Expanding the Triptych - PECE as Scaffolding Scholars

All of our interviewees used PECE in their classes and emphasized the importance of PECE as a tool to help make the research and interpretation process visible for junior scholars. Most students do not have opportunities to see how ethnographic scholars move from data to an end result. The question-sharing function of PECE is central to helping students see a path from data through interpretation to research products. As Kim Fortun noted:

I think one thing I’ve learned with the PECE platform and with other projects, part of what ethnography is and perhaps other interpretive forms of research is really is… there’s questions at many different levels of abstraction on the way to where we’re going. I was at an NSF workshop a few years ago on digital infrastructure for the social sciences ... [there was] a historian that said, ‘my data analysis is I sit in a coffee shop and I stare at this stuff on my computer and then I know what my interpretation is.’ And he refused to go into any more detail. … one of the most the rewarding parts of PECE is being able to bring in quite junior researchers, undergraduates, but part of what they can’t do is they can’t jump through all of those levels of questions themselves or create them because they don’t know the pathway through the storm, so to speak. But if you expose them, they can have a room of their own, but you’re telling them where it is. ... It’s almost like lily pads to stand on in the project. The work of building a visible, usable workflow and interface is deeply tied to the challenge of making a very tacit tradition of knowledge production more expressed or exposed.

The majority of available qualitative research software is centered on coding and settling meaning as quickly as possible, often in hierarchical ways. Students beginning qualitative research for the first time often are directed to coding as a default way through their data. This method of analysis is built on other forms of qualitative research. As Mike Fortun noted:

As most of the people we talked to thought of qualitative data analysis, it was all, ‘You have to get study design right.’ Particularly if you were doing surveys ... And they had at least an explicit set of questions, and then you generated your data, and then you would not go back and add questions. And that struck us as particularly unsuited for particularly ethnographic studies. ... Anthropology privileges that to a greater extent - not knowing what the questions are, necessarily, at the beginning and even as research progresses

Thus, PECE was built to provide a digital qualitative data analysis platform built on anthropological methods. Interviewees contrasted PECE with these coding-focused software tools, highlighting the importance of giving students an option with a more ethnographic sensibility as they find a way through the research process. PECE models a research process that normalizes the adding of questions before, during, and after data collection. This helps to socialize an ethnographic approach that does not see iterative questioning as “bad” science, but rather as a part of the process of generating insights from data. As an additional advantage, PECE is free for the user to use, whereas most coding software requires costly licensing purchases.

The use of PECE in classes helps young researchers realize the importance of building off of the work of others, rather than doing everything by themselves. Students are socialized to use the questions and artifacts that others have contributed, with appropriate attribution, and are rewarded by more nuanced outcomes that are made possible by engaging with existing work, rather than continuously starting from scratch. In essence, PECE celebrates remixing data. As Kim described, this approach helped socialize her students to view remixing as collaborative rather than as “cheating.” In practice, PECE provides material so that students are able to experiment with different ways of repurposing data. By building off of the work of past and current scholars, students simultaneously find new meaning in “old” data and spark collaborations with other contributors.

Our interviewees noted their students’ excitement at the prospect of connecting with researchers around the world. Students were eager to see how their work was situated among the research of other scholars, and proud to see their contributions alongside those of established researchers in remote locations. Ali Kenner described her experiences introducing students to the PECE platform:

When I onboarded a group of students in January, the thing that they were most excited about was the groups. They were so excited that there were these research groups where people from all around the world got together and shared material and did research together. That blew their minds. They were like, ‘This is so cool. We can’t wait to be involved in this.'

While PECE allows new researchers to see what projects senior and junior researchers are working on, some members of the design team felt that this value of PECE was, to an extent, underestimated. For students who may have never felt they could be a researcher, PECE not only helps them find collaborators to work with, but also provides a venue for their own novel research to be shared, built upon, and valued.