we wanted to demonstrate the necessity but also the novelty and creativity that can be unleashed when researchers ally themselves with Information Scientists. The chapters by Edward Schortman and his co-authors, and Lindsay Poirier and her co-authors, discuss in detail some of these potentials (and their challenges) of building collaborations with librarians, Information Scientists, and computer scientists who can help anthropologists design and deploy organizational systems for our research and the often unique and ever-changing data management technologies and practices it requires.

Given his qualifications and enthusiasm for the project, Richard took the lead on the book proposal in early 2017 and we began soliciting chapter ideas from colleagues who were conducting exemplary work to include in the volume. By late spring of 2017, the prospectus was ready for submission, and we had a green light to move forward with the volume by summer. Throughout this time Richard had been falling terribly ill on and off for weeks at a time; however, he found the strength to continue working at the library and caring for those around him. That summer a series of hurricanes struck Florida and he even recounted how he had sandbagged his house despite his pain and discomfort. By late September the frequency of our communication and work on the volume had significantly decreased. He let me know in early October that he would be having surgery within several weeks to remove portions of his intestine. I did not hear from him again, as Richard died on October 24. It was an unexpected blow to all of us who worked with him and knew him as a colleague and friend (see our dedication to him on p. v).

I contacted the contributors and the press to let them know what had happened and that I wanted to keep the volume on track. The search began for a new co-editor, and although it would be impossible to replace Richard, I could find very qualified persons with appropriate skill sets who could lend their perspectives to the volume, as well. Mike Fortun and I had worked together on previous projects, but he was unable to join the original AAA panel. I knew of his involvement with the Research Data Alliance, and his work helping develop the digital Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE) as well as his earlier experience as a co-editor (with Kim Fortun) of Cultural Anthropology, initiating the push that years later resulted in the journal going Open Access. Mike suggested Lindsay Poirier, a recent graduate from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, whose dissertation was on ethnography of builders of the semantic web and related data scientists, and who also did much of the conceptual and technical design work on PECE. Michele Reilly suggested Rachel Besara, a colleague of hers in Information Science. Rachel had used ethnographic methods to inform her work as a librarian and so was familiar with some of the practical challenges in handling anthropological data as well as through her support of other researchers. She was on the committee at Florida State University that wrote their research data management policy. Rachel could shepherd the appropriate chapters through the review system and provide feedback on issues the anthropologists could not. We have done our best to keep Richard’s vision for the volume while also placing our own touches on it.

Data and the New Digital Technologies

For more than two decades anthropologists have wrestled with new digital technologies and their impact on the nature and form their data take. Data generated through current anthropological research is most likely created in a digital format, also known as “born digital.” The counterpoint to born digital data is data that has been digitized from analog forms, such as scanned texts (documents, field notes, transcripts), visual materials (drawings, negatives, slides, film and video tapes), and audio materials (tapes, recorded discs, etc.), also known as “made digital.” The major differences are more technical: resolution, metadata structure, or the age of the original. In this way many technical issues of the analog are shared with their digital data counterparts. Yet, once in digital form, many of these concerns are “heightened” due to their characteristics not shared. Three of these characteristics are digital file’s ease of lossless duplication (the ability to make unlimited copies that are the same quality as the original), the ease of transmission over the internet, and the difficulty to control data once it is “out there,” which matters in ethical decisions and issues over consent, copyright, and ownership. Two of these problems can also be seen as positives: easy to reproduce and share; shared data can be analyzed by others. When producing data, either digital or analog, one must develop plans on how to manage and use the data so they are ethically sound and viable.

While all digital data may have similarities in appearance, it is important to remember, to paraphrase Franz Boas, data similar in appearance does not necessarily come from similar places (Boas 1887: 589). We must consider who collected or created the data? For what purpose and with whom? Guided by what questions or using what instruments? The answer to these and many other questions will partially determine the possibilities of what the data can be used for and what the best practices are for getting there. Given the technical differences mentioned, there are things that can be done with digital data that were never imagined with analog data: interactive maps, real-time collaboration with colleagues across the globe, and interactive uses of the data in course instruction, to name but a few exciting ideas being put into practice and further discussed in the pages that follow.

Throughout the book we ask several fundamental questions about the role of digital data in current and emerging anthropological practice and discourse. Our authors offer several examples on how they engage with digital data in research, teaching, and analysis (see chapters by Smith et al., Antonijevic, Schortman et al.). ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Understanding Data Management Planning and Sharing: Perspectives for the Social Scientist
• 3. Building Socio-technical Systems to Support Data Management and Digital Scholarship in the Social Sciences
• 4. Digital Workflow in the Humanities and Social Sciences: A Data Ethnography
• 5. Archaeological Data in the Cloud: Collaboration and Accessibility with the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS)
• 6. Opportunities and Challenges to Data Sharing with American Indian Tribal Nations
• 7. Digital Transformations: Integrating Ethnographic Video into a Multimodal Platform
• 8. Studying and Mobilizing the Impacts of Anthropological Data in Archives
• 9. The Past Is Prologue: Preserving and Disseminating Archaeological Data Online
• 10. Metadata, Digital Infrastructure, and the Data Ideologies of Cultural Anthropology
• 11. Interview with Deborah Winslow of the National Science Foundation
• 12. Post-script: Thoughts on Data Lifecycle and the Lifecycle of Anthropological Thought on Data
• Back Matter