In practice, PECE has three main functions: Archiving, Analyzing, and Publishing, which can be thought of as the Back Stage, Center Stage, and Front Stage of the platform (respectively).
In this essay, I’ll describe how these functions play out in collaborative projects and provide you with a few resources and tutorials for each stage to get you started working in PECE.
The backstage of a PECE instance enables the creation of lively archives. Many types of data –from plain text and PDFs, to image, sound, and video files—can be archived and curated in PECE. You can search and filter through all of the public data hosted on an instance of PECE by visiting its repository.
One of the first tasks you will likely be given as a collaborator will be to build and/or contribute to a project’s “backstage” by creating and contributing artifacts into the project’s archives. See these archives for the Quotidian Anthropocene group and Environmental Injustice group. As you all start collecting stores of artifacts, you’ll also begin annotating (center stage) and curating these artifacts into different types of essays for publication (front stage).
The center stage facilitates collaborative analysis on the platform through data sharing and shared research questions. Researchers can form public or private groups for sharing data internally, and they can collectively analyze this data by responding to the questions in different analytic structures- or by creating their own.
These sets of analytic questions will help guide you as you analyze and annotate the artifacts that you and others have been gathering and uploading into the project archives.
Lastly, by the front stage we mean to indicate the many ways that research can be presented on the platform. These can include photo essays, timelines and/or PECE essays. Many projects will set up a PECE Essay that will serve as its home page or project page (see this example from the Transnational STS COVID-19 Project). As you or other collaborators begin to write up research outcomes from your analyses, you’ll be creating new PECE Essays, Photo Essays, and Timeline Essays of your own, and you’ll likely embed or link to these essays from this central project page.