Christine Hegel is primarily concerned about the missed potential of improvised collaboration between peers during the process of data analysis: “A model of collaborative work in which we listen and respond in real time and think through one another’s data in unfinished states, whether in the field or in lab/studio environments (as opposed to symposia or workshops, where we share mostly finished work), could enrich how we produce knowledge and make our concepts portable.”
Thus she is not trying to think through the mechanics/dynamics/politics of collaboration, or what differentiates successful from unsuccessful attempts to collaborate. Rather, she is calling anthropologists to adopt a specific “improvisational” breed of collaboration during data analysis that she characterizes at “yes, and.” She argues that this manner of collaboration is often employed between the researcher and their interlocutors during data production, but not between researchers during the data analysis phase. She also notes an absence of collaboration during the dissemination phase as interactions at this stage are typically non-improvisational (in the case of publications and peer reviews) or non-collaborative (in the case of Q&A sessions). That is, neither case follows the “yes, and” model. The other phases of the research process that Angela and I have identified are not included in this analysis. Yet, given that the topic of this CA series is “collaborative analytics,” it is understandable that the focus is limited.
