Expanding the Triptych - PECE as Accessing Desired Material

One use of PECE our interviewees thought was both central and difficult in PECE was the ability to access artifacts, data, analytic questions, and writings that had been uploaded to the platform either by themselves, a collaborator, or an unfamiliar user. 

Visibility created a key tension for our participants. There was a desire to collectively build a rich archive where a researcher could get lost in a lush overgrowth of data, analytic questions, and the reflections of other contributors. This desire existed in tension with a sense of foreboding at the prospect of sifting through this overwhelming overgrowth and frustration during failed attempts to find what one is looking for. 

Interviewees particularly struggled with analytic questions and visibility in PECE. On the one hand, a proliferation of questions means that contributors are engaging with a core aspect of the platform. However, the display of questions on PECE makes it extremely difficult to find a specific question once a large number of questions has been contributed to an instance. While workarounds have been used to boost the visibility of questions where groups are actively collaboratively answering together, many people are unable to find the question they added or that a collaborator asked them to engage with. The proliferation of questions also increases the occurrence of duplicated questions, where people who otherwise would have discovered an interesting overlap in interests are working on two different versions of the same analytic question. This results in a lost opportunity for building broader research communities.

Users developed several strategies for keeping track of their materials outside of PECE. Spreadsheets and copies of data or questions in google drive were often brought up as ways for coping with the difficulty of finding an artifact that had been added to PECE. Interviewees felt conflicted about these strategies. Adding items to PECE after logging them in a spreadsheet and copying them into google drive felt like duplicated work, especially if it would be difficult for themselves and others to find without the spreadsheet as a guide. Unfortunately, engaging with data via the guidance of a spreadsheet removed the ability to get lost in the data and find unexpected connections. On the other hand, not developing data tracking methods would result in increased frustration later on. 

Somewhat guiltily, an interviewee told us that they aspired to share interesting articles they found via PECE but almost always emailed it around instead. Uploading it would archive it in case it was removed from the place it was originally found, and adding metadata would give context to make it more useful for others who may discover it, comment on it, and use it now that it was on PECE. However, the interviewee noted that in the moment there was often not enough time to upload and add metadata, and that it was also not straightforward to decide “where” to add an artifact such that it would actually be discovered by people who might see it. Additionally, the lack of notifications within PECE meant that she would need to send an email to her collaborators after uploading anyway— in this situation, PECE serves as a redundancy, rather than a facilitator. While these redundancies sometimes resulted in research insights, it was more often the case that any benefits of this added labor were not visible to users. This resulted in frustration and avoidance rather than engaging with PECE at all.