I almost have to post this, because I went on a rant in IRC about the breakdown of research methods across disciplines leading to reinventing the wheel. I am just going to paste the logs because oh god, why not. I changed two usernames because I’m weird and care about privacy on the internet, sometimes. I also fixed one typo, though it was in no way a meaningful typo.
12:26:59 AM <redacted1>: morbidflight: coding?
12:27:11 AM morbidflight: qualitative data, not programming
12:27:12 AM morbidflight: like
12:27:23 AM <redacted2>: night
12:27:24 AM morbidflight: creating a theoretical framework within which to analyze said messy qual data
12:27:27 AM morbidflight: night <redacted2>
12:27:38 AM morbidflight: but doing it from a bunch of reading and categorizing
12:27:46 AM morbidflight: it’s honestly a pretty similar task to classification in general
12:28:21 AM morbidflight: although, and we’ve talked about this before, qualitative researchers don’t tend to talk to the kinds of people who are trained in classification and so that task gets seen as bitch work while coding and qualitative analysis in general is seen as this high-level thing
12:28:40 AM morbidflight: anyway i have a grudge against that because any ontological construct is high-level work and should be recognized as such
12:28:59 AM morbidflight: and understanding the similarities in said work can help ethnographers et al. learn to manage their task in a different way
12:29:00 AM morbidflight: etc
12:29:31 AM morbidflight: yet another example of the segmentation of academic work leading to breakdowns in potential communication and collaboration
12:29:48 AM morbidflight: i mean imagine if you had a hardcore taxonomist on every anthropological team that worked with qual data
12:29:51 AM morbidflight: that’d be pretty swanky
12:30:05 AM morbidflight: i mean you’d have to argue with them about the fundamental principles of organizing knowledge but hey
12:30:14 AM morbidflight: epistemology amirite
12:30:40 AM morbidflight: itt: i care too much about research methods
A long-standing issue of mine is that I see a lot of great theoretical work being done in libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions, and by the people who study them. This work often engages with larger topical debates, such as the entire field of digital humanities (I mean seriously, who other than an information professional are you going to talk to about creating an accessible web-based database of digitized texts?), and yet these larger debates treat this work as “infrastructure” or “the help.” NOT TO MENTION the often gendered breakdown of this labor. I didn’t use the term “bitch work” lightly, above.
On that note, have a look at this article from a few weeks ago that I tweeted on June 6. Infrastructure is what makes it all possible.
morbidflight 