Expanding the Triptych - PECE as Public Repository

Interviewees hoped that PECE could serve as a public repository for research data and help to disrupt a property sense of knowledge and data. Ethnographers in particular collect a great deal of data, oftentimes more than they are able to individually process. Even data they have used in support of certain interpretations and arguments could be remixed with other perspectives and theories to support a different academic contribution. Promoting an ethos of sharing through a platform like PECE makes it possible for people across different positions and purposes to access primary data that is otherwise difficult to come across. Ethnographers who are driven by an interest in a topic rather than a desire to possess data about it may be gratified by sharing and seeing the work they put into data collection taken up more broadly. PECE’s design allows for considerate sharing of certain artifacts as public and others as restricted to collaborators in the case that they may contain sensitive information. Mike Fortun illustrates this goal for PECE with an example from Hurricane Katrina:

I remember coming across that on Omeka and saying Yes! Yes, that’s exactly what... the idea that quickly, someone built and organized and put up and made public a collection of Katrina stories that otherwise, how were people going to get to those? Wait for a publication that included excerpts from some of those stories, maybe? So this was the other kind of driver, was making everything available down to the “primary data.” ... I will say that both the kind of individual impulse in humanities and social science researcher that people always refer to “my” data. And eventually some of “my” data would make its way into a public space... it seemed crazy to us to have, to just like do an interview that ranged over a whole set of topics, but you might only get around to analyzing and publicizing one or two of those. Whereas someone else might want to listen to that because they think they know what it’s about or they’re thinking it’s about something else, or that somehow we could let them know that ‘hey there’s more in here than you might have thought based on what you read from this publication.’ … I think the expectation... it’s like, ‘nobody wants to look at that data.’ Well, I don’t know that, I don’t think that. Wouldn’t it be good that people actually got interested in reading just an entire oral history or an entire ethnographic interview or other forms of data? Wouldn't that be a good thing or at least make it possible for people to get interested in...?

The process of making data shared can be an opportunity for analysis as well. PECE currently emphasizes slowness and thoughtfulness in the process of sharing data, which turned out to be important for an interviewee. Angela Okunue recalled a moment of both time-consuming frustration and rewarding analytic epiphany. She had been individually uploading data from participants, since PECE currently does not allow for batch uploads. While the process was time consuming and frustrating, the slowness and individual attention of the process led her to realize that bulk uploading her consent forms would potentially violate the privacy of her participants, some of whom wanted to stay anonymous. Only in working with data slowly did she realize that the efficiency benefits of scale uploading came at the deprioritization of other values in her research process.