Dear All, I'm new to this listserv and have been enjoying the fact that there is actual debate rather than just announcements. So my two cents will take the form of raising a new twist on the issue-- on this 'unintended effects' business. One thing that's going on with UK researchers is a major research council is considering (or have they made it mandatory now?) requiring people to deposit their 'qualitative data' into a bank to be used by other researchers. Depositors can put restrictions on other users' access to the data, but it's to encourage data recycling. Part of me likes the idea of opening the books, so to speak... I believe that there is a student at (Kent??) that is blogging his fieldwork which seems an admirable way forward. Nevertheless, this 'depository' strikes me as HUGELY controversial, not only for reasons of informant confidentiality, but also because it requires some consensus on the part of depositors to agree on what 'data' is and does--not something we could say exists even within disciplines. Ethnography raises a special point with regard to this, because it's always meant to be more than transcripts. The ethnography is not even the fieldnotes, or even the being there itself, it's (in my book anyway) the dialogue between the categories the researcher thinks she's hearing and the categories meaningful for the audience she's writing for(maybe I've deconstructed my own craft to the point of oblivion! It's always a bad idea to say ethnog is this or that...esp. on a first posting). This is what gets published anyway. This qualidata project seems to multiply the 'unintended effects' by asking in what way can 'data' be circulated as a stand-alone entity. But then again how much 'intention' do authors really think they have in the first place? In our texts, perhaps, we can represent context but I work in contexts like Maxmilian where any 'representing' I do is more marginal than the people I 'represent'. Does anyone see any merit in 'depositing' data, and would depositing data actually make you think twice about the kinds of textual representations you make? I so much prefer to share rather than deposit...but that's idealistic I suppose. You are welcome to my fieldnotes, but I reserve the right to share a cup of coffee with you first:). An example of what disturbed me. I went to a one day workshop on this sort of thing. There are a number of projects already in place, outside the goal of making a megadatabank. Interestingly though, in one (http://www.icbh.ac.uk/icbh/witness/welcome.html) the transcripts of elites sitting round a table were considered narratives in and of themselves. They are complete, un-break-apart-able pdf documents, which readers are meant to read through. They usually do. Another project on everyday life in the Edwardian period generated much discussion about how to do the metadata (http://www.qualidata.essex.ac.uk/edwardians/about/introduction.asp). Ordinary Edwardians had to be searchable. The decisions on the metadata did not bother me--what bothered me was that ordinary Edwardians could only stand for pieces that needed to be added up (searched, categorized, etc.), while elites' speech only had to amount to itself. I'm not one to harp on everyone's voices getting heard (to whom? For what? I usually find myself asking), but still there's a mathematics here that just doesn't seem right. Sorry I can't put my finger on it more than that. Maybe it's the attempt at standardizing scales of knowledge when these two projects clearly show there is no agreed scale. Hopefully someone else can do better... Dawn Dawn Nafus Senior Research Officer Chimera Institute for Socio-Technical Innovation and Research University of Essex Adastral Park Martlesham Heath, Suffolk IP5 3RE http://www.essex.ac.uk/chimera/people/dawn_nafus.html