What attracted Angela to PECE
Moving forward with PECE
Signed up for several other coding softwares, but “jumped on PECE” - spoke intuitively to what she wanted to do with the materials. Needs UX UI work - they’re the target users and she could feel that as she was using that (more than the Nvivo or other quant driven softwares). Multiscalar component was exciting - being able to zoom in to the annotation level of an artifact, link to that, be able to go up one level and see all the annotations produced by the questions, then zoom out to the artifact in itself. Kalleidocsopic. Work with the material at those different levels. Artistic / creative side - assembly, piecing together, making choices about what I want to foreground and in what combination.
Notion - addicting in the same way
Overwhelming and exciting because of the options and lack of structure - free and flexible
Need to be “a certain kind of person to enjoy using PECE” - flexibility to develop and design your own style. Ability to think with material in a different way
Orals docs as a test
Archive v. Playing with material - not an archive for preservation (ISPCR), but something that we can continue to work with, look at, reuse, incorporate new ideas. Tension - when do you publish it? Publication matters - need to play by some of those rules, a “date” when it’s “done” - can we change it and iterate it but still maintain that “integrity”
Working group - community building, keeping the fever going, getting people excited.
COVID-19: Develop new dataset and think about what collective datasets (with no funding) can look like, and identify previous research / datasets that exist that might help better understand the crisis. Comprehensive or curation - trying to get everything (quant) or trying to choose things we think are important and elucidate why?
Comprehensive architectures are different than curation - if you want PECE as an archive, need “drive-esque” infrastructures to facilitate that, versus curation for right now. “Bulk uploads” want to put a lot of material in a place, but then how do you title, metadata, and sort everything?
Governance of community spaces - egalitarian but doesn’t allow for everything and everyone - how to make decisions around that? How to decide what to upload?
Instances not able to share data with each other - how do we ensure discoverability and speaking across instances that doesn’t lump everything together - we want it to be decentralized, but not silo’d.
Publishing in PECE, using PECE to match the expected PhD output and what form do those things take. How to link data with dissertation? Flow? Audience? Meet the audience where they are or push the audience to join me? Links to digital art I guess?
Future features: bulk uploads - historically against because they need the metadata structures in place and get user used to working with those, long-form documents.
Mike: What is it that’s so important / attractive about making your analysis sit right alongside your data - what is it about that multi scalar thing / perspective that’s so important to have on the platform? Do people really want to go and look at your interviews or questions?
Angela: Allows for that flexibility. If someone is interested in reading the transcript, they can. At the same time, Angela wants more ways of having the annotations surface - sometimes if there are a lot, if there’s a better way of seeing them than chunking. Annotations next to it invites the reader to dive into the conversation. Three orals docs in PECE - each with different format. One with just the artifact, annotations are backgrounded. Don’t engage as much with the material because Angela’s voice vis a vis the annotations aren’t foregrounded. With another the annotations are foregrounded and Angela is front and center - but that almost forecloses what someone else might want to say. Angela is just telling you everything - if they read the materials themselves, they’re reading it through that lens. Like being able to go in directly, question format is nice - writing succinct questions can invite new users, non anthro-trained folks to come in and say they can answer those questions. Analysis less daunting. Doesn’t make it feel like there is a “right” answer. Like tacking between.
Inviting - openness. Fragmentary structure is more inviting than seeing the usual big hunk of polished / published text - looks like a work in progress. Hospitality - if you want to invite people to the analytic conversation, it has to be structured. How can we make it more inviting for people who are less comfortable with the technologies? Lots of tutorials, there’s a backlog because Angela is the person uploading everything. People need to be onboarded to the tech side. Once they’re comfortable it’s not too onerous. Learning curve - redesign user experience to be more inviting.
Takeaways:
Future questions for Angela:
Anonymous, "Redesigning PECE Additional Founder Notes - Angela Okune", contributed by Hillary Abraham and Lucy Pei, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 16 December 2020, accessed 1 May 2024. https://worldpece.org/content/redesigning-pece-additional-founder-notes-angela-okune
Critical Commentary
These are notes Hillary took during an Open Anthropology class on April 16, 2020. This class explored the concept of "opening data" and featured a veteran PECE user, Angela Okune, as guest speaker. These notes are intended to support the Redesigning PECE project. The official interview can be found here, and notes supplementing the audio recording can be found here.