Conventional social scientific analysis, guided by and aiming at ideals of reproducibility, values transparency: show your data, show your code book, show your coding procedures. "Showing the analytic work of the ethnographer" has been a PECE substantive logic from the get-go, but hasn't it been a a design logic too? Memos were a key part of this; what does it mean that they have been so underutilized?
An ethnographer's analyses exceed or ab-use codes and coding, they turn and twist and transform and multiply and open up. Ethnographer's analyses don't simply reflect worlds, nor do they just refract it via a reversible coding (a translational model); our analyses diffract worlds, mutliplying and differentiating interpretations in the process, kaelidoscopically. These diffractions exhibit patterns. They are not just an effect of an interpreting subject; interpretive diffractions happen through institutions: long-term scholarly genealogies, shorter-term schools and styles, accreted reading habits, etc. PECE tries to "invert" this perverse analytic infrastructure that always departs from a norm.
or maybe what we try to do is "show and tell," rather than simply "show"
or maybe this is better simplified to "analytic transparency"
Anonymous, "transparent diffraction", contributed by Mike Fortun, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 14 July 2024, accessed 5 November 2024. https://worldpece.org/content/transparent-diffraction
Critical Commentary
transparent diffraction or maybe opacity?