Archiving and Reusing Qualitative Data: Theory, Method and Ethics across Disciplines
Seminar 3: Methods and Archives, 10 November 2008, University of Sussex
Seminar 4: The Epistemology of the Archive, 11 November 2008, Pelham House Hotel, Lewes.
Seminar 3: Methods and Archives, 10 November 2008, University of Sussex
Certain social science concerns with validity, sampling, representativeness, generalisability, with the now and with mapping the future, seem to map uneasily onto the archive, and the historian’s solitary search for unique and eccentric documents in an apparently archaic and dusty repository of texts. This seminar focused on the methods used by those who routinely turn to archives for research, addressing:
- how historians conceive of their craft
- what methods and methodologies historians employ in reading archival documents
- how historians make knowledge claims on the basis of their documents
- how researchers piece together different sources and documents which cannot be understood as commensurate, from official policy documents, and government statistics, to diaries letters and ad hoc notes and marginalia when ‘doing research’
- how archivists understand the use of the archives they create and manage
The seminar asked how these techniques might enable us to think innovatively about data linkage across the social sciences, about integrating methods, and about the possibilities of comparative research.
Programme
10:00–10.15 - Registration and refreshments
10.15–10.20 - Introduction and welcome to CRESC and the workshop
10.20–11.15 - Session 1: Constructing re-usable qualitative data
Dorothy Sheridan, Director, Mass Observation Archive
Respondent: Bill Bytheway (OU; Timescapes)
11.15-12.30 - Session 2: Sampling, validity and the longitudinal archive
Mike Savage (University of Manchester; CRESC)
Respondent: Libby Bishop (Essex/Leeds; Qualidata)
12.30–13.30 - Lunch
13.30–15.00 - Session 3: Workshop in the Mass Observation Archive
With Archivist Fiona Courage
15.00-15.20 - Tea
15.20-16.00 - Session 4: The commissioner, the re-user and the director
Dorothy Sheridan (Sussex); Claire Langhamer (Sussex); Anne-Marie Kramer (Warwick)
16.00-16.30 - Methods and the qualitative archive: open discussion
Chair: Molly Andrews (UEL)
Seminar 4: The Epistemology of the Archive, 11 November 2008, Pelham House Hotel, Lewes
This seminar turned our attention to the production of the archive. In the social science literature archived data appears as ‘secondary data’, or ‘pre-existing data’, or even ‘found data’, as it is understood to have been generated in a different project by another researcher. Given the centrality of context and the reflexive production of data and analysis for social science researchers, the use of archived documents, particularly interview transcripts, has raised the challenge of research using data when the original context of the production of the data is not necessarily easily accessible. Here we examined what could be gained for the social science researcher by treating archival work as an ethnographic project in its own right, by understanding archival data not as found, but as generated by a particular archive. We asked how understandings of archival research change when we focus on such work, not as a project of recreating the ‘original’ research, and original research relationship, but as involving a new relationship, between researcher and the archive, and the artefacts in the archive, as an embodied and situated project. We were thus returned to questions about the temporality of archives, which we explored in Seminar One. Such attention to the production of the archive, for example through even a cursory comparison of archives such as Qualidata and Mass Observation, reveals very different epistemologies at play. In calling for a new epistemology of the archive, we also examined how ethical questions are reformulated.
Programme
10:00–10.15 - Registration and refreshments
10.15–10.20 - Introduction and welcome to CRESC and the workshop
10.20–11.30 - Session 1: Archiving in the digital age: Towards a post-documentary sensibility
Michael Frisch, President-Elect The Oral History Association, University at Buffalo, State University of New York
Respondent: Rob Perks Director of National Life Stories, British Library National Sound Archive
11.30-12.15 - Session 2: Multi-media and the mediated archive
Jack Latimer (QueenSpark) Community Archives
Jeremy Johns (British Library) Digital Lives Research Project
12.15–13.15 - Lunch
13.15–14.30 - Session 3: Heritage politics and the epistemology of the political archive
John Hay (Wolverhampton) A National Deaf Archive
Teresa Doherty (The Women’s Library) GENESIS - Developing Access to Women's History Sources
14.30-14.45 - Tea
14.45-16.00 - Session 4: Do archives have lives? And feelings?
Carolyn Hamilton (University of Witwaterstrand and Digital Innovation South Africa) Biographies of Archives
Ann Cvetkovich (University of Texas) The Archive of Feelings as Research Method
16.00-16.30 - Epistemology and the qualitative archive: open discussion