Expanding the Triptych - PECE as Sharing Research

Interviewees were excited that PECE provides flexibility both to speak to new audiences, and to speak to old audiences in new ways. 

Broadly, our interviewees hoped to augment traditional academic publishing. Academic journals can be difficult to access and, unlike the worlds they exist within, are stagnant. PECE would allow for this analytic work to be shared with predominantly academic audiences more dynamically, collaboratively, and multi-modally. As Alli Morgan describes:

One of the things I’m excited about exploring its use a bit more - Kim and I have an essay coming out in Catalyst... We were a bit frustrated with the editors because they weren’t allowing us to hyperlink anything, even though it’s a completely online journal, to any of these secondary sources. We had some great images. Now we have a link to a PECE essay in the metadata of the main journal paper that links to everything we would have linked to in the essay. I’ve been interested in the role that could play as supplementary to traditional publication. We talk a lot about PECE as a form of publication, PECE essays, but to think how they work kind of side-by-side, I’ve been interested in maybe going back to some old papers and making PECE essays for them to see if that’s another way they can be engaged with… And the ability for someone to then annotate either individual artifacts or images or the whole thing I think could be really cool.”

PECE broadens the possibilities for speaking with academic audiences. Unlike traditional article formats, PECE can leverage digital infrastructure to include images, news articles, and other artifacts to supplement the prose. These multimodal artifacts could allow for the researcher to see their project in new ways, while inviting other academics to engage with their work directly. This opens up opportunities for increased collaboration as well as more rigorous peer-review.

In addition to speaking with academic audiences, PECE creates pathways to speak with non-academic audiences. Journal articles can be difficult to access technically as well as difficult to interpret for non-academically trained individuals. In this way, PECE shortens the research feedback loop with other stakeholders, whether they are funders or interlocutors. More importantly, it offers opportunities to engage with audiences in a fundamentally different fashion. As Ali Kenner describes:

I think I have a great interest in building archives, building media-rich narratives, where you can kind of hop around and get lost and also have an interactive experience where users can actually engage substantively with the material itself. So yeah, I mean actually this project is very near and dear to my core research interests… I really felt that ultimately, I don’t want to write peer reviewed journals, I want to do digital publishing. Media-rich digital publishing… It’s not that I want to build websites, it’s that I want to build digital museums. I want to build a digital archive or I want to build a digital story. It’s digital storytelling that I want to do.”

Whereas Ali is excited about exhibiting her work and building narratives, Angela Okune was equally excited about the curatorial aspect of PECE. Rather than doing explicit verbal analytic work, Angela enjoyed using PECE essays to “fishbowl” different artifacts in conversation with each other, letting the connections speak for themselves. Our interviewees appreciated being able to vary the extent to which they included their explicit voice versus letting juxtapositions and collections speak for themselves in various projects.

With these new opportunities available, PECE forced our interviewees to consider, then, what they mean by scholarly communication. As Aalok Khandekar described:

STS Infrastructures really pushed us to think better and think differently about PECE. This was the first time we are doing things that are public facing, much more public facing than have been so far. So in strategies being like, one element of how do you create legibility? But more generally thinking about what is this as a communication genre? What is a PECE essay? How does the very idea of scholarly communication shift? Is it the same, are we just simply duplicating what we do in the print world, or does digital space do something different for us and how do we better use and leverage the possibilities there. So a lot of those questions around what post-print scholarly communication looks like and can look like.

As the nature of scholarly communication shifts, PECE simultaneously enables students to learn new norms of engaging with various audiences. Using PECE, junior researchers can practice writing for academic audiences, take pride in having their work published, and produce more publicly engaging products.