Expanding the Triptych - PECE as Building Communities

Our interviewees note a key function of PECE as bringing together distinct research communities to collaborate on interdisciplinary research interests. Deeper engagements with research questions require collaboration across topic areas, across scales, across approaches, across locations, and more. PECE is seen as a way to facilitate these different kinds of collaborations. In one example, PECE facilitated the research of a class of 20 engineering undergraduates. These students, having different training and seeing the world differently, were able to bring back data that would not have been found by a team of anthropologists; as Kim Fortun pointed out, “their eyes were trained differently.” 

Bringing together different ways of knowing creates opportunities for deeper understanding of complex problem-spaces but also creates challenges. At a tactical level within PECE, different communities and groups have created different norms in the way they engage with the platform. These different norms support different needs and ways of knowing. With a diversity of norms, there is no one “right” way of using the platform, yet PECE users also seek to balance contributions across different instances with a desire to respect unfamiliar or intricate protocols for how to “correctly” engage with a particular page or collection. Alli Morgan described balancing her students’, and her own, desires to engage freely with creating spaces that were easily navigable by various audiences and collaborators:

I think a lot of users want a sense of ‘When would I do a photo essay?’ ‘When would I do a PECE essay? And why is it called a PECE essay?” I think I have to explain the history of the project in order to feel kind of justified in why we made some of these decisions. Then I worry too if that overdetermines their use of it too... I think everyone has their own habits with using it and workarounds, but there is always the sense with new users of, ‘Am I doing it right?’ And even for me, some of the [spaces], it does feel like they’re developing kind of these ‘best practices’ of how to develop a project, that I don’t necessarily want to do anything on those projects until I check with them or I see what structure they’ve put in place.

Many interviewees described the tension in designing instances that facilitated, rather than inhibited or predetermined, collaborations. Our interviewees had suggestions, which are elaborated further in the design ideas, of how PECE could further facilitate the building of communities. One interviewee noted that she was excited to see that other researchers had contributed content to PECE that aligned with her research interests when she searched for a keyword to find something she had added to the platform before. Drawing on this interest in identifying scholars who are working on similar topics, we noted an opportunity for PECE to more explicitly bring researchers together who may have a connection in interests. As Aalok Khandekar described:

PECE’s founding impulse was always about how do you do collaborative analytics well, and I think that continues to be a fairly unique feature of PECE. I don’t think many of the other platforms that are out there are paying nearly enough attention to this question, like, enough attention to this question for doing open-ended kind of work especially - I mean there are things like Atlas.ti for instance that lead you in a different direction when it comes to analyzing your data, but PECE is the primary intervention to think about what we need. What we need to do is to learn to ask better questions, that you learn to do collaboratively. I think that’s unique, and that continues to be a strength.

Another interviewee mentioned that she wanted to respond to everything that students put into the platform, even though this would require the dedication of a full-time job. This illustrates how seeing one’s contributions acknowledged in PECE can actively build research communities, and inspired a design suggestion for how to build upon this insight.