“Collaborative analytics” became a key motivating phrase of our Center for Ethnography workshop in June 2017 and a thematic for this collection of short essays deriving from it. The idea of thinking together within the classic anthropological research process, which is based on fieldwork and produces systematic conceptual thought, is a powerfully attractive restatement of the rationale for ethnography for our times. In this, it is similar to the virtues of polyphony and dialogics as representational ideals of ethnographic writing that motivated the critiques of the 1980s and 1990s.
Critical Commentary
“Collaborative analytics” became a key motivating phrase of our Center for Ethnography workshop in June 2017 and a thematic for this collection of short essays deriving from it. The idea of thinking together within the classic anthropological research process, which is based on fieldwork and produces systematic conceptual thought, is a powerfully attractive restatement of the rationale for ethnography for our times. In this, it is similar to the virtues of polyphony and dialogics as representational ideals of ethnographic writing that motivated the critiques of the 1980s and 1990s.