Expanding the Triptych - PECE as Generating Novel Connections

Interviewees value PECE as a space where they can see their data in new ways and make new connections across their own data and with others’ data. Where the theme of building communities emphasizes the opportunities to connect with other scholars, this theme emphasizes the insights generated from the artifacts being shared in the scholarly community of PECE. As Kim summarized:

When you see peoples’ examples and interpretations along the way of your own work, it’s incredibly generative and creative-making.

PECE is set up to facilitate encounters with others’ work, providing space for bringing new questions to others’ data and vice versa. This kind of remixing is described by Alli as an ideal use of the platform:

I think there’s this ideal use we imagined where I make a question set and I intended for it to be deployed in a particular setting. Then User X comes along and finds that question set, and they use it for a different kind of setting, and they also add a question. Then someone else uses that entire analytic to think about something else, then they associate the questions with different analytics or a different sort of project, then I return to them and think about my original artifact differently now that I see all of these questions. I think that’s the romantic ideal, is that it just happens organically through use.

Part of the way in which interviewees see PECE facilitating novel connections is through juxtaposition and surprise. Rather than seeing one’s work alongside what might seem like the most relevant contributions by others on the platform, randomness may generate an interesting connection across artifacts and topics that are not obviously related to each other. Lindsay elaborates on the concept of surprises in PECE: 

That's always been one of the primary goals of PECE. The primary aims is to be - we used to call it in the Rheinbergian sense, a “generator of surprises” - so you’re finding material that you didn’t even know that you were looking for as kind of a way to create that shift. I definitely don’t want to ever lose that piece of it, because I think it is a real critical piece. At the same time, as we’ve had more communities get involved, we have gotten - I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from communities saying ‘hey I have no idea how to find this thing that somebody I know put up, put up.’ The tricky part for me is how do we figure out what that balance is between actually being able to find the things you know you’re looking for while at the same time also being able to constantly be surprised at things you didn’t know you were looking for.

She highlights an ongoing tension for PECE and its users: people want to find what they know they are looking for, while the platform wants to help users find what they didn’t know they were looking for. While the theme of accessing desired materials emphasizes the desire to find what users want more efficiently and reliably, this theme illustrates that there is value to maintaining a wandering and indirect path to finding artifacts on the platform. This generates surprising and otherwise difficult-to-see connections. 

Juxtaposition and surprise help users to see their own data in new ways. Interviewees note that like the turning of a kaleidoscope, PECE should facilitate the seeing of their data in different combinations and from different angles. Rather than pare down and settle down a specific meaning from data, PECE allows for an extended exploration of what a volume of data may show across different scales, through different disciplinary lenses, and through different levels of abstraction. Noise is valuable because it may become the signal a researcher is seeking when seen in different combinations. 

Ultimately, the goal of research that is baked into PECE is not to find what is the “right” answer in one’s data as a positivist view of the world would require. Rather, in taking up a poststructuralist theory of language, interviewees see research as trying to help audiences see how others see and as trying to find new ways of conveying meaning. This is the view of research that PECE seeks to share to its users as well: scholars on the platform should be encouraged to use the platform to help others see in a different way rather than finding out what is right.