This week's guest lecture by Prof. David Phillips got me thinking about the relationship between documentation and experience in research projects. As we saw in his presentation, performance-based research is intensely experiential -- it's about being there, and about the insights into a research question that can emerge only in the moment of performance. As we've seen in previous weeks, other research methods such as interviews and ethnographies depend upon the same principle, though perhaps not quite to the same extent as performance research. And yet, for it to be research, it can't be entirely ephemeral: there have to be some documentary traces that outlive the moment, and can be shared with those who weren't there. Prof. Phillips article is one of those documents, but so were the many photographs of the performance that he showed us. There's an interesting theoretical tension here between experience, memory, and the sharing of knowledge. There's also a very practical question here, too, having to do with how we document our research processes. That tension, and its role in your own research, is the subject of this week's blogging question.
I recommend starting with a seemingly straightforward question: how will you ensure that your research materials, especially digital materials, are preserved? Imagine that someone in the far future (say, the year 2112) wants to understand what research your project was doing, much as we look back to the lab notebooks, letters, records, and other materials left behind by Darwin, Freud, Turing, Banting & Best, and so on. A couple of years ago I had the exciting experience of paging through Alexander Graham Bell's lab notebooks at the Smithsonian American History Museum and the Library of Congress. These notebooks document the day-to-day activities that led to the invention of the telephone, among other developments. It was a window into the process of scientific research that I couldn't have obtained solely by analyzing its products -- even through the close analysis of artifacts that we discussed this past week. Scientists have a strong tradition of documenting the processes of their work, due largely to the need for valid scientific results to be replicable by others. Researchers in anthropology and ethnography often keep field journals for different reasons, too, but all fields could learn from the tradition of self-documentation for the sake of the future.
However, as Kirschenbaum and other scholars of digital preservation point out, this all gets tricky when our notebooks and other records are digital. What kinds of records (digital and otherwise) will your project generate, and what best practices will you follow to preserve them? Where would you look to find those best practices? In the field(s) where you situate your research, are there professional associations who have issued statements or guidelines on archiving digital research materials? Thinking back to our class on research ethics, does your project involve records or data that must not be preserved, and how will you ensure they are destroyed? (Is it enough to press "delete" and then empty your recycle bin? Kirschenbaum's book Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination suggests otherwise...) Keep in mind that this question isn't just asking how you'll back up your work to save yourself from, say, a laptop theft or hard drive crash. Rather, the question is about preserving our materials into a technological future that we can't actually see from here. We don't know how technology will change, but what's the best we can do at present to leave behind records that will survive those changes?
So, if you wish, you can approach this question as being about digital preservation as part of your research process. Another way to approach the question -- or another thread to weave into your thinking about preservation and documentation -- is to consider the un-documentable parts of your research process (at least that you can foresee as you plan your project). The researchers' own experiences where an integral, even foundational part of Prof. Phillips's project, and yours may nor may not involve direct experience in the same way. If yours is an ethnographic project, experience will be key; if it's survey-based, it probably won't. Give it some thought, either way, and if it turns out to be relevant to the blogging question, tell us about the aspects of your research process that may be challenging -- even impossible? -- to document.
I recommend starting with a seemingly straightforward question: how will you ensure that your research materials, especially digital materials, are preserved? Imagine that someone in the far future (say, the year 2112) wants to understand what research your project was doing, much as we look back to the lab notebooks, letters, records, and other materials left behind by Darwin, Freud, Turing, Banting & Best, and so on. A couple of years ago I had the exciting experience of paging through Alexander Graham Bell's lab notebooks at the Smithsonian American History Museum and the Library of Congress. These notebooks document the day-to-day activities that led to the invention of the telephone, among other developments. It was a window into the process of scientific research that I couldn't have obtained solely by analyzing its products -- even through the close analysis of artifacts that we discussed this past week. Scientists have a strong tradition of documenting the processes of their work, due largely to the need for valid scientific results to be replicable by others. Researchers in anthropology and ethnography often keep field journals for different reasons, too, but all fields could learn from the tradition of self-documentation for the sake of the future.
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| Detail from one of Alexander Graham Bell's lab notebooks, authenticating a transcription of a sound recording experiment at Bell's Volta Labs in Washington, DC. Part of the Smithsonian American History Museuem's exhibition "Hear My Voice: Alexander Graham Bell and the Origins of Recorded Sound." Other examples of lab notebooks and research notes are available at the link. |
However, as Kirschenbaum and other scholars of digital preservation point out, this all gets tricky when our notebooks and other records are digital. What kinds of records (digital and otherwise) will your project generate, and what best practices will you follow to preserve them? Where would you look to find those best practices? In the field(s) where you situate your research, are there professional associations who have issued statements or guidelines on archiving digital research materials? Thinking back to our class on research ethics, does your project involve records or data that must not be preserved, and how will you ensure they are destroyed? (Is it enough to press "delete" and then empty your recycle bin? Kirschenbaum's book Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination suggests otherwise...) Keep in mind that this question isn't just asking how you'll back up your work to save yourself from, say, a laptop theft or hard drive crash. Rather, the question is about preserving our materials into a technological future that we can't actually see from here. We don't know how technology will change, but what's the best we can do at present to leave behind records that will survive those changes?
So, if you wish, you can approach this question as being about digital preservation as part of your research process. Another way to approach the question -- or another thread to weave into your thinking about preservation and documentation -- is to consider the un-documentable parts of your research process (at least that you can foresee as you plan your project). The researchers' own experiences where an integral, even foundational part of Prof. Phillips's project, and yours may nor may not involve direct experience in the same way. If yours is an ethnographic project, experience will be key; if it's survey-based, it probably won't. Give it some thought, either way, and if it turns out to be relevant to the blogging question, tell us about the aspects of your research process that may be challenging -- even impossible? -- to document.
