(4711,3,'2013-06-17 23:26:20','2013-06-17 23:26:20','<b>Introduction</b>\r\n\r\nBy vastly increasing the volume and types of data that field researchers can collect, digital technologies have reshaped ethnographers’ relationship with their accumulated research data and materials. Whereas paper-based fieldnotes and other physical ethnographic records are often deposited in repositories and made accessible only after a scholar’s death, the emergence of born-digital materials has created and enhanced possibilities for rapidly sharing data, not only with other researchers but also with research subjects and the public at large via online repositories. While many researchers support the principal of public access to research data, making this data available online can compound the ethical dilemmas ethnographers face. Ethnographers often find themselves torn between contradictory imperatives to share data publically and to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study. ((L. Jahnke, A. Asher, and S.D.C. Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>, CLIR Publication #154 (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2012).))\r\n\r\nUnlike experimental data, ethnographic data, by definition, are not reproducible. ((See Sydel Silverman, “Introduction,” in <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, ed. Sydel Silverman and Nancy J. Parezo (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1995), 1.)) Ethnographic fieldwork is inextricably linked to a particular time, place, and society, making the primary data of ethnographers unique and unrecoverable. For this reason, today’s ethnographic fieldnotes are particularly important to preserve as tomorrow’s historical records; they document observations of places and cultures that—because they are in a constant state of change—will never exist in the same configuration again. Since ethnographic fieldnotes provide the empirical basis for researchers’ public authority, it would likewise seem logical for fieldnotes and other ethnographic materials to be made available for verification purposes in online repositories as soon as possible after the publication of research reports, articles, or monographs.\r\n\r\nHowever, several characteristics of ethnographic materials cause them to be particularly difficult to make publically accessible. First, many ethnographic researchers are reluctant to share their data for personal reasons. Ethnographic fieldnotes are intensely personal documents for many researchers, who often view them as extremely valuable for their own work, but doubt that they would be useful to other researchers without the accompanying contexts and experiences in which the materials were collected. Secondly, ethnographic materials also routinely contain private, confidential, or culturally sensitive information about both research subjects and the researcher, which often requires time-consuming or costly procedures to redact, and may limit or prevent public dissemination and secondary analyses of the data. Finally, ethnographic materials are regularly collected in contexts with varying or conflicting cultural standards for consent and data use, raising ethical questions about the efficacy of archiving these materials. For these reasons, balancing the multiple imperatives of data sharing, informed consent, and confidentiality for research participants is a fundamental issue for ethnographers preparing to deposit their materials in an archives, and the ethics surrounding these decisions was one of the most common and recurring themes in the interviews conducted for the study we present here.\r\n\r\nUsing data gathered during the 2011-2012 academic year in a qualitative study of researchers’ data management and curation practices, ((This study was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and managed by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). See Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.)) this article examines the practical and ethical dilemmas ethnographers face as they work with diverse research materials across varying, and sometimes conflicting, cultural standards for consent and data use. By emphasizing the everyday practices of researchers, this study sought to gain a holistic understanding of the workflows involved in the creation, management, and preservation of research data in order to better comprehend researchers’ unmet needs within data curation processes. Twenty-three researchers from varying ranks working in a variety of social science disciplines at five universities ((Penn State University, Lehigh University, Bucknell University, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Pennsylvania.)) participated in interviews for this study (see Table 1), which focused on how researchers collect and analyze data, how they manage and preserve these data, and what training they have had in data-curation practices.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4704\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"273\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4704\" alt=\"Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants.  *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE-273x300.jpg\" width=\"273\" height=\"300\" /></a> Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants. *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.[/caption]\r\n\r\nAlthough scholars across many disciplines were grappling with the ethical and philosophical problems of data sharing—often in the absence of coherent policies for data archiving and release from funding agencies, professional organizations, or their employing institutions—this article will focus on the experiences of nine of these researchers who conducted ethnography as part of their data collection. Because ethnographic research involves a complex social interplay between researchers and respondents, often from differing cultural contexts, the management of these data presents unique difficulties for researchers who usually have little or no training in preservation, curation, or data-stewardship strategies. This article will examine how researchers navigate these difficulties when dealing with the two principal types of ethnographic data: fieldnotes—the diverse array of notes, writings, and other materials upon which researchers base their ethnographies ((Jean E. Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1.))—and the research artifacts, such as transcripts and audio or video recordings, produced from more formal, direct interactions with respondents.\r\n\r\n<b>The Data Sharing Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nFunding agencies—especially agencies administering public funds—are increasingly requiring qualitative research data to be made publically available. Since 1995, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)—a major source of funding for qualitative research in the United Kingdom—has required its awardees to archive their data as a condition of funding. ((See O. Parry and N. S. Mauthner, “Whose Data Are They Anyway?” <i>Sociology</i> 38, no. 1 (2004): 140-41.)) Similarly, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other US funding agencies (e.g. National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities) have begun to require formal data-management plans detailing how researchers will meet data-sharing expectations. Our assumption is that this trend will continue as both public and private funders seek maximum returns on their investment in research. While not always explicitly required, the goal of many of these policies is for research data to be deposited in an appropriate repository with online access for both other researchers and the public. For ethnographers, who are often accustomed to retaining exclusive rights over their fieldnotes and other materials, this can represent an uncomfortable shift in research practice, even when these repositories take into account the particular confidentiality and consent demands inherent to ethnographic research (discussed further below) and implement appropriate safeguards such as embargoing or redacting sensitive materials.\r\n\r\nIn principal, the ethnographic researchers we interviewed for this study saw data preservation and sharing as positive values, even if they were not sure about how to preserve and share data or who would potentially use the materials. When asked about what parts of her research data she would like to preserve, one anthropologist explained:\r\n\r\nThat’s the thing—If you keep anything long enough it becomes interesting. . . . For myself . . . I would love to archive everything and maybe put some kind of time stamp on personal information where it can’t be released for some amount of time. It’s so hard to know what people in the future would be interested in. . . . I try to keep data in such a way that hopefully it would be comprehensible to someone else if they were willing to work through my crazy software. . . . If I had somebody’s fieldnotes from 100 years ago from my field site, I’d be totally fascinated by that, so you never know what people are going to be interested in. (2-16-120211) ((The number in parentheses is the participant identification number; please refer to Table 1.))\r\n\r\nThe scholarly societies to which many of these researchers belong also broadly support data sharing and potential reuse. The most recent 2012 revision on the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) ethics statement explicitly states that it is the obligation of the researcher to preserve records and make results accessible, “Anthropologists have an ethical responsibility for ensuring the integrity, preservation, and protection of their work” and, the “results of anthropological research should be disseminated in a timely fashion” provided it is not “at the expense of protecting confidentiality.” ((American Anthropological Association (AAA), <i>Statement on Ethics: Principals of Professional Responsibility</i>, 2012, <a href=\"http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf\">http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf</a>.)) The previous 1998 version also addressed data access and preservation, but not as systematically or forcefully. ((This version was slightly revised in 2009 to make minor changes to some of the statement’s language. Since this revision did not alter the structure or main points of the statement, we continue to refer the 1998 version (as does the AAA’s ethics website). American Anthropological Association, Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, Statement, 1998, B.4-5, C1.)) Likewise, the American Sociological Association sets similar expectations in the data sharing section of its Code of Ethics. ((American Sociological Association, Code of Ethics, 1999, 13.05.))\r\n\r\nThe benefits of data archiving and sharing for scholarly disciplines and the advancement of knowledge are straightforward: preserved materials can be subjected to secondary analysis, unnecessary duplication of research can be minimized, historical records can be maintained, and, importantly, scholars can independently evaluate the validity of published results by consulting the primary data. ((Libby Bishop, “Ethical Sharing and Reuse of Qualitative Data,” <i>Australian Journal of Social Issues</i> 44, no. 3 (2009): 266.)) Furthermore, online repositories might enable new forms of scholarship and writing. For the first time, materials preserved and made accessible online have made it feasible to make publically available the corpus of primary texts that form the basis of support for ethnographic argumentation. While a non-digitized, paper-based collection could also serve this purpose, it is unlikely that more than a handful of interested readers of a particular ethnography would physically travel to the repository to examine the documents. Repositories that make resources available online fundamentally change this dynamic. In <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive, </i>Johannes Fabian explores these possibilities by conducting what he describes as an experiment with “writing ethnography ‘in the presence of texts’” located in a publically accessible online repository. ((Johannes Fabian, <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive</i> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), vii.)) Fabian terms this genre of writing “commentary,” a text-centered form of ethnography that assumes his reader can simultaneously consult a primary text for her or himself via an online archive. ((Ibid., 9-13.))\r\n\r\nThe text Fabian utilizes is a conversation he and Kahenga Mukonkwa Michel had about a ceremony Kahenga conducted at Fabian’s home in Zaire in 1974. ((Ibid., 3.)) The transcription, translation, and an audio excerpt of the discussion are now housed in the Archives of Popular Swahili on the website of the Language and Popular Culture in Africa project. ((Johannes. Fabian, “‘Magic and Modernity’: A Conversation with a Herbalist and Practitioner of Magic,” trans. Johannes Fabian, <i>Archives of Popular Swahili</i> 7 (2005), http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction.)) Fabian argues that the repository of documents serves an important epistemological purpose by “mediat[ing] between . . . events, the presentation of evidence, and our aims and claims to produce anthropological knowledge.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn16\">[xvi]</a> By allowing the reader of an ethnography to interrogate and evaluate the primary data on which it is based, the archive reveals how ethnographies are composed through the confrontation between the researcher, his or her respondents, and the texts they co-create.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn17\">[xvii]</a>\r\n\r\nFabian’s instructive experiment notwithstanding, for many researchers the practice of making ethnographic materials available online is fraught. Ethnography requires researchers to occupy a methodological position that mediates and translates between multiple cultural contexts. This positioning leads to a number of difficulties for ethnographers as they attempt to meet their obligations to multiple constituencies—including funders, cultural institutions, and the researcher’s employing university, in addition to the individuals and communities the researcher works with—while negotiating the processes of placing materials in archives and repositories. When working with human subjects, ethical pitfalls abound, and often ethnographers must resolve contradictions between these groups.\r\n\r\nAt a very basic level, policies requiring access to research data may “directly [contradict] some ethnic groups’ cultural traditions concerning secrecy and controlled access to information.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn18\">[xviii]</a> For example, an anthropologist might gain access to knowledge that is secret, or restricted for cultural or social reasons. During his fieldwork with the Saramaka, a group in Suriname who descended from escaped African slaves, Richard Price gained knowledge about the “Old-Time People” who experienced the war for liberation from roughly 1680 to 1762.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn19\">[xix]</a> The Saramaka consider knowledge about this time and these people powerful, dangerous, and restricted. Price struggled with the ethical implications of publishing a book within a different cultural system that uses this knowledge as its primary subject.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn20\">[xx]</a> Price notes that by putting the information in a public document, he potentially “deprives [the] author of control (except perhaps via the language in which [the book] appears) over [his or her] audience.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn21\">[xxi]</a> This problem is compounded exponentially once information is made available online (as Price’s book now is, at least in part, in Google Books) by removing even the physical restrictions of a bound monograph.\r\n\r\nInformation need not be “exotic” to create publishing difficulties for ethnographers. For example, an ethnographer working in a corporate, government, or other institutional setting in the United States might be privy to proprietary or confidential information about a product or service that must be ethically and legally protected. A researcher in environmental engineering explained her process when conducting interviews:\r\n\r\nAnother big concern is confidentiality because I record those conversations, and then there’s kind of an extended period of time in which I allow those who I’ve talked with to redact parts of our conversation if they’ve talked about things they would prefer to remain private. . . I’m talking to several companies about the development and production of their technologies and so there’s some proprietary information that comes up and that’s really the main concern. (5-20-020212)\r\n\r\nIndeed, accidental release of this type of information might put the researcher at as much legal risk as her respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen preparing to preserve ethnographic data, issues of ownership and authorship are also not always straightforward, and it is imperative that researchers communicate and address these potential problems with archivists, data curators, and repository and digital collection managers before depositing ethnographic materials. For example, consent forms for interviews might not clearly state who holds the copyright or who has a license to use the recording or transcripts, potentially leading to confusion over the legal status of these materials and making it more difficult for a researcher to transfer materials to an archives. Intellectual property and copyright are themselves culturally specific concepts, and a legal right to dispose of or deposit materials as a researcher sees fit does not equal an ethical right to do so. The people providing information, the funders, the institution that employs the researcher, and the community in which the researcher works all have a moral interest in the disposition of the data.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn22\">[xxii]</a> Parry and Mauthner go so far as to say, “[B]ecause the construction of qualitative data is a joint endeavor between respondent and researcher, both parties should retain authorship/ownership rights over the data,” which creates “practical, legal and ethical implications for archiving and re-use.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn23\">[xxiii]</a>\r\n\r\nSome researchers, including Fabian, argue that since ethnographers and their respondents are joint agents in creating ethnographic materials, both parties should be named to acknowledge their contributions.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn24\">[xxiv]</a> However, naming respondents as authors or contributors contradicts an ethnographer’s imperative to protect the confidentiality of their research participants, which is a basic standard required by most Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved research and by professional-ethics statements. While David Zeitlyn observes that “a default assumption that notes will be anonymized conflicts with an individual’s moral right to be recognized as the author of his or her words,”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn25\">[xxv]</a> many, if not most, ethnographers would likely be uncomfortable naming their participants in almost any context, but especially in publically accessible online repositories. This is likely to hold true even if a researcher philosophically accepts that his or her authority to determine the level of sensitivity that the data require privileges the researcher’s position vis-à-vis his or her respondents.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn26\">[xxvi]</a>\r\n\r\nMany ethnographers thus understand themselves not so much as owners of their data, but rather as stewards or custodians of data that are produced by a complex set of relationships between researchers and respondents.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn27\">[xxvii]</a> As the stewards of these data, researchers are often the de facto interpreters of the terms by which data are made available, choosing what and when to publish or deposit materials in repositories or archives. Despite his assertion that correspondents should be named, Fabian notes that he exercises this stewardship by attempting not to publish anything that might be dangerous or damaging to the people with whom he worked—a position that is probably made easier by the fact that the texts he is working with were already 30 years old when he transcribed and posted them on the web.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn28\">[xxviii]</a> Many researchers we interviewed adopted a similar “attitude of moral responsibility towards research participants, expressed in the way in which data are handled,”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn29\">[xxix]</a> citing ethical concerns about appropriate use of the data as well as issues of confidentiality and consent. Even for researchers who support public access to data, these concerns cause them to question funders’ data-sharing requirements. A researcher in education who was preparing to apply for additional funding to create a longitudinal dataset by re-interviewing her previous respondents noted her uncertainty:\r\n\r\nI know that a lot of places when you apply for funding they want eventually for [data] to become public. I haven’t had to deal with it, but I’ve definitely thought about it. . . . I want to make sure to preserve the qualitative data because it’s very important to me . . . so it’s a concern for me personally to save it. . . . [But] once it’s public, or shared between other people, I would like to get help eventually on making the data itself more confidential because they are just interview transcripts which, you know, there are a lot of [confidentiality] issues with that, and that I would have to [make the data itself more confidential] before I shared it. . . . I don’t know if there are limits to the extent to which I can make it public or not. (1-04-100511)\r\n\r\nIn the context of making their data accessible, these confidentiality and consent negotiations are some of the most difficult issues for scholars to resolve before depositing their ethnographic materials in data repositories or archives. These issues are also most effectively addressed as early in a research project as possible, so that researchers can implement the necessary practices and protocols to insure that confidentiality and consent can be assured in the long term prior to data collection. As Charles Humphrey and his colleagues discuss, the integral involvement of archivists and data-curation specialists in the planning stages and throughout qualitative research projects greatly increases the quality of the data products and decreases ethical problems associated with deposition in repositories and archives.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn30\">[xxx]</a> As they point out, this collaboration is beneficial to both researchers and archivists, since good archival preparation practices are often synonymous with good research practices.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn31\">[xxxi]</a>\r\n\r\nDespite efforts by organizations such as the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR) to foster this type of collaboration<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn32\">[xxxii]</a> and educate ethnographers in data curation and archival preparation practices,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn33\">[xxxiii]</a> it appears that relatively few ethnographers seek out the assistance of archivists or data management specialists until after data collection is completed, unless funding requirements compelled them to do so. Of the ethnographers we interviewed, only two had consulted with data management services prior to the data collection phase of their research, both as a result of the NSF’s requirement that data-management plans be included in new funding proposals. Only one project had a systematic plan for depositing its ethnographic data in an archives, principally because this research was conducted as part of a very large and well-funded research initiative. This project had amassed some 40,000 pages of ethnographic fieldnotes, which were being preserved but not yet been shared publically. The researcher leading this project explained:\r\n\r\nIt’s news to anthropologists that data should be made public. It’s not something that’s in their mindset. In fact they are appalled by it. . . . However, that [ethnographic] data was paid for using a million dollars of federal money and I’m using it with some of my grad students who are essentially doing secondary analysis of fieldnotes. I think that in the long run that data should be made public, and could be, but very carefully. . . . I don’t think that’s a problem . . . my guess is we’re going to get there. . . . A very new area now is “what do you do with electronic fieldnotes?” and “can those be made available for researchers?” If nothing else, I think this archive of fieldnotes . . .in 20 or 30 years could be a great historical source and should be preserved on that basis. So, I would like to see us work out ways of carefully having anthropological and ethnographic data made public too. (5-11-103011)\r\n\r\nIn working out the procedures for sharing these materials, this researcher went on to emphasize the paramount importance of protecting research participants’ confidentiality. Indeed, all of the ethnographers cited confidentiality concerns as one of the foremost issues that they would need to discuss and resolve with an archivist or repository manager before depositing their materials, making it perhaps the most critical area for developing collaborative practices between researchers, data curators, and archivists.\r\n\r\n<b>The Confidentiality Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nThe ethics statements of both the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association require researchers to protect the confidentiality of their respondents (although the AAA statement asserts that expectations of credit should also be addressed).<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn34\">[xxxiv]</a> Protecting research participants’ confidentiality is routinely an explicit promise within social science research, and is an almost universally assumed requirement of IRBs when reviewing research proposals. Setting aside the research participant’s potential moral right to authorship as discussed above, the nature of ethnographic research often renders the promise of confidentiality problematic, if not outright impossible. As Zachary Schrag observes, maintaining the confidentiality of fieldwork sites and research participants discussed in publications has been a perennial problem for social science researchers, as details necessary to make ethnographic and other fieldwork-based writing meaningful often simultaneously make these places and people identifiable, especially to people familiar with the location or topic.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn35\">[xxxv]</a> Increasing confidentiality protections almost always come at the cost of decreasing the amount of contextual information included for the ethnography’s audience, and can effectively prevent data from being deposited in an archives or repository (or sometimes even collected). A sociologist recounted the difficulties he encountered on one project:\r\n\r\nI wanted to do life histories with priests [in central Pennsylvania], and part of the problem was . . . we got into a situation where people might tell me things about their personal lives that are sort of not confidential in the IRB sense but that might be upsetting to their congregations—like I talked to one priest who had been married three times, where if the congregation had known about that they would have been very upset. There’s nothing illegal about it; this person’s not shy about telling that, but it could have been damaging. But I had the sense that . . . if I went around and did these interviews, I didn’t want to destroy the data because I thought they had some historical importance. . . . [The IRB said,] “and when you get done with this study if you’re not going to destroy the data you have to store it in an archive for 50 years, and I checked with [university] archives and they said, “we’re not going to store anything like that.” . . . I wanted to preserve the data, but there was no way to do it. . . . I actually quit the project [because the IRB made it impossible to do]. (2-13-111411)\r\n\r\nWhile protecting research participants’ privacy can be difficult, even in carefully prepared and edited publications, the nature of ethnographic materials makes them especially difficult to confidentially preserve over time. Audio and video recordings present obvious confidentiality problems by capturing a respondents’ voice or image,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn36\">[xxxvi]</a> but even interview transcripts can be problematic. A common practice in archiving ethnographic materials is to make attempts to remove potentially identifying information from archived transcripts. However, even these “anonymized” transcripts often still contain personal details that allow the possible identification of research participants. For example, in the interviews conducted for this study, participants regularly discussed their discipline and research interests. Coupled with the names of the universities where the research was conducted—which are contained in all of our research proposals and publications—this seemingly innocuous information would probably render any of our participants identifiable with a simple web search if the full interview transcripts were released. This might not seem like a significant risk for scholars describing projects that they routinely discuss publically, but depending on the other details contained in the transcript it might also be embarrassing or potentially damaging (for example, comments about university administrators, other colleagues, etc.). As is often the case with qualitative research, removing these contextual details would diminish, if not destroy, the usefulness of these data to future researchers—the ostensible audience for these materials. Unfortunately, each piece of contextual detail retained about a research participant to aid in data interpretation simultaneously creates more potential for identification.\r\n\r\nGiven technological advances, removing all conceivably identifying details might still be insufficient to guarantee that transcripts are rendered anonymous. In fact, anonymizing transcripts may soon no longer be technically possible. Arvind Narayana and his colleagues have demonstrated that it is possible to accurately identify anonymous online authors up to 20 percent of the time based on writing style alone, given a sufficient corpus of example texts.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn37\">[xxxvii]</a> As more and more content moves online, one can only assume that these techniques will become more robust, so that identifying a participant from the vocabulary or speech patterns in a transcript may eventually become a matter of applying the correct software. These realities set up even the most well-intentioned researchers to fail to meet the obligations required by IRBs and the agreements made with their respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen archiving ethnographic materials, confidentiality can also be equally important for protecting the researcher. This is especially true for the archiving of fieldnotes, which are profoundly personal for many ethnographic researchers. Researchers are often quite ambivalent about these data, regularly describing feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, or embarrassment about their work and what it reveals about them as scholars.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn38\">[xxxviii]</a> When talking about her data collection process, an anthropologist in our study observed:\r\n\r\nThat’s the thing with fieldnotes, you never show them to anyone . . . as long as it works for you . . . it’s not like you have to show it to someone else and have them make sense of it, which is kind of a shame because it would be nice to have data in formats where people could, you know, sort of, archive that information. (2-16-120211)\r\n\r\nIn his study of fieldnote practices, Jean Jackson observes, “Many respondents point out that the highly personal nature of fieldnotes influences the extent of one’s willingness to share them: ‘Fieldnotes can reveal how worthless your work was, the lacunae, your linguistic incompetence, your not being made a blood brother, your childish temper.’”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn39\">[xxxix]</a> Anthropologist Simon Ottenberg describes his fieldnotes similarly, “[W]hen I was younger, I would have felt uncomfortable at the thought of someone else using my notes, whether I was alive or dead—they are so much a private thing, so much an aspect of personal field experience, so much a private language, so much part of my ego, my childhood [as an anthropologist], and my personal maturity.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn40\">[xl]</a> This attachment and ambivalence may make researchers reluctant to turn over control of their notes to an archives—especially one that has the purpose of making materials available publically on the internet. This professional practice not only makes it very difficult to substantiate or verify ethnographers’ data, suggesting a need for ethnographers to develop more proactive and sensitive data-sharing procedures, but also creates a situation where ethnographic materials are saved, but with inadequate plans for preservation. Zeitlyn notes, “Paradoxically most anthropologists want neither to destroy their field material nor archive it.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn41\">[xli]</a> So, too, with our study: almost no one had made plans for their data beyond the short term, let alone the final dispensation of their materials at the end of their career or after their death.\r\n\r\nWhile archivists regularly assure scholars that the papers of “ordinary” or not-famous researchers are sometimes the most valuable,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn42\">[xlii]</a> researchers themselves are often unconvinced. Many of our respondents had trouble imagining the potential audience for their data and primary materials, although one Environmental Studies researcher shared data on graffiti images she collected during fieldwork following a particular ethnic conflict event. The data were not directly related to her primary research questions, but another scholar used them in a Master’s thesis (and possibly in a future dissertation). Nevertheless, doubts about future usefulness contribute to researchers’ reluctance to undertake sometimes arduous and time-consuming data preservation and annotation tasks, such as redacting confidential information, and to neglect advance planning for the eventual archiving of their materials, such as assuring adequate consent procedures. This is potentially a key area of advocacy for data curators and archivists, who are well positioned to both educate researchers in the importance of preserving primary data for future generations of researchers, even if its immediate value is not apparent, and to provide tools such as cross-indexes and finding aids that make these data more useful and comparable.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn43\">[xliii]</a>\r\n\r\n<b>The Consent Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nBoth IRBs and disciplinary societies’ ethics statements emphasize the importance and necessity of obtaining informed consent from research participants. Given the possibility of archiving materials indefinitely, and especially for web publication, obtaining fully informed consent may be a futile endeavor. Libby Bishop points out that because researchers cannot adequately speculate on all the uses in which data might be employed, explicit consent is “logically impossible.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn44\">[xliv]</a> However, Bishop also observes that this should not paralyze researchers from depositing their materials in archives, since consent for the primary research activity is in itself partial and no researcher can fully explain all information about any research project.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn45\">[xlv]</a> Zeitlyn makes this point in another way, noting that cultural differences may also limit the ability of a researcher to obtain consent in a way that is recognizable to IRBs: “Once material is archived, it may be consulted by unknown others who might use it in novel ways. . . . Can a researcher obtain meaningful prior informed consent if the uses to which the material might be put in the future cannot be explained?”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn46\">[xlvi]</a>\r\n\r\nWhile Bishop suggests responding to this problem by providing examples of how archived research might be reused or by obtaining open-ended consent,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn47\">[xlvii]</a> others suggest a more comprehensive approach that understands consent as a process rather than a one-time event.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn48\">[xlviii]</a> This approach presents significant difficulties when applied to the lifecycle of an entire ethnographic research project, especially once data and other fieldwork materials are deposited in an archives for the purpose of long-term access and preservation. If appropriate consent for archiving is not obtained at the outset of a project, or is sought when new uses are discovered for materials, contacting participants to authorize this usage can be extremely difficult and costly for ethnographers, if not outright impossible. Furthermore, a consent model that requires re-contacting participants also requires confidentiality or anonymization procedures to be reversible, meaning that the researcher must retain records that can link individuals to the materials about them. Retaining contact information or other identifying records is not best practice for assuring participant confidentiality, and in the case of truly sensitive research, doing so unnecessarily maintains records that could be subject to subpoena or otherwise compromised. For example, in 2012 the US Department of Justice issued a subpoena in connection with a murder investigation on behalf of Great Britain for access to oral history interviews conducted with Irish Republican Army and Loyalist paramilitary members as part of “The Belfast Project,” archived at Boston College’s Burns Library. While the project’s confidentiality agreement promised interviewees that these materials would be embargoed until their death, this guarantee was subject to exceptions required by American law; a point that may have been unclear to the research participants. Both Boston College and the researchers are presently contesting the subpoenas, but the initial rulings by a federal district court and the First Circuit Court of Appeals have found that the subpoenas are legal.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn49\">[xlix]</a> As this case demonstrates, whenever identifying information exists, there is a possibility that its disclosure can be compelled. From the point of view of research-participant confidentiality, it is therefore preferable to destroy materials that enable identification or re-contact as soon as possible after research is complete.\r\n\r\nSince anonymization is an all-or-nothing decision that must be irreversible, even for the researcher, if it is to be effective,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn50\">[l]</a> in order to make consent an ongoing process, one must also accept that the data cannot be made fully anonymous. The question then becomes how researchers can meaningfully extend consent decisions to include archives without rendering them unmanageable for their administrators or unnecessarily diminishing their analytical value.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn51\">[li]</a> Balancing the need to maintain appropriate levels of confidentiality with the administrative costs is a critical area for collaboration between researchers, archivists, and data specialists. Fully anonymizing datasets is probably neither necessary, nor cost effective, for relatively low-risk materials,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn52\">[lii]</a> but both the researcher and the archivists must fully understand the potential risk scenarios before these decisions can be made, particularly in an environment where privacy protections are an increasing concern for research participants. While discussing the challenges he faces in complying with funder’s public access requirements, a sociologist observed:\r\n\r\nClearly the biggest problem is the problem of protection of privacy. The concern of privacy has been ramped up tremendously over the last 10 or 15 years, and the process of getting permission to analyze data can be difficult, but a trend in social science data is to include more and more information that\'s sensitive. . . . I think the field is trying to now establish appropriate levels of protection for particular kinds of data and is trying to balance this problem of privacy with public access. And it is a challenge and it’s going to require some new modes of doing things. (5-11-103111)\r\n\r\nDeveloping these modes of work and processes of consent requires not only the participation of researchers and scholarly societies, but also intensive cooperation with data management specialists, technologists, and archivists.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn53\">[liii]</a>\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusions and Recommendations</b>\r\n\r\nResearchers and archivists alike face tremendous challenges in effectively preserving ethnographic research data and providing meaningful access for researchers and other stakeholders while simultaneously protecting sensitive data. In order to be effective, data sharing, confidentiality, and consent imperatives all require the active participation and investment of researchers themselves. Decisions about access, issues of authorship attribution, adequate consent, and the level of confidentially required cannot be made without the input of someone who is deeply knowledgeable about the contexts in which the research took place. However, as we have seen, none of these decision processes necessarily end at the moment when the materials are deposited in an archives or repository, and a researcher’s ethical obligation to his or her research participants does not end once he or she has transferred responsibility for their preservation. This sense of responsibility makes many researchers reluctant to relinquish control over their ethnographic materials, lest changing political, social, or cultural conditions necessitates a more restrictive approach to data access than was initially required.\r\n\r\nFor example, an Environmental Studies researcher noted that currently her data does not present much risk to her respondents:\r\n\r\nMost of the data I’ve collected really have limited privacy issues or any kind of harm that could come to respondents. There are some topics that I’ve looked at, that depending on, when—you know, timeliness—at what point these were published, that identifying information could be problematic. In [central Asian country] it’s a lot easier—at least currently—the situation for my topics isn’t dangerous. That doesn’t mean it can’t be in the future and if I extended the research to neighboring countries then I would probably have some more serious confidentiality issues. (2-12-111011)\r\n\r\nIf the political situation for her respondents changed, however, this researcher might be ethically obligated to change the access conditions of any materials that she had archived, even if her consent procedures had addressed this eventuality. Repositories for ethnographic materials must be careful to include procedures to respond to these types of situations in their donor agreements, and researchers should discuss the unique qualities of ethnographic materials prior to their deposit. As Parezo points out, “it is unethical and unreasonable to expect the archival community to guess which fieldnotes contain sensitive information and what are reasonable use restrictions.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn54\">[liv]</a>\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, preparing materials for deposit into an archives is often a low priority for ethnographers for a variety of reasons, and the archiving of ethnographic data is further hindered by a persistent lack of training. While comprehensive historical review is beyond the scope of this article, Silverman already noted the problem of a lack of formal training in data collection and management practices among anthropologists almost 20 years ago,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn55\">[lv]</a> before the rise of many of the complications that the expansion of digital data collection created. Almost none of the scholars we interviewed reported that data curation or stewardship training was part of their graduate curriculum, and data management was usually only addressed narrowly in relation to methodological approaches and problems. The ethical and practical difficulties involved in managing and preserving large amounts of research data were rarely addressed, with most researchers acquiring the skills they needed via trial and error.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn56\">[lvi]</a> None of the scholars interviewed during this study expressed satisfaction with their level of expertise in data management, and few had access to individuals who could provide knowledgeable guidance. While it would be preferable for graduate curricula to include this type of training, it seems unlikely that this change will occur in the near term. It is, therefore, likely that archivists and data specialists will need to provide this training, preferably by developing relationships with ethnographic researchers as early as possible in the research process.\r\n\r\nThe lack of confidence in their data-management training compounds researchers’ apprehension about the ethical issues contained in their data. Researchers are naturally—and rightfully—conservative about the potential risks in sharing data, especially if they are not convinced they can protect their respondents’ confidentiality, or that they have obtained appropriate consent—issues that the difficulties of cross-cultural communication make more complex. Without such assurances that these ethical imperatives can be addressed, many researchers are unlikely to invest in archiving their materials. “In many cases, their desire to avoid the ethical risks of inappropriate data release may outweigh the costs of potential data loss.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn57\">[lvii]</a>\r\n\r\nBecause of these interrelated concerns, it is critical that the archival and data curation systems available to ethnographic researchers have multiple and fine-grained levels of access and privacy controls. Tools must be developed that can appropriately manage confidential data and that allow researchers, working in conjunction with their respondents, to exercise control over their data, administer who has access to it, and account for culturally specific restrictions on data use.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn58\">[lviii]</a> One example of a system attempting to address these requirements is the Murkutu content management system (<a href=\"http://www.mukurtu.org/\">http://www.mukurtu.org/</a>), which makes cultural protocols a fundamental part of access to materials. This allows for the easy creation of fine-grained and culturally appropriate user groups with specifically defined usage rights, and it is being developed in cooperation with indigenous communities.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn59\">[lix]</a>\r\n\r\nBecause the nature of ethnographic materials makes them potentially subject to ongoing and evolving dilemmas of confidentiality and consent, archivists and data managers should understand that these materials may require ongoing curation, preferably through processes and procedures that incorporate researchers in a collaborative and meaningful way. Although many researchers would welcome the ability to more easily share their data, particularly in collaborative projects and in response to data-sharing requirements, they are almost universally resistant to any arrangement in which they would relinquish control over access to the data. As one anthropologist described:\r\n\r\nPeople don’t hesitate, at all, to share data with collaborators that they trust. … If you provide a mechanism for collaboration, even if it’s just Google Docs or something, you know, people share data easily and freely. It’s when it becomes an anonymous process that they seem to get balky. (1-02-100511)\r\n\r\nThe goal of making materials publically available online, then, will require archival systems and processes that are cognizant of the complex social relationships embedded within ethnographic materials, not only between the researcher and his or her respondents, but also between and among the many stakeholders in ethnographic data. The development of additional policies, ethical guidelines, and best practices by disciplinary organizations, funding agencies, universities, and cultural institutions could further aid researchers and archivists in navigating the ethical dilemmas contained in the archival process.\r\n\r\nBecause much ethnographic data is collected by individuals in relatively small and often idiosyncratic datasets, it is especially vulnerable to loss due to benign neglect or lack or resources, even if the data are historically unique. A sociologist described one such vulnerable dataset:\r\n\r\nWe did life histories of 45 people in a [church] congregation in [central Pennsylvania town]. . . . It’s probably the only body of material on a single congregation of that depth and complexity that exists, and I’m just too lazy to have figured out what to do with it and write it up and everything, but you could imagine somewhere somebody who wants to do research on congregations would find this incredibly valuable. But what’s going to happen to it [in the long term]? And what’s going to happen to it is, the copies I have will end up in a trash can, and my computer hard drive will eventually crash or get outmoded or get erased, and that’ll be the end of it [if there isn’t a place to archive it]. (2-13-111411)\r\n\r\nIn order to prevent these losses, data management specialists and archivists must specifically curate these materials. They must also build relationships with ethnographers to resolve the unique ethical dilemmas these data present and the uneasy tensions between researchers’ desire to share data publically and obligations to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study.\r\n\r\nFinally, despite the acknowledged importance and value of archival materials to the disciplines and future researchers, academic rewards systems offer very little payoff for the work that goes into making ethnographic materials available, and ethnographic researchers are often under-resourced in the funding, time, and personnel support needed for preparing materials for archiving. <a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn60\">[lx]</a> Archivists must therefore work to make archival systems and the development of archival processes and policies as straightforward for researchers as possible, ideally assisting in integrating the development of metadata and other secondary materials (for example, codebooks, explanatory materials, finding aids, and ontologies) necessary to archiving and ensuring the long-term usefulness of primary data as early in the research process as possible. Likewise, funding agencies should improve funding for long-term data management, preservation, and curatorial services, either directly or via guidelines to institutions for recouping indirect costs, especially when the grant mandates archiving or public data accessibility. By providing these supports, archivists and funders would greatly assist researchers in responding to the imperatives of providing access to data and assuring the confidentiality and consent of their respondents, as well as resolving the ethical dilemmas contained in their data, thereby helping assure the preservation of irreplaceable ethnographic information.\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<hr align=\"left\" size=\"1\" width=\"33%\" />\r\n\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref16\">[xvi]</a> Fabian, “Magic,” 123\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref17\">[xvii]</a> Fabian, <i>Ethnography</i>, 54. One does wonder, however, why Fabian considered a traditionally published monograph necessary to this project, rather than simply including it in the archive. Given that his book annotates the online texts using paragraph numbers that assume a specific online layout, it would seem more effective to have created hyperlinks between the commentary and the primary materials. In this way, the “experiment” seems incomplete.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref18\">[xviii]</a> David Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates,” <i>Annual Review of Anthropology</i> 41, no. 1 (2012): 472, doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145721. See also G. Isaac, “Whose Idea Was This?: Museums, Replicas, and the Reproduction of Knowledge,” <i>Current Anthropology</i> 52, no. 2 (2011) 211-233.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref19\">[xix]</a> Richard Price, <i>First Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 5-6. For additional examples and a discussion of cross-cultural differences in relation to access to knowledge see Nancy J. Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage: CoPAR, Anthropological Records, and the Archival Community,” <i>The American Archivist </i>62 (1999): 285, note 24.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref20\">[xx]</a> Price, <i>First Time, </i>21-23.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref21\">[xxi]</a> Ibid.,<i> </i>23\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref22\">[xxii]</a> Silverman, “Introduction,” 4; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 142.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref23\">[xxiii]</a> Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 141.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref24\">[xxiv]</a> Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref25\">[xxv]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 470.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref26\">[xxvi]</a> Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 148.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref27\">[xxvii]</a> Silverman, “Introduction,” 4-5.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref28\">[xxviii]</a> Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref29\">[xxix]</a> Annamaria Carusi and Marina Jirotka, “From Data Archive to Ethical Labyrinth,” <i>Qualitative Research</i> 9, no. 3 (2009): 292.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref30\">[xxx]</a> Charles K. Humphrey, Carole A. Estabrooks, Judy R. Norris, Jane E. Smith, and Kathryn L. Hesketh, “Archivist on Board: Contributions to the Research Team,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000).\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref31\">[xxxi]</a> Humphrey et al., “Archivist on Board,” 5.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref32\">[xxxii]</a> Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage.”\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref33\">[xxxiii]</a> CoPAR has released a series of fourteen bulletins outlining specific issues involved in the preservation of anthropological materials and addressed to practicing anthropologists. These bulletins are available at <a href=\"http://copar.org/bulletins.htm\">http://copar.org/bulletins.htm</a>. Unfortunately, since most of these bulletins were written in the late 1990s, many of the technology discussions are out of date. However, the conceptual discussions remain highly relevant.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref34\">[xxxiv]</a> ASA, Code of Ethics, 11; AAA, Statement on Ethics (Part 3), 7.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref35\">[xxxv]</a> Zachary M. Schrag, <i>Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 15.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref36\">[xxxvi]</a> For a discussion of the extreme difficulty of archiving video and audio data anonymously, see Louise Corti, Annette Day, and Gill Backhouse, “Confidentiality and Informed Consent: Issues for Consideration in the Preservation of and Provision of Access to Qualitative Data Archives,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 4.4c, <a href=\"http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024\">http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024</a>.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref37\">[xxxvii]</a> A. Narayanan, H. Paskov, N. Z. Gong, J. Bethencourt, E. Stefanov, E. C. R. Shin, and D. Song, “On the Feasibility of Internet-scale Author Identification,” Security and Privacy (SP), 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (May 20-23, 2012): 301, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref38\">[xxxviii]</a> Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” 10-12.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref39\">[xxxix]</a> Ibid., 22.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref40\">[xl]</a> Simon Ottenberg, “Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1990), 153.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref41\">[xli]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref42\">[xlii]</a> Catherine Fowler, \"Ethical Considerations,\" in Silverman and Parezo, <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, 64-65; Robert Leopold, “The Second Life of Ethnographic Fieldnotes,” <i>Ateliers d\'anthropologie</i> 32 (2008): 4.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref43\">[xliii]</a> Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 301-305. See also Louise Corti, “Progress and Problems of Preserving and Providing Access to Qualitative Data for Social Research—The International Picture of an Emerging Culture,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 10.1.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref44\">[xliv]</a> Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref45\">[xlv]</a> Ibid., 264.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref46\">[xlvi]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471; see also Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 147.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref47\">[xlvii]</a> Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref48\">[xlviii]</a> Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 146; AAA, Code of Ethics, III.A.4.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref49\">[xlix]</a> The Society of American Archivists Oral History Section maintains a webpage summarizing the case and providing links to relevant documents at http://www2.archivists.org/groups/oral-history-section/the-belfast-case-information-for-saa-members.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref50\">[l]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref51\">[li]</a> See Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294-95.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref52\">[lii]</a> See Corti, Day, and Backhouse,\" Confidentiality and Informed Consent,\" 4.4, on the expense of creating anonymized archives.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref53\">[liii]</a> ICPSR’s “Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving Phase 5: Preparing Data for Sharing” provides a model for these processes. See <a href=\"http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html\">http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html</a>.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref54\">[liv]</a> Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 285.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref55\">[lv]</a> Silverman, “Introduction,” 6.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref56\">[lvi]</a> Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref57\">[lvii]</a> Ibid.<i>,</i> 17.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref58\">[lviii]</a> Ibid.<i>,</i> 17-18.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref59\">[lix]</a> A list of community groups and organizations participating in the Mukurtu project is available at http://www.mukurtu.org/community.html.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref60\">[lx]</a> The NSF’s recent decision to list datasets as one of the research products to be included in the section of its grant proposals where researchers describe their qualifications does suggest, however, that the current rewards system may gradually be changing (see <a href=\"http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp\">http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp</a>).\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n</div>','Curating the Ethnographic Moment','','inherit','open','open','','4698-revision-8','','','2013-06-17 23:26:20','2013-06-17 23:26:20','',4698,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4698-revision-8/',0,'revision','',0),(4708,3,'2013-06-17 23:20:36','2013-06-17 23:20:36','<b>Introduction</b>\r\n\r\nBy vastly increasing the volume and types of data that field researchers can collect, digital technologies have reshaped ethnographers’ relationship with their accumulated research data and materials. Whereas paper-based fieldnotes and other physical ethnographic records are often deposited in repositories and made accessible only after a scholar’s death, the emergence of born-digital materials has created and enhanced possibilities for rapidly sharing data, not only with other researchers but also with research subjects and the public at large via online repositories. While many researchers support the principal of public access to research data, making this data available online can compound the ethical dilemmas ethnographers face. Ethnographers often find themselves torn between contradictory imperatives to share data publically and to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study. ((L. Jahnke, A. Asher, and S.D.C. Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>, CLIR Publication #154 (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2012).))\r\n\r\nUnlike experimental data, ethnographic data, by definition, are not reproducible. ((See Sydel Silverman, “Introduction,” in <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, ed. Sydel Silverman and Nancy J. Parezo (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1995), 1.)) Ethnographic fieldwork is inextricably linked to a particular time, place, and society, making the primary data of ethnographers unique and unrecoverable. For this reason, today’s ethnographic fieldnotes are particularly important to preserve as tomorrow’s historical records; they document observations of places and cultures that—because they are in a constant state of change—will never exist in the same configuration again. Since ethnographic fieldnotes provide the empirical basis for researchers’ public authority, it would likewise seem logical for fieldnotes and other ethnographic materials to be made available for verification purposes in online repositories as soon as possible after the publication of research reports, articles, or monographs.\r\n\r\nHowever, several characteristics of ethnographic materials cause them to be particularly difficult to make publically accessible. First, many ethnographic researchers are reluctant to share their data for personal reasons. Ethnographic fieldnotes are intensely personal documents for many researchers, who often view them as extremely valuable for their own work, but doubt that they would be useful to other researchers without the accompanying contexts and experiences in which the materials were collected. Secondly, ethnographic materials also routinely contain private, confidential, or culturally sensitive information about both research subjects and the researcher, which often requires time-consuming or costly procedures to redact, and may limit or prevent public dissemination and secondary analyses of the data. Finally, ethnographic materials are regularly collected in contexts with varying or conflicting cultural standards for consent and data use, raising ethical questions about the efficacy of archiving these materials. For these reasons, balancing the multiple imperatives of data sharing, informed consent, and confidentiality for research participants is a fundamental issue for ethnographers preparing to deposit their materials in an archives, and the ethics surrounding these decisions was one of the most common and recurring themes in the interviews conducted for the study we present here.\r\n\r\nUsing data gathered during the 2011-2012 academic year in a qualitative study of researchers’ data management and curation practices, ((This study was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and managed by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). See Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.)) this article examines the practical and ethical dilemmas ethnographers face as they work with diverse research materials across varying, and sometimes conflicting, cultural standards for consent and data use. By emphasizing the everyday practices of researchers, this study sought to gain a holistic understanding of the workflows involved in the creation, management, and preservation of research data in order to better comprehend researchers’ unmet needs within data curation processes. Twenty-three researchers from varying ranks working in a variety of social science disciplines at five universities ((Penn State University, Lehigh University, Bucknell University, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Pennsylvania.)) participated in interviews for this study (see Table 1), which focused on how researchers collect and analyze data, how they manage and preserve these data, and what training they have had in data-curation practices.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4704\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"273\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4704\" alt=\"Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants.  *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE-273x300.jpg\" width=\"273\" height=\"300\" /></a> Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants. *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.[/caption]\r\n\r\nAlthough scholars across many disciplines were grappling with the ethical and philosophical problems of data sharing—often in the absence of coherent policies for data archiving and release from funding agencies, professional organizations, or their employing institutions—this article will focus on the experiences of nine of these researchers who conducted ethnography as part of their data collection. Because ethnographic research involves a complex social interplay between researchers and respondents, often from differing cultural contexts, the management of these data presents unique difficulties for researchers who usually have little or no training in preservation, curation, or data-stewardship strategies. This article will examine how researchers navigate these difficulties when dealing with the two principal types of ethnographic data: fieldnotes—the diverse array of notes, writings, and other materials upon which researchers base their ethnographies ((Jean E. Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1.))—and the research artifacts, such as transcripts and audio or video recordings, produced from more formal, direct interactions with respondents.\r\n\r\n<b>The Data Sharing Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nFunding agencies—especially agencies administering public funds—are increasingly requiring qualitative research data to be made publically available. Since 1995, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)—a major source of funding for qualitative research in the United Kingdom—has required its awardees to archive their data as a condition of funding. ((See O. Parry and N. S. Mauthner, “Whose Data Are They Anyway?” <i>Sociology</i> 38, no. 1 (2004): 140-41.)) Similarly, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other US funding agencies (e.g. National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities) have begun to require formal data-management plans detailing how researchers will meet data-sharing expectations. Our assumption is that this trend will continue as both public and private funders seek maximum returns on their investment in research. While not always explicitly required, the goal of many of these policies is for research data to be deposited in an appropriate repository with online access for both other researchers and the public. For ethnographers, who are often accustomed to retaining exclusive rights over their fieldnotes and other materials, this can represent an uncomfortable shift in research practice, even when these repositories take into account the particular confidentiality and consent demands inherent to ethnographic research (discussed further below) and implement appropriate safeguards such as embargoing or redacting sensitive materials.\r\n\r\nIn principal, the ethnographic researchers we interviewed for this study saw data preservation and sharing as positive values, even if they were not sure about how to preserve and share data or who would potentially use the materials. When asked about what parts of her research data she would like to preserve, one anthropologist explained:\r\n\r\nThat’s the thing—If you keep anything long enough it becomes interesting. . . . For myself . . . I would love to archive everything and maybe put some kind of time stamp on personal information where it can’t be released for some amount of time. It’s so hard to know what people in the future would be interested in. . . . I try to keep data in such a way that hopefully it would be comprehensible to someone else if they were willing to work through my crazy software. . . . If I had somebody’s fieldnotes from 100 years ago from my field site, I’d be totally fascinated by that, so you never know what people are going to be interested in. (2-16-120211) ((The number in parentheses is the participant identification number; please refer to Table 1.))\r\n\r\nThe scholarly societies to which many of these researchers belong also broadly support data sharing and potential reuse. The most recent 2012 revision on the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) ethics statement explicitly states that it is the obligation of the researcher to preserve records and make results accessible, “Anthropologists have an ethical responsibility for ensuring the integrity, preservation, and protection of their work” and, the “results of anthropological research should be disseminated in a timely fashion” provided it is not “at the expense of protecting confidentiality.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn8\">[viii]</a> The previous 1998 version also addressed data access and preservation, but not as systematically or forcefully.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn9\">[ix]</a> Likewise, the American Sociological Association sets similar expectations in the data sharing section of its Code of Ethics.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn10\">[x]</a>\r\n\r\nThe benefits of data archiving and sharing for scholarly disciplines and the advancement of knowledge are straightforward: preserved materials can be subjected to secondary analysis, unnecessary duplication of research can be minimized, historical records can be maintained, and, importantly, scholars can independently evaluate the validity of published results by consulting the primary data.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn11\">[xi]</a> Furthermore, online repositories might enable new forms of scholarship and writing. For the first time, materials preserved and made accessible online have made it feasible to make publically available the corpus of primary texts that form the basis of support for ethnographic argumentation. While a non-digitized, paper-based collection could also serve this purpose, it is unlikely that more than a handful of interested readers of a particular ethnography would physically travel to the repository to examine the documents. Repositories that make resources available online fundamentally change this dynamic. In <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive, </i>Johannes Fabian explores these possibilities by conducting what he describes as an experiment with “writing ethnography ‘in the presence of texts’” located in a publically accessible online repository.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn12\">[xii]</a> Fabian terms this genre of writing “commentary,” a text-centered form of ethnography that assumes his reader can simultaneously consult a primary text for her or himself via an online archive.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn13\">[xiii]</a>\r\n\r\nThe text Fabian utilizes is a conversation he and Kahenga Mukonkwa Michel had about a ceremony Kahenga conducted at Fabian’s home in Zaire in 1974.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn14\">[xiv]</a> The transcription, translation, and an audio excerpt of the discussion are now housed in the Archives of Popular Swahili on the website of the Language and Popular Culture in Africa project.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn15\">[xv]</a> Fabian argues that the repository of documents serves an important epistemological purpose by “mediat[ing] between . . . events, the presentation of evidence, and our aims and claims to produce anthropological knowledge.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn16\">[xvi]</a> By allowing the reader of an ethnography to interrogate and evaluate the primary data on which it is based, the archive reveals how ethnographies are composed through the confrontation between the researcher, his or her respondents, and the texts they co-create.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn17\">[xvii]</a>\r\n\r\nFabian’s instructive experiment notwithstanding, for many researchers the practice of making ethnographic materials available online is fraught. Ethnography requires researchers to occupy a methodological position that mediates and translates between multiple cultural contexts. This positioning leads to a number of difficulties for ethnographers as they attempt to meet their obligations to multiple constituencies—including funders, cultural institutions, and the researcher’s employing university, in addition to the individuals and communities the researcher works with—while negotiating the processes of placing materials in archives and repositories. When working with human subjects, ethical pitfalls abound, and often ethnographers must resolve contradictions between these groups.\r\n\r\nAt a very basic level, policies requiring access to research data may “directly [contradict] some ethnic groups’ cultural traditions concerning secrecy and controlled access to information.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn18\">[xviii]</a> For example, an anthropologist might gain access to knowledge that is secret, or restricted for cultural or social reasons. During his fieldwork with the Saramaka, a group in Suriname who descended from escaped African slaves, Richard Price gained knowledge about the “Old-Time People” who experienced the war for liberation from roughly 1680 to 1762.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn19\">[xix]</a> The Saramaka consider knowledge about this time and these people powerful, dangerous, and restricted. Price struggled with the ethical implications of publishing a book within a different cultural system that uses this knowledge as its primary subject.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn20\">[xx]</a> Price notes that by putting the information in a public document, he potentially “deprives [the] author of control (except perhaps via the language in which [the book] appears) over [his or her] audience.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn21\">[xxi]</a> This problem is compounded exponentially once information is made available online (as Price’s book now is, at least in part, in Google Books) by removing even the physical restrictions of a bound monograph.\r\n\r\nInformation need not be “exotic” to create publishing difficulties for ethnographers. For example, an ethnographer working in a corporate, government, or other institutional setting in the United States might be privy to proprietary or confidential information about a product or service that must be ethically and legally protected. A researcher in environmental engineering explained her process when conducting interviews:\r\n\r\nAnother big concern is confidentiality because I record those conversations, and then there’s kind of an extended period of time in which I allow those who I’ve talked with to redact parts of our conversation if they’ve talked about things they would prefer to remain private. . . I’m talking to several companies about the development and production of their technologies and so there’s some proprietary information that comes up and that’s really the main concern. (5-20-020212)\r\n\r\nIndeed, accidental release of this type of information might put the researcher at as much legal risk as her respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen preparing to preserve ethnographic data, issues of ownership and authorship are also not always straightforward, and it is imperative that researchers communicate and address these potential problems with archivists, data curators, and repository and digital collection managers before depositing ethnographic materials. For example, consent forms for interviews might not clearly state who holds the copyright or who has a license to use the recording or transcripts, potentially leading to confusion over the legal status of these materials and making it more difficult for a researcher to transfer materials to an archives. Intellectual property and copyright are themselves culturally specific concepts, and a legal right to dispose of or deposit materials as a researcher sees fit does not equal an ethical right to do so. The people providing information, the funders, the institution that employs the researcher, and the community in which the researcher works all have a moral interest in the disposition of the data.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn22\">[xxii]</a> Parry and Mauthner go so far as to say, “[B]ecause the construction of qualitative data is a joint endeavor between respondent and researcher, both parties should retain authorship/ownership rights over the data,” which creates “practical, legal and ethical implications for archiving and re-use.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn23\">[xxiii]</a>\r\n\r\nSome researchers, including Fabian, argue that since ethnographers and their respondents are joint agents in creating ethnographic materials, both parties should be named to acknowledge their contributions.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn24\">[xxiv]</a> However, naming respondents as authors or contributors contradicts an ethnographer’s imperative to protect the confidentiality of their research participants, which is a basic standard required by most Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved research and by professional-ethics statements. While David Zeitlyn observes that “a default assumption that notes will be anonymized conflicts with an individual’s moral right to be recognized as the author of his or her words,”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn25\">[xxv]</a> many, if not most, ethnographers would likely be uncomfortable naming their participants in almost any context, but especially in publically accessible online repositories. This is likely to hold true even if a researcher philosophically accepts that his or her authority to determine the level of sensitivity that the data require privileges the researcher’s position vis-à-vis his or her respondents.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn26\">[xxvi]</a>\r\n\r\nMany ethnographers thus understand themselves not so much as owners of their data, but rather as stewards or custodians of data that are produced by a complex set of relationships between researchers and respondents.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn27\">[xxvii]</a> As the stewards of these data, researchers are often the de facto interpreters of the terms by which data are made available, choosing what and when to publish or deposit materials in repositories or archives. Despite his assertion that correspondents should be named, Fabian notes that he exercises this stewardship by attempting not to publish anything that might be dangerous or damaging to the people with whom he worked—a position that is probably made easier by the fact that the texts he is working with were already 30 years old when he transcribed and posted them on the web.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn28\">[xxviii]</a> Many researchers we interviewed adopted a similar “attitude of moral responsibility towards research participants, expressed in the way in which data are handled,”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn29\">[xxix]</a> citing ethical concerns about appropriate use of the data as well as issues of confidentiality and consent. Even for researchers who support public access to data, these concerns cause them to question funders’ data-sharing requirements. A researcher in education who was preparing to apply for additional funding to create a longitudinal dataset by re-interviewing her previous respondents noted her uncertainty:\r\n\r\nI know that a lot of places when you apply for funding they want eventually for [data] to become public. I haven’t had to deal with it, but I’ve definitely thought about it. . . . I want to make sure to preserve the qualitative data because it’s very important to me . . . so it’s a concern for me personally to save it. . . . [But] once it’s public, or shared between other people, I would like to get help eventually on making the data itself more confidential because they are just interview transcripts which, you know, there are a lot of [confidentiality] issues with that, and that I would have to [make the data itself more confidential] before I shared it. . . . I don’t know if there are limits to the extent to which I can make it public or not. (1-04-100511)\r\n\r\nIn the context of making their data accessible, these confidentiality and consent negotiations are some of the most difficult issues for scholars to resolve before depositing their ethnographic materials in data repositories or archives. These issues are also most effectively addressed as early in a research project as possible, so that researchers can implement the necessary practices and protocols to insure that confidentiality and consent can be assured in the long term prior to data collection. As Charles Humphrey and his colleagues discuss, the integral involvement of archivists and data-curation specialists in the planning stages and throughout qualitative research projects greatly increases the quality of the data products and decreases ethical problems associated with deposition in repositories and archives.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn30\">[xxx]</a> As they point out, this collaboration is beneficial to both researchers and archivists, since good archival preparation practices are often synonymous with good research practices.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn31\">[xxxi]</a>\r\n\r\nDespite efforts by organizations such as the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR) to foster this type of collaboration<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn32\">[xxxii]</a> and educate ethnographers in data curation and archival preparation practices,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn33\">[xxxiii]</a> it appears that relatively few ethnographers seek out the assistance of archivists or data management specialists until after data collection is completed, unless funding requirements compelled them to do so. Of the ethnographers we interviewed, only two had consulted with data management services prior to the data collection phase of their research, both as a result of the NSF’s requirement that data-management plans be included in new funding proposals. Only one project had a systematic plan for depositing its ethnographic data in an archives, principally because this research was conducted as part of a very large and well-funded research initiative. This project had amassed some 40,000 pages of ethnographic fieldnotes, which were being preserved but not yet been shared publically. The researcher leading this project explained:\r\n\r\nIt’s news to anthropologists that data should be made public. It’s not something that’s in their mindset. In fact they are appalled by it. . . . However, that [ethnographic] data was paid for using a million dollars of federal money and I’m using it with some of my grad students who are essentially doing secondary analysis of fieldnotes. I think that in the long run that data should be made public, and could be, but very carefully. . . . I don’t think that’s a problem . . . my guess is we’re going to get there. . . . A very new area now is “what do you do with electronic fieldnotes?” and “can those be made available for researchers?” If nothing else, I think this archive of fieldnotes . . .in 20 or 30 years could be a great historical source and should be preserved on that basis. So, I would like to see us work out ways of carefully having anthropological and ethnographic data made public too. (5-11-103011)\r\n\r\nIn working out the procedures for sharing these materials, this researcher went on to emphasize the paramount importance of protecting research participants’ confidentiality. Indeed, all of the ethnographers cited confidentiality concerns as one of the foremost issues that they would need to discuss and resolve with an archivist or repository manager before depositing their materials, making it perhaps the most critical area for developing collaborative practices between researchers, data curators, and archivists.\r\n\r\n<b>The Confidentiality Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nThe ethics statements of both the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association require researchers to protect the confidentiality of their respondents (although the AAA statement asserts that expectations of credit should also be addressed).<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn34\">[xxxiv]</a> Protecting research participants’ confidentiality is routinely an explicit promise within social science research, and is an almost universally assumed requirement of IRBs when reviewing research proposals. Setting aside the research participant’s potential moral right to authorship as discussed above, the nature of ethnographic research often renders the promise of confidentiality problematic, if not outright impossible. As Zachary Schrag observes, maintaining the confidentiality of fieldwork sites and research participants discussed in publications has been a perennial problem for social science researchers, as details necessary to make ethnographic and other fieldwork-based writing meaningful often simultaneously make these places and people identifiable, especially to people familiar with the location or topic.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn35\">[xxxv]</a> Increasing confidentiality protections almost always come at the cost of decreasing the amount of contextual information included for the ethnography’s audience, and can effectively prevent data from being deposited in an archives or repository (or sometimes even collected). A sociologist recounted the difficulties he encountered on one project:\r\n\r\nI wanted to do life histories with priests [in central Pennsylvania], and part of the problem was . . . we got into a situation where people might tell me things about their personal lives that are sort of not confidential in the IRB sense but that might be upsetting to their congregations—like I talked to one priest who had been married three times, where if the congregation had known about that they would have been very upset. There’s nothing illegal about it; this person’s not shy about telling that, but it could have been damaging. But I had the sense that . . . if I went around and did these interviews, I didn’t want to destroy the data because I thought they had some historical importance. . . . [The IRB said,] “and when you get done with this study if you’re not going to destroy the data you have to store it in an archive for 50 years, and I checked with [university] archives and they said, “we’re not going to store anything like that.” . . . I wanted to preserve the data, but there was no way to do it. . . . I actually quit the project [because the IRB made it impossible to do]. (2-13-111411)\r\n\r\nWhile protecting research participants’ privacy can be difficult, even in carefully prepared and edited publications, the nature of ethnographic materials makes them especially difficult to confidentially preserve over time. Audio and video recordings present obvious confidentiality problems by capturing a respondents’ voice or image,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn36\">[xxxvi]</a> but even interview transcripts can be problematic. A common practice in archiving ethnographic materials is to make attempts to remove potentially identifying information from archived transcripts. However, even these “anonymized” transcripts often still contain personal details that allow the possible identification of research participants. For example, in the interviews conducted for this study, participants regularly discussed their discipline and research interests. Coupled with the names of the universities where the research was conducted—which are contained in all of our research proposals and publications—this seemingly innocuous information would probably render any of our participants identifiable with a simple web search if the full interview transcripts were released. This might not seem like a significant risk for scholars describing projects that they routinely discuss publically, but depending on the other details contained in the transcript it might also be embarrassing or potentially damaging (for example, comments about university administrators, other colleagues, etc.). As is often the case with qualitative research, removing these contextual details would diminish, if not destroy, the usefulness of these data to future researchers—the ostensible audience for these materials. Unfortunately, each piece of contextual detail retained about a research participant to aid in data interpretation simultaneously creates more potential for identification.\r\n\r\nGiven technological advances, removing all conceivably identifying details might still be insufficient to guarantee that transcripts are rendered anonymous. In fact, anonymizing transcripts may soon no longer be technically possible. Arvind Narayana and his colleagues have demonstrated that it is possible to accurately identify anonymous online authors up to 20 percent of the time based on writing style alone, given a sufficient corpus of example texts.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn37\">[xxxvii]</a> As more and more content moves online, one can only assume that these techniques will become more robust, so that identifying a participant from the vocabulary or speech patterns in a transcript may eventually become a matter of applying the correct software. These realities set up even the most well-intentioned researchers to fail to meet the obligations required by IRBs and the agreements made with their respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen archiving ethnographic materials, confidentiality can also be equally important for protecting the researcher. This is especially true for the archiving of fieldnotes, which are profoundly personal for many ethnographic researchers. Researchers are often quite ambivalent about these data, regularly describing feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, or embarrassment about their work and what it reveals about them as scholars.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn38\">[xxxviii]</a> When talking about her data collection process, an anthropologist in our study observed:\r\n\r\nThat’s the thing with fieldnotes, you never show them to anyone . . . as long as it works for you . . . it’s not like you have to show it to someone else and have them make sense of it, which is kind of a shame because it would be nice to have data in formats where people could, you know, sort of, archive that information. (2-16-120211)\r\n\r\nIn his study of fieldnote practices, Jean Jackson observes, “Many respondents point out that the highly personal nature of fieldnotes influences the extent of one’s willingness to share them: ‘Fieldnotes can reveal how worthless your work was, the lacunae, your linguistic incompetence, your not being made a blood brother, your childish temper.’”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn39\">[xxxix]</a> Anthropologist Simon Ottenberg describes his fieldnotes similarly, “[W]hen I was younger, I would have felt uncomfortable at the thought of someone else using my notes, whether I was alive or dead—they are so much a private thing, so much an aspect of personal field experience, so much a private language, so much part of my ego, my childhood [as an anthropologist], and my personal maturity.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn40\">[xl]</a> This attachment and ambivalence may make researchers reluctant to turn over control of their notes to an archives—especially one that has the purpose of making materials available publically on the internet. This professional practice not only makes it very difficult to substantiate or verify ethnographers’ data, suggesting a need for ethnographers to develop more proactive and sensitive data-sharing procedures, but also creates a situation where ethnographic materials are saved, but with inadequate plans for preservation. Zeitlyn notes, “Paradoxically most anthropologists want neither to destroy their field material nor archive it.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn41\">[xli]</a> So, too, with our study: almost no one had made plans for their data beyond the short term, let alone the final dispensation of their materials at the end of their career or after their death.\r\n\r\nWhile archivists regularly assure scholars that the papers of “ordinary” or not-famous researchers are sometimes the most valuable,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn42\">[xlii]</a> researchers themselves are often unconvinced. Many of our respondents had trouble imagining the potential audience for their data and primary materials, although one Environmental Studies researcher shared data on graffiti images she collected during fieldwork following a particular ethnic conflict event. The data were not directly related to her primary research questions, but another scholar used them in a Master’s thesis (and possibly in a future dissertation). Nevertheless, doubts about future usefulness contribute to researchers’ reluctance to undertake sometimes arduous and time-consuming data preservation and annotation tasks, such as redacting confidential information, and to neglect advance planning for the eventual archiving of their materials, such as assuring adequate consent procedures. This is potentially a key area of advocacy for data curators and archivists, who are well positioned to both educate researchers in the importance of preserving primary data for future generations of researchers, even if its immediate value is not apparent, and to provide tools such as cross-indexes and finding aids that make these data more useful and comparable.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn43\">[xliii]</a>\r\n\r\n<b>The Consent Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nBoth IRBs and disciplinary societies’ ethics statements emphasize the importance and necessity of obtaining informed consent from research participants. Given the possibility of archiving materials indefinitely, and especially for web publication, obtaining fully informed consent may be a futile endeavor. Libby Bishop points out that because researchers cannot adequately speculate on all the uses in which data might be employed, explicit consent is “logically impossible.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn44\">[xliv]</a> However, Bishop also observes that this should not paralyze researchers from depositing their materials in archives, since consent for the primary research activity is in itself partial and no researcher can fully explain all information about any research project.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn45\">[xlv]</a> Zeitlyn makes this point in another way, noting that cultural differences may also limit the ability of a researcher to obtain consent in a way that is recognizable to IRBs: “Once material is archived, it may be consulted by unknown others who might use it in novel ways. . . . Can a researcher obtain meaningful prior informed consent if the uses to which the material might be put in the future cannot be explained?”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn46\">[xlvi]</a>\r\n\r\nWhile Bishop suggests responding to this problem by providing examples of how archived research might be reused or by obtaining open-ended consent,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn47\">[xlvii]</a> others suggest a more comprehensive approach that understands consent as a process rather than a one-time event.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn48\">[xlviii]</a> This approach presents significant difficulties when applied to the lifecycle of an entire ethnographic research project, especially once data and other fieldwork materials are deposited in an archives for the purpose of long-term access and preservation. If appropriate consent for archiving is not obtained at the outset of a project, or is sought when new uses are discovered for materials, contacting participants to authorize this usage can be extremely difficult and costly for ethnographers, if not outright impossible. Furthermore, a consent model that requires re-contacting participants also requires confidentiality or anonymization procedures to be reversible, meaning that the researcher must retain records that can link individuals to the materials about them. Retaining contact information or other identifying records is not best practice for assuring participant confidentiality, and in the case of truly sensitive research, doing so unnecessarily maintains records that could be subject to subpoena or otherwise compromised. For example, in 2012 the US Department of Justice issued a subpoena in connection with a murder investigation on behalf of Great Britain for access to oral history interviews conducted with Irish Republican Army and Loyalist paramilitary members as part of “The Belfast Project,” archived at Boston College’s Burns Library. While the project’s confidentiality agreement promised interviewees that these materials would be embargoed until their death, this guarantee was subject to exceptions required by American law; a point that may have been unclear to the research participants. Both Boston College and the researchers are presently contesting the subpoenas, but the initial rulings by a federal district court and the First Circuit Court of Appeals have found that the subpoenas are legal.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn49\">[xlix]</a> As this case demonstrates, whenever identifying information exists, there is a possibility that its disclosure can be compelled. From the point of view of research-participant confidentiality, it is therefore preferable to destroy materials that enable identification or re-contact as soon as possible after research is complete.\r\n\r\nSince anonymization is an all-or-nothing decision that must be irreversible, even for the researcher, if it is to be effective,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn50\">[l]</a> in order to make consent an ongoing process, one must also accept that the data cannot be made fully anonymous. The question then becomes how researchers can meaningfully extend consent decisions to include archives without rendering them unmanageable for their administrators or unnecessarily diminishing their analytical value.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn51\">[li]</a> Balancing the need to maintain appropriate levels of confidentiality with the administrative costs is a critical area for collaboration between researchers, archivists, and data specialists. Fully anonymizing datasets is probably neither necessary, nor cost effective, for relatively low-risk materials,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn52\">[lii]</a> but both the researcher and the archivists must fully understand the potential risk scenarios before these decisions can be made, particularly in an environment where privacy protections are an increasing concern for research participants. While discussing the challenges he faces in complying with funder’s public access requirements, a sociologist observed:\r\n\r\nClearly the biggest problem is the problem of protection of privacy. The concern of privacy has been ramped up tremendously over the last 10 or 15 years, and the process of getting permission to analyze data can be difficult, but a trend in social science data is to include more and more information that\'s sensitive. . . . I think the field is trying to now establish appropriate levels of protection for particular kinds of data and is trying to balance this problem of privacy with public access. And it is a challenge and it’s going to require some new modes of doing things. (5-11-103111)\r\n\r\nDeveloping these modes of work and processes of consent requires not only the participation of researchers and scholarly societies, but also intensive cooperation with data management specialists, technologists, and archivists.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn53\">[liii]</a>\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusions and Recommendations</b>\r\n\r\nResearchers and archivists alike face tremendous challenges in effectively preserving ethnographic research data and providing meaningful access for researchers and other stakeholders while simultaneously protecting sensitive data. In order to be effective, data sharing, confidentiality, and consent imperatives all require the active participation and investment of researchers themselves. Decisions about access, issues of authorship attribution, adequate consent, and the level of confidentially required cannot be made without the input of someone who is deeply knowledgeable about the contexts in which the research took place. However, as we have seen, none of these decision processes necessarily end at the moment when the materials are deposited in an archives or repository, and a researcher’s ethical obligation to his or her research participants does not end once he or she has transferred responsibility for their preservation. This sense of responsibility makes many researchers reluctant to relinquish control over their ethnographic materials, lest changing political, social, or cultural conditions necessitates a more restrictive approach to data access than was initially required.\r\n\r\nFor example, an Environmental Studies researcher noted that currently her data does not present much risk to her respondents:\r\n\r\nMost of the data I’ve collected really have limited privacy issues or any kind of harm that could come to respondents. There are some topics that I’ve looked at, that depending on, when—you know, timeliness—at what point these were published, that identifying information could be problematic. In [central Asian country] it’s a lot easier—at least currently—the situation for my topics isn’t dangerous. That doesn’t mean it can’t be in the future and if I extended the research to neighboring countries then I would probably have some more serious confidentiality issues. (2-12-111011)\r\n\r\nIf the political situation for her respondents changed, however, this researcher might be ethically obligated to change the access conditions of any materials that she had archived, even if her consent procedures had addressed this eventuality. Repositories for ethnographic materials must be careful to include procedures to respond to these types of situations in their donor agreements, and researchers should discuss the unique qualities of ethnographic materials prior to their deposit. As Parezo points out, “it is unethical and unreasonable to expect the archival community to guess which fieldnotes contain sensitive information and what are reasonable use restrictions.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn54\">[liv]</a>\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, preparing materials for deposit into an archives is often a low priority for ethnographers for a variety of reasons, and the archiving of ethnographic data is further hindered by a persistent lack of training. While comprehensive historical review is beyond the scope of this article, Silverman already noted the problem of a lack of formal training in data collection and management practices among anthropologists almost 20 years ago,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn55\">[lv]</a> before the rise of many of the complications that the expansion of digital data collection created. Almost none of the scholars we interviewed reported that data curation or stewardship training was part of their graduate curriculum, and data management was usually only addressed narrowly in relation to methodological approaches and problems. The ethical and practical difficulties involved in managing and preserving large amounts of research data were rarely addressed, with most researchers acquiring the skills they needed via trial and error.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn56\">[lvi]</a> None of the scholars interviewed during this study expressed satisfaction with their level of expertise in data management, and few had access to individuals who could provide knowledgeable guidance. While it would be preferable for graduate curricula to include this type of training, it seems unlikely that this change will occur in the near term. It is, therefore, likely that archivists and data specialists will need to provide this training, preferably by developing relationships with ethnographic researchers as early as possible in the research process.\r\n\r\nThe lack of confidence in their data-management training compounds researchers’ apprehension about the ethical issues contained in their data. Researchers are naturally—and rightfully—conservative about the potential risks in sharing data, especially if they are not convinced they can protect their respondents’ confidentiality, or that they have obtained appropriate consent—issues that the difficulties of cross-cultural communication make more complex. Without such assurances that these ethical imperatives can be addressed, many researchers are unlikely to invest in archiving their materials. “In many cases, their desire to avoid the ethical risks of inappropriate data release may outweigh the costs of potential data loss.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn57\">[lvii]</a>\r\n\r\nBecause of these interrelated concerns, it is critical that the archival and data curation systems available to ethnographic researchers have multiple and fine-grained levels of access and privacy controls. Tools must be developed that can appropriately manage confidential data and that allow researchers, working in conjunction with their respondents, to exercise control over their data, administer who has access to it, and account for culturally specific restrictions on data use.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn58\">[lviii]</a> One example of a system attempting to address these requirements is the Murkutu content management system (<a href=\"http://www.mukurtu.org/\">http://www.mukurtu.org/</a>), which makes cultural protocols a fundamental part of access to materials. This allows for the easy creation of fine-grained and culturally appropriate user groups with specifically defined usage rights, and it is being developed in cooperation with indigenous communities.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn59\">[lix]</a>\r\n\r\nBecause the nature of ethnographic materials makes them potentially subject to ongoing and evolving dilemmas of confidentiality and consent, archivists and data managers should understand that these materials may require ongoing curation, preferably through processes and procedures that incorporate researchers in a collaborative and meaningful way. Although many researchers would welcome the ability to more easily share their data, particularly in collaborative projects and in response to data-sharing requirements, they are almost universally resistant to any arrangement in which they would relinquish control over access to the data. As one anthropologist described:\r\n\r\nPeople don’t hesitate, at all, to share data with collaborators that they trust. … If you provide a mechanism for collaboration, even if it’s just Google Docs or something, you know, people share data easily and freely. It’s when it becomes an anonymous process that they seem to get balky. (1-02-100511)\r\n\r\nThe goal of making materials publically available online, then, will require archival systems and processes that are cognizant of the complex social relationships embedded within ethnographic materials, not only between the researcher and his or her respondents, but also between and among the many stakeholders in ethnographic data. The development of additional policies, ethical guidelines, and best practices by disciplinary organizations, funding agencies, universities, and cultural institutions could further aid researchers and archivists in navigating the ethical dilemmas contained in the archival process.\r\n\r\nBecause much ethnographic data is collected by individuals in relatively small and often idiosyncratic datasets, it is especially vulnerable to loss due to benign neglect or lack or resources, even if the data are historically unique. A sociologist described one such vulnerable dataset:\r\n\r\nWe did life histories of 45 people in a [church] congregation in [central Pennsylvania town]. . . . It’s probably the only body of material on a single congregation of that depth and complexity that exists, and I’m just too lazy to have figured out what to do with it and write it up and everything, but you could imagine somewhere somebody who wants to do research on congregations would find this incredibly valuable. But what’s going to happen to it [in the long term]? And what’s going to happen to it is, the copies I have will end up in a trash can, and my computer hard drive will eventually crash or get outmoded or get erased, and that’ll be the end of it [if there isn’t a place to archive it]. (2-13-111411)\r\n\r\nIn order to prevent these losses, data management specialists and archivists must specifically curate these materials. They must also build relationships with ethnographers to resolve the unique ethical dilemmas these data present and the uneasy tensions between researchers’ desire to share data publically and obligations to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study.\r\n\r\nFinally, despite the acknowledged importance and value of archival materials to the disciplines and future researchers, academic rewards systems offer very little payoff for the work that goes into making ethnographic materials available, and ethnographic researchers are often under-resourced in the funding, time, and personnel support needed for preparing materials for archiving. <a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn60\">[lx]</a> Archivists must therefore work to make archival systems and the development of archival processes and policies as straightforward for researchers as possible, ideally assisting in integrating the development of metadata and other secondary materials (for example, codebooks, explanatory materials, finding aids, and ontologies) necessary to archiving and ensuring the long-term usefulness of primary data as early in the research process as possible. Likewise, funding agencies should improve funding for long-term data management, preservation, and curatorial services, either directly or via guidelines to institutions for recouping indirect costs, especially when the grant mandates archiving or public data accessibility. By providing these supports, archivists and funders would greatly assist researchers in responding to the imperatives of providing access to data and assuring the confidentiality and consent of their respondents, as well as resolving the ethical dilemmas contained in their data, thereby helping assure the preservation of irreplaceable ethnographic information.\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<hr align=\"left\" size=\"1\" width=\"33%\" />\r\n\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref8\">[viii]</a> American Anthropological Association (AAA), <i>Statement on Ethics: Principals of Professional Responsibility</i>, 2012, http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref9\">[ix]</a> This version was slightly revised in 2009 to make minor changes to some of the statement’s language. Since this revision did not alter the structure or main points of the statement, we continue to refer the 1998 version (as does the AAA’s ethics website). American Anthropological Association, Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, Statement, 1998, B.4-5, C1.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref10\">[x]</a> American Sociological Association, Code of Ethics, 1999, 13.05\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref11\">[xi]</a> Libby Bishop, “Ethical Sharing and Reuse of Qualitative Data,” <i>Australian Journal of Social Issues</i> 44, no. 3 (2009): 266.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref12\">[xii]</a> Johannes Fabian, <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive</i> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), vii.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref13\">[xiii]</a> Ibid., 9-13.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref14\">[xiv]</a> Ibid., 3.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref15\">[xv]</a> Johannes. Fabian, “‘Magic and Modernity’: A Conversation with a Herbalist and Practitioner of Magic,” trans. Johannes Fabian, <i>Archives of Popular Swahili</i> 7 (2005), http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref16\">[xvi]</a> Fabian, “Magic,” 123\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref17\">[xvii]</a> Fabian, <i>Ethnography</i>, 54. One does wonder, however, why Fabian considered a traditionally published monograph necessary to this project, rather than simply including it in the archive. Given that his book annotates the online texts using paragraph numbers that assume a specific online layout, it would seem more effective to have created hyperlinks between the commentary and the primary materials. In this way, the “experiment” seems incomplete.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref18\">[xviii]</a> David Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates,” <i>Annual Review of Anthropology</i> 41, no. 1 (2012): 472, doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145721. See also G. Isaac, “Whose Idea Was This?: Museums, Replicas, and the Reproduction of Knowledge,” <i>Current Anthropology</i> 52, no. 2 (2011) 211-233.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref19\">[xix]</a> Richard Price, <i>First Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 5-6. For additional examples and a discussion of cross-cultural differences in relation to access to knowledge see Nancy J. Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage: CoPAR, Anthropological Records, and the Archival Community,” <i>The American Archivist </i>62 (1999): 285, note 24.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref20\">[xx]</a> Price, <i>First Time, </i>21-23.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref21\">[xxi]</a> Ibid.,<i> </i>23\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref22\">[xxii]</a> Silverman, “Introduction,” 4; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 142.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref23\">[xxiii]</a> Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 141.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref24\">[xxiv]</a> Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref25\">[xxv]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 470.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref26\">[xxvi]</a> Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 148.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref27\">[xxvii]</a> Silverman, “Introduction,” 4-5.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref28\">[xxviii]</a> Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref29\">[xxix]</a> Annamaria Carusi and Marina Jirotka, “From Data Archive to Ethical Labyrinth,” <i>Qualitative Research</i> 9, no. 3 (2009): 292.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref30\">[xxx]</a> Charles K. Humphrey, Carole A. Estabrooks, Judy R. Norris, Jane E. Smith, and Kathryn L. Hesketh, “Archivist on Board: Contributions to the Research Team,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000).\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref31\">[xxxi]</a> Humphrey et al., “Archivist on Board,” 5.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref32\">[xxxii]</a> Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage.”\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref33\">[xxxiii]</a> CoPAR has released a series of fourteen bulletins outlining specific issues involved in the preservation of anthropological materials and addressed to practicing anthropologists. These bulletins are available at <a href=\"http://copar.org/bulletins.htm\">http://copar.org/bulletins.htm</a>. Unfortunately, since most of these bulletins were written in the late 1990s, many of the technology discussions are out of date. However, the conceptual discussions remain highly relevant.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref34\">[xxxiv]</a> ASA, Code of Ethics, 11; AAA, Statement on Ethics (Part 3), 7.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref35\">[xxxv]</a> Zachary M. Schrag, <i>Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 15.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref36\">[xxxvi]</a> For a discussion of the extreme difficulty of archiving video and audio data anonymously, see Louise Corti, Annette Day, and Gill Backhouse, “Confidentiality and Informed Consent: Issues for Consideration in the Preservation of and Provision of Access to Qualitative Data Archives,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 4.4c, <a href=\"http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024\">http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024</a>.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref37\">[xxxvii]</a> A. Narayanan, H. Paskov, N. Z. Gong, J. Bethencourt, E. Stefanov, E. C. R. Shin, and D. Song, “On the Feasibility of Internet-scale Author Identification,” Security and Privacy (SP), 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (May 20-23, 2012): 301, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref38\">[xxxviii]</a> Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” 10-12.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref39\">[xxxix]</a> Ibid., 22.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref40\">[xl]</a> Simon Ottenberg, “Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1990), 153.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref41\">[xli]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref42\">[xlii]</a> Catherine Fowler, \"Ethical Considerations,\" in Silverman and Parezo, <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, 64-65; Robert Leopold, “The Second Life of Ethnographic Fieldnotes,” <i>Ateliers d\'anthropologie</i> 32 (2008): 4.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref43\">[xliii]</a> Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 301-305. See also Louise Corti, “Progress and Problems of Preserving and Providing Access to Qualitative Data for Social Research—The International Picture of an Emerging Culture,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 10.1.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref44\">[xliv]</a> Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref45\">[xlv]</a> Ibid., 264.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref46\">[xlvi]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471; see also Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 147.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref47\">[xlvii]</a> Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref48\">[xlviii]</a> Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 146; AAA, Code of Ethics, III.A.4.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref49\">[xlix]</a> The Society of American Archivists Oral History Section maintains a webpage summarizing the case and providing links to relevant documents at http://www2.archivists.org/groups/oral-history-section/the-belfast-case-information-for-saa-members.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref50\">[l]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref51\">[li]</a> See Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294-95.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref52\">[lii]</a> See Corti, Day, and Backhouse,\" Confidentiality and Informed Consent,\" 4.4, on the expense of creating anonymized archives.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref53\">[liii]</a> ICPSR’s “Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving Phase 5: Preparing Data for Sharing” provides a model for these processes. See <a href=\"http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html\">http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html</a>.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref54\">[liv]</a> Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 285.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref55\">[lv]</a> Silverman, “Introduction,” 6.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref56\">[lvi]</a> Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref57\">[lvii]</a> Ibid.<i>,</i> 17.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref58\">[lviii]</a> Ibid.<i>,</i> 17-18.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref59\">[lix]</a> A list of community groups and organizations participating in the Mukurtu project is available at http://www.mukurtu.org/community.html.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref60\">[lx]</a> The NSF’s recent decision to list datasets as one of the research products to be included in the section of its grant proposals where researchers describe their qualifications does suggest, however, that the current rewards system may gradually be changing (see <a href=\"http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp\">http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp</a>).\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n</div>','Curating the Ethnographic Moment','','inherit','open','open','','4698-revision-5','','','2013-06-17 23:20:36','2013-06-17 23:20:36','',4698,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4698-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `archive_posts` VALUES (4709,3,'2013-06-17 23:20:42','2013-06-17 23:20:42','<b>Introduction</b>\r\n\r\nBy vastly increasing the volume and types of data that field researchers can collect, digital technologies have reshaped ethnographers’ relationship with their accumulated research data and materials. Whereas paper-based fieldnotes and other physical ethnographic records are often deposited in repositories and made accessible only after a scholar’s death, the emergence of born-digital materials has created and enhanced possibilities for rapidly sharing data, not only with other researchers but also with research subjects and the public at large via online repositories. While many researchers support the principal of public access to research data, making this data available online can compound the ethical dilemmas ethnographers face. Ethnographers often find themselves torn between contradictory imperatives to share data publically and to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study. ((L. Jahnke, A. Asher, and S.D.C. Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>, CLIR Publication #154 (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2012).))\r\n\r\nUnlike experimental data, ethnographic data, by definition, are not reproducible. ((See Sydel Silverman, “Introduction,” in <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, ed. Sydel Silverman and Nancy J. Parezo (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1995), 1.)) Ethnographic fieldwork is inextricably linked to a particular time, place, and society, making the primary data of ethnographers unique and unrecoverable. For this reason, today’s ethnographic fieldnotes are particularly important to preserve as tomorrow’s historical records; they document observations of places and cultures that—because they are in a constant state of change—will never exist in the same configuration again. Since ethnographic fieldnotes provide the empirical basis for researchers’ public authority, it would likewise seem logical for fieldnotes and other ethnographic materials to be made available for verification purposes in online repositories as soon as possible after the publication of research reports, articles, or monographs.\r\n\r\nHowever, several characteristics of ethnographic materials cause them to be particularly difficult to make publically accessible. First, many ethnographic researchers are reluctant to share their data for personal reasons. Ethnographic fieldnotes are intensely personal documents for many researchers, who often view them as extremely valuable for their own work, but doubt that they would be useful to other researchers without the accompanying contexts and experiences in which the materials were collected. Secondly, ethnographic materials also routinely contain private, confidential, or culturally sensitive information about both research subjects and the researcher, which often requires time-consuming or costly procedures to redact, and may limit or prevent public dissemination and secondary analyses of the data. Finally, ethnographic materials are regularly collected in contexts with varying or conflicting cultural standards for consent and data use, raising ethical questions about the efficacy of archiving these materials. For these reasons, balancing the multiple imperatives of data sharing, informed consent, and confidentiality for research participants is a fundamental issue for ethnographers preparing to deposit their materials in an archives, and the ethics surrounding these decisions was one of the most common and recurring themes in the interviews conducted for the study we present here.\r\n\r\nUsing data gathered during the 2011-2012 academic year in a qualitative study of researchers’ data management and curation practices, ((This study was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and managed by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). See Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.)) this article examines the practical and ethical dilemmas ethnographers face as they work with diverse research materials across varying, and sometimes conflicting, cultural standards for consent and data use. By emphasizing the everyday practices of researchers, this study sought to gain a holistic understanding of the workflows involved in the creation, management, and preservation of research data in order to better comprehend researchers’ unmet needs within data curation processes. Twenty-three researchers from varying ranks working in a variety of social science disciplines at five universities ((Penn State University, Lehigh University, Bucknell University, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Pennsylvania.)) participated in interviews for this study (see Table 1), which focused on how researchers collect and analyze data, how they manage and preserve these data, and what training they have had in data-curation practices.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4704\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"273\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4704\" alt=\"Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants.  *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE-273x300.jpg\" width=\"273\" height=\"300\" /></a> Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants. *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.[/caption]\r\n\r\nAlthough scholars across many disciplines were grappling with the ethical and philosophical problems of data sharing—often in the absence of coherent policies for data archiving and release from funding agencies, professional organizations, or their employing institutions—this article will focus on the experiences of nine of these researchers who conducted ethnography as part of their data collection. Because ethnographic research involves a complex social interplay between researchers and respondents, often from differing cultural contexts, the management of these data presents unique difficulties for researchers who usually have little or no training in preservation, curation, or data-stewardship strategies. This article will examine how researchers navigate these difficulties when dealing with the two principal types of ethnographic data: fieldnotes—the diverse array of notes, writings, and other materials upon which researchers base their ethnographies ((Jean E. Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1.))—and the research artifacts, such as transcripts and audio or video recordings, produced from more formal, direct interactions with respondents.\r\n\r\n<b>The Data Sharing Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nFunding agencies—especially agencies administering public funds—are increasingly requiring qualitative research data to be made publically available. Since 1995, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)—a major source of funding for qualitative research in the United Kingdom—has required its awardees to archive their data as a condition of funding. ((See O. Parry and N. S. Mauthner, “Whose Data Are They Anyway?” <i>Sociology</i> 38, no. 1 (2004): 140-41.)) Similarly, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other US funding agencies (e.g. National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities) have begun to require formal data-management plans detailing how researchers will meet data-sharing expectations. Our assumption is that this trend will continue as both public and private funders seek maximum returns on their investment in research. While not always explicitly required, the goal of many of these policies is for research data to be deposited in an appropriate repository with online access for both other researchers and the public. For ethnographers, who are often accustomed to retaining exclusive rights over their fieldnotes and other materials, this can represent an uncomfortable shift in research practice, even when these repositories take into account the particular confidentiality and consent demands inherent to ethnographic research (discussed further below) and implement appropriate safeguards such as embargoing or redacting sensitive materials.\r\n\r\nIn principal, the ethnographic researchers we interviewed for this study saw data preservation and sharing as positive values, even if they were not sure about how to preserve and share data or who would potentially use the materials. When asked about what parts of her research data she would like to preserve, one anthropologist explained:\r\n\r\nThat’s the thing—If you keep anything long enough it becomes interesting. . . . For myself . . . I would love to archive everything and maybe put some kind of time stamp on personal information where it can’t be released for some amount of time. It’s so hard to know what people in the future would be interested in. . . . I try to keep data in such a way that hopefully it would be comprehensible to someone else if they were willing to work through my crazy software. . . . If I had somebody’s fieldnotes from 100 years ago from my field site, I’d be totally fascinated by that, so you never know what people are going to be interested in. (2-16-120211) ((The number in parentheses is the participant identification number; please refer to Table 1.))\r\n\r\nThe scholarly societies to which many of these researchers belong also broadly support data sharing and potential reuse. The most recent 2012 revision on the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) ethics statement explicitly states that it is the obligation of the researcher to preserve records and make results accessible, “Anthropologists have an ethical responsibility for ensuring the integrity, preservation, and protection of their work” and, the “results of anthropological research should be disseminated in a timely fashion” provided it is not “at the expense of protecting confidentiality.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn8\">[viii]</a> The previous 1998 version also addressed data access and preservation, but not as systematically or forcefully.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn9\">[ix]</a> Likewise, the American Sociological Association sets similar expectations in the data sharing section of its Code of Ethics.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn10\">[x]</a>\r\n\r\nThe benefits of data archiving and sharing for scholarly disciplines and the advancement of knowledge are straightforward: preserved materials can be subjected to secondary analysis, unnecessary duplication of research can be minimized, historical records can be maintained, and, importantly, scholars can independently evaluate the validity of published results by consulting the primary data.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn11\">[xi]</a> Furthermore, online repositories might enable new forms of scholarship and writing. For the first time, materials preserved and made accessible online have made it feasible to make publically available the corpus of primary texts that form the basis of support for ethnographic argumentation. While a non-digitized, paper-based collection could also serve this purpose, it is unlikely that more than a handful of interested readers of a particular ethnography would physically travel to the repository to examine the documents. Repositories that make resources available online fundamentally change this dynamic. In <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive, </i>Johannes Fabian explores these possibilities by conducting what he describes as an experiment with “writing ethnography ‘in the presence of texts’” located in a publically accessible online repository.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn12\">[xii]</a> Fabian terms this genre of writing “commentary,” a text-centered form of ethnography that assumes his reader can simultaneously consult a primary text for her or himself via an online archive.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn13\">[xiii]</a>\r\n\r\nThe text Fabian utilizes is a conversation he and Kahenga Mukonkwa Michel had about a ceremony Kahenga conducted at Fabian’s home in Zaire in 1974.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn14\">[xiv]</a> The transcription, translation, and an audio excerpt of the discussion are now housed in the Archives of Popular Swahili on the website of the Language and Popular Culture in Africa project.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn15\">[xv]</a> Fabian argues that the repository of documents serves an important epistemological purpose by “mediat[ing] between . . . events, the presentation of evidence, and our aims and claims to produce anthropological knowledge.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn16\">[xvi]</a> By allowing the reader of an ethnography to interrogate and evaluate the primary data on which it is based, the archive reveals how ethnographies are composed through the confrontation between the researcher, his or her respondents, and the texts they co-create.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn17\">[xvii]</a>\r\n\r\nFabian’s instructive experiment notwithstanding, for many researchers the practice of making ethnographic materials available online is fraught. Ethnography requires researchers to occupy a methodological position that mediates and translates between multiple cultural contexts. This positioning leads to a number of difficulties for ethnographers as they attempt to meet their obligations to multiple constituencies—including funders, cultural institutions, and the researcher’s employing university, in addition to the individuals and communities the researcher works with—while negotiating the processes of placing materials in archives and repositories. When working with human subjects, ethical pitfalls abound, and often ethnographers must resolve contradictions between these groups.\r\n\r\nAt a very basic level, policies requiring access to research data may “directly [contradict] some ethnic groups’ cultural traditions concerning secrecy and controlled access to information.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn18\">[xviii]</a> For example, an anthropologist might gain access to knowledge that is secret, or restricted for cultural or social reasons. During his fieldwork with the Saramaka, a group in Suriname who descended from escaped African slaves, Richard Price gained knowledge about the “Old-Time People” who experienced the war for liberation from roughly 1680 to 1762.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn19\">[xix]</a> The Saramaka consider knowledge about this time and these people powerful, dangerous, and restricted. Price struggled with the ethical implications of publishing a book within a different cultural system that uses this knowledge as its primary subject.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn20\">[xx]</a> Price notes that by putting the information in a public document, he potentially “deprives [the] author of control (except perhaps via the language in which [the book] appears) over [his or her] audience.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn21\">[xxi]</a> This problem is compounded exponentially once information is made available online (as Price’s book now is, at least in part, in Google Books) by removing even the physical restrictions of a bound monograph.\r\n\r\nInformation need not be “exotic” to create publishing difficulties for ethnographers. For example, an ethnographer working in a corporate, government, or other institutional setting in the United States might be privy to proprietary or confidential information about a product or service that must be ethically and legally protected. A researcher in environmental engineering explained her process when conducting interviews:\r\n\r\nAnother big concern is confidentiality because I record those conversations, and then there’s kind of an extended period of time in which I allow those who I’ve talked with to redact parts of our conversation if they’ve talked about things they would prefer to remain private. . . I’m talking to several companies about the development and production of their technologies and so there’s some proprietary information that comes up and that’s really the main concern. (5-20-020212)\r\n\r\nIndeed, accidental release of this type of information might put the researcher at as much legal risk as her respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen preparing to preserve ethnographic data, issues of ownership and authorship are also not always straightforward, and it is imperative that researchers communicate and address these potential problems with archivists, data curators, and repository and digital collection managers before depositing ethnographic materials. For example, consent forms for interviews might not clearly state who holds the copyright or who has a license to use the recording or transcripts, potentially leading to confusion over the legal status of these materials and making it more difficult for a researcher to transfer materials to an archives. Intellectual property and copyright are themselves culturally specific concepts, and a legal right to dispose of or deposit materials as a researcher sees fit does not equal an ethical right to do so. The people providing information, the funders, the institution that employs the researcher, and the community in which the researcher works all have a moral interest in the disposition of the data.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn22\">[xxii]</a> Parry and Mauthner go so far as to say, “[B]ecause the construction of qualitative data is a joint endeavor between respondent and researcher, both parties should retain authorship/ownership rights over the data,” which creates “practical, legal and ethical implications for archiving and re-use.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn23\">[xxiii]</a>\r\n\r\nSome researchers, including Fabian, argue that since ethnographers and their respondents are joint agents in creating ethnographic materials, both parties should be named to acknowledge their contributions.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn24\">[xxiv]</a> However, naming respondents as authors or contributors contradicts an ethnographer’s imperative to protect the confidentiality of their research participants, which is a basic standard required by most Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved research and by professional-ethics statements. While David Zeitlyn observes that “a default assumption that notes will be anonymized conflicts with an individual’s moral right to be recognized as the author of his or her words,”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn25\">[xxv]</a> many, if not most, ethnographers would likely be uncomfortable naming their participants in almost any context, but especially in publically accessible online repositories. This is likely to hold true even if a researcher philosophically accepts that his or her authority to determine the level of sensitivity that the data require privileges the researcher’s position vis-à-vis his or her respondents.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn26\">[xxvi]</a>\r\n\r\nMany ethnographers thus understand themselves not so much as owners of their data, but rather as stewards or custodians of data that are produced by a complex set of relationships between researchers and respondents.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn27\">[xxvii]</a> As the stewards of these data, researchers are often the de facto interpreters of the terms by which data are made available, choosing what and when to publish or deposit materials in repositories or archives. Despite his assertion that correspondents should be named, Fabian notes that he exercises this stewardship by attempting not to publish anything that might be dangerous or damaging to the people with whom he worked—a position that is probably made easier by the fact that the texts he is working with were already 30 years old when he transcribed and posted them on the web.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn28\">[xxviii]</a> Many researchers we interviewed adopted a similar “attitude of moral responsibility towards research participants, expressed in the way in which data are handled,”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn29\">[xxix]</a> citing ethical concerns about appropriate use of the data as well as issues of confidentiality and consent. Even for researchers who support public access to data, these concerns cause them to question funders’ data-sharing requirements. A researcher in education who was preparing to apply for additional funding to create a longitudinal dataset by re-interviewing her previous respondents noted her uncertainty:\r\n\r\nI know that a lot of places when you apply for funding they want eventually for [data] to become public. I haven’t had to deal with it, but I’ve definitely thought about it. . . . I want to make sure to preserve the qualitative data because it’s very important to me . . . so it’s a concern for me personally to save it. . . . [But] once it’s public, or shared between other people, I would like to get help eventually on making the data itself more confidential because they are just interview transcripts which, you know, there are a lot of [confidentiality] issues with that, and that I would have to [make the data itself more confidential] before I shared it. . . . I don’t know if there are limits to the extent to which I can make it public or not. (1-04-100511)\r\n\r\nIn the context of making their data accessible, these confidentiality and consent negotiations are some of the most difficult issues for scholars to resolve before depositing their ethnographic materials in data repositories or archives. These issues are also most effectively addressed as early in a research project as possible, so that researchers can implement the necessary practices and protocols to insure that confidentiality and consent can be assured in the long term prior to data collection. As Charles Humphrey and his colleagues discuss, the integral involvement of archivists and data-curation specialists in the planning stages and throughout qualitative research projects greatly increases the quality of the data products and decreases ethical problems associated with deposition in repositories and archives.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn30\">[xxx]</a> As they point out, this collaboration is beneficial to both researchers and archivists, since good archival preparation practices are often synonymous with good research practices.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn31\">[xxxi]</a>\r\n\r\nDespite efforts by organizations such as the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR) to foster this type of collaboration<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn32\">[xxxii]</a> and educate ethnographers in data curation and archival preparation practices,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn33\">[xxxiii]</a> it appears that relatively few ethnographers seek out the assistance of archivists or data management specialists until after data collection is completed, unless funding requirements compelled them to do so. Of the ethnographers we interviewed, only two had consulted with data management services prior to the data collection phase of their research, both as a result of the NSF’s requirement that data-management plans be included in new funding proposals. Only one project had a systematic plan for depositing its ethnographic data in an archives, principally because this research was conducted as part of a very large and well-funded research initiative. This project had amassed some 40,000 pages of ethnographic fieldnotes, which were being preserved but not yet been shared publically. The researcher leading this project explained:\r\n\r\nIt’s news to anthropologists that data should be made public. It’s not something that’s in their mindset. In fact they are appalled by it. . . . However, that [ethnographic] data was paid for using a million dollars of federal money and I’m using it with some of my grad students who are essentially doing secondary analysis of fieldnotes. I think that in the long run that data should be made public, and could be, but very carefully. . . . I don’t think that’s a problem . . . my guess is we’re going to get there. . . . A very new area now is “what do you do with electronic fieldnotes?” and “can those be made available for researchers?” If nothing else, I think this archive of fieldnotes . . .in 20 or 30 years could be a great historical source and should be preserved on that basis. So, I would like to see us work out ways of carefully having anthropological and ethnographic data made public too. (5-11-103011)\r\n\r\nIn working out the procedures for sharing these materials, this researcher went on to emphasize the paramount importance of protecting research participants’ confidentiality. Indeed, all of the ethnographers cited confidentiality concerns as one of the foremost issues that they would need to discuss and resolve with an archivist or repository manager before depositing their materials, making it perhaps the most critical area for developing collaborative practices between researchers, data curators, and archivists.\r\n\r\n<b>The Confidentiality Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nThe ethics statements of both the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association require researchers to protect the confidentiality of their respondents (although the AAA statement asserts that expectations of credit should also be addressed).<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn34\">[xxxiv]</a> Protecting research participants’ confidentiality is routinely an explicit promise within social science research, and is an almost universally assumed requirement of IRBs when reviewing research proposals. Setting aside the research participant’s potential moral right to authorship as discussed above, the nature of ethnographic research often renders the promise of confidentiality problematic, if not outright impossible. As Zachary Schrag observes, maintaining the confidentiality of fieldwork sites and research participants discussed in publications has been a perennial problem for social science researchers, as details necessary to make ethnographic and other fieldwork-based writing meaningful often simultaneously make these places and people identifiable, especially to people familiar with the location or topic.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn35\">[xxxv]</a> Increasing confidentiality protections almost always come at the cost of decreasing the amount of contextual information included for the ethnography’s audience, and can effectively prevent data from being deposited in an archives or repository (or sometimes even collected). A sociologist recounted the difficulties he encountered on one project:\r\n\r\nI wanted to do life histories with priests [in central Pennsylvania], and part of the problem was . . . we got into a situation where people might tell me things about their personal lives that are sort of not confidential in the IRB sense but that might be upsetting to their congregations—like I talked to one priest who had been married three times, where if the congregation had known about that they would have been very upset. There’s nothing illegal about it; this person’s not shy about telling that, but it could have been damaging. But I had the sense that . . . if I went around and did these interviews, I didn’t want to destroy the data because I thought they had some historical importance. . . . [The IRB said,] “and when you get done with this study if you’re not going to destroy the data you have to store it in an archive for 50 years, and I checked with [university] archives and they said, “we’re not going to store anything like that.” . . . I wanted to preserve the data, but there was no way to do it. . . . I actually quit the project [because the IRB made it impossible to do]. (2-13-111411)\r\n\r\nWhile protecting research participants’ privacy can be difficult, even in carefully prepared and edited publications, the nature of ethnographic materials makes them especially difficult to confidentially preserve over time. Audio and video recordings present obvious confidentiality problems by capturing a respondents’ voice or image,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn36\">[xxxvi]</a> but even interview transcripts can be problematic. A common practice in archiving ethnographic materials is to make attempts to remove potentially identifying information from archived transcripts. However, even these “anonymized” transcripts often still contain personal details that allow the possible identification of research participants. For example, in the interviews conducted for this study, participants regularly discussed their discipline and research interests. Coupled with the names of the universities where the research was conducted—which are contained in all of our research proposals and publications—this seemingly innocuous information would probably render any of our participants identifiable with a simple web search if the full interview transcripts were released. This might not seem like a significant risk for scholars describing projects that they routinely discuss publically, but depending on the other details contained in the transcript it might also be embarrassing or potentially damaging (for example, comments about university administrators, other colleagues, etc.). As is often the case with qualitative research, removing these contextual details would diminish, if not destroy, the usefulness of these data to future researchers—the ostensible audience for these materials. Unfortunately, each piece of contextual detail retained about a research participant to aid in data interpretation simultaneously creates more potential for identification.\r\n\r\nGiven technological advances, removing all conceivably identifying details might still be insufficient to guarantee that transcripts are rendered anonymous. In fact, anonymizing transcripts may soon no longer be technically possible. Arvind Narayana and his colleagues have demonstrated that it is possible to accurately identify anonymous online authors up to 20 percent of the time based on writing style alone, given a sufficient corpus of example texts.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn37\">[xxxvii]</a> As more and more content moves online, one can only assume that these techniques will become more robust, so that identifying a participant from the vocabulary or speech patterns in a transcript may eventually become a matter of applying the correct software. These realities set up even the most well-intentioned researchers to fail to meet the obligations required by IRBs and the agreements made with their respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen archiving ethnographic materials, confidentiality can also be equally important for protecting the researcher. This is especially true for the archiving of fieldnotes, which are profoundly personal for many ethnographic researchers. Researchers are often quite ambivalent about these data, regularly describing feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, or embarrassment about their work and what it reveals about them as scholars.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn38\">[xxxviii]</a> When talking about her data collection process, an anthropologist in our study observed:\r\n\r\nThat’s the thing with fieldnotes, you never show them to anyone . . . as long as it works for you . . . it’s not like you have to show it to someone else and have them make sense of it, which is kind of a shame because it would be nice to have data in formats where people could, you know, sort of, archive that information. (2-16-120211)\r\n\r\nIn his study of fieldnote practices, Jean Jackson observes, “Many respondents point out that the highly personal nature of fieldnotes influences the extent of one’s willingness to share them: ‘Fieldnotes can reveal how worthless your work was, the lacunae, your linguistic incompetence, your not being made a blood brother, your childish temper.’”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn39\">[xxxix]</a> Anthropologist Simon Ottenberg describes his fieldnotes similarly, “[W]hen I was younger, I would have felt uncomfortable at the thought of someone else using my notes, whether I was alive or dead—they are so much a private thing, so much an aspect of personal field experience, so much a private language, so much part of my ego, my childhood [as an anthropologist], and my personal maturity.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn40\">[xl]</a> This attachment and ambivalence may make researchers reluctant to turn over control of their notes to an archives—especially one that has the purpose of making materials available publically on the internet. This professional practice not only makes it very difficult to substantiate or verify ethnographers’ data, suggesting a need for ethnographers to develop more proactive and sensitive data-sharing procedures, but also creates a situation where ethnographic materials are saved, but with inadequate plans for preservation. Zeitlyn notes, “Paradoxically most anthropologists want neither to destroy their field material nor archive it.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn41\">[xli]</a> So, too, with our study: almost no one had made plans for their data beyond the short term, let alone the final dispensation of their materials at the end of their career or after their death.\r\n\r\nWhile archivists regularly assure scholars that the papers of “ordinary” or not-famous researchers are sometimes the most valuable,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn42\">[xlii]</a> researchers themselves are often unconvinced. Many of our respondents had trouble imagining the potential audience for their data and primary materials, although one Environmental Studies researcher shared data on graffiti images she collected during fieldwork following a particular ethnic conflict event. The data were not directly related to her primary research questions, but another scholar used them in a Master’s thesis (and possibly in a future dissertation). Nevertheless, doubts about future usefulness contribute to researchers’ reluctance to undertake sometimes arduous and time-consuming data preservation and annotation tasks, such as redacting confidential information, and to neglect advance planning for the eventual archiving of their materials, such as assuring adequate consent procedures. This is potentially a key area of advocacy for data curators and archivists, who are well positioned to both educate researchers in the importance of preserving primary data for future generations of researchers, even if its immediate value is not apparent, and to provide tools such as cross-indexes and finding aids that make these data more useful and comparable.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn43\">[xliii]</a>\r\n\r\n<b>The Consent Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nBoth IRBs and disciplinary societies’ ethics statements emphasize the importance and necessity of obtaining informed consent from research participants. Given the possibility of archiving materials indefinitely, and especially for web publication, obtaining fully informed consent may be a futile endeavor. Libby Bishop points out that because researchers cannot adequately speculate on all the uses in which data might be employed, explicit consent is “logically impossible.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn44\">[xliv]</a> However, Bishop also observes that this should not paralyze researchers from depositing their materials in archives, since consent for the primary research activity is in itself partial and no researcher can fully explain all information about any research project.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn45\">[xlv]</a> Zeitlyn makes this point in another way, noting that cultural differences may also limit the ability of a researcher to obtain consent in a way that is recognizable to IRBs: “Once material is archived, it may be consulted by unknown others who might use it in novel ways. . . . Can a researcher obtain meaningful prior informed consent if the uses to which the material might be put in the future cannot be explained?”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn46\">[xlvi]</a>\r\n\r\nWhile Bishop suggests responding to this problem by providing examples of how archived research might be reused or by obtaining open-ended consent,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn47\">[xlvii]</a> others suggest a more comprehensive approach that understands consent as a process rather than a one-time event.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn48\">[xlviii]</a> This approach presents significant difficulties when applied to the lifecycle of an entire ethnographic research project, especially once data and other fieldwork materials are deposited in an archives for the purpose of long-term access and preservation. If appropriate consent for archiving is not obtained at the outset of a project, or is sought when new uses are discovered for materials, contacting participants to authorize this usage can be extremely difficult and costly for ethnographers, if not outright impossible. Furthermore, a consent model that requires re-contacting participants also requires confidentiality or anonymization procedures to be reversible, meaning that the researcher must retain records that can link individuals to the materials about them. Retaining contact information or other identifying records is not best practice for assuring participant confidentiality, and in the case of truly sensitive research, doing so unnecessarily maintains records that could be subject to subpoena or otherwise compromised. For example, in 2012 the US Department of Justice issued a subpoena in connection with a murder investigation on behalf of Great Britain for access to oral history interviews conducted with Irish Republican Army and Loyalist paramilitary members as part of “The Belfast Project,” archived at Boston College’s Burns Library. While the project’s confidentiality agreement promised interviewees that these materials would be embargoed until their death, this guarantee was subject to exceptions required by American law; a point that may have been unclear to the research participants. Both Boston College and the researchers are presently contesting the subpoenas, but the initial rulings by a federal district court and the First Circuit Court of Appeals have found that the subpoenas are legal.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn49\">[xlix]</a> As this case demonstrates, whenever identifying information exists, there is a possibility that its disclosure can be compelled. From the point of view of research-participant confidentiality, it is therefore preferable to destroy materials that enable identification or re-contact as soon as possible after research is complete.\r\n\r\nSince anonymization is an all-or-nothing decision that must be irreversible, even for the researcher, if it is to be effective,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn50\">[l]</a> in order to make consent an ongoing process, one must also accept that the data cannot be made fully anonymous. The question then becomes how researchers can meaningfully extend consent decisions to include archives without rendering them unmanageable for their administrators or unnecessarily diminishing their analytical value.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn51\">[li]</a> Balancing the need to maintain appropriate levels of confidentiality with the administrative costs is a critical area for collaboration between researchers, archivists, and data specialists. Fully anonymizing datasets is probably neither necessary, nor cost effective, for relatively low-risk materials,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn52\">[lii]</a> but both the researcher and the archivists must fully understand the potential risk scenarios before these decisions can be made, particularly in an environment where privacy protections are an increasing concern for research participants. While discussing the challenges he faces in complying with funder’s public access requirements, a sociologist observed:\r\n\r\nClearly the biggest problem is the problem of protection of privacy. The concern of privacy has been ramped up tremendously over the last 10 or 15 years, and the process of getting permission to analyze data can be difficult, but a trend in social science data is to include more and more information that\'s sensitive. . . . I think the field is trying to now establish appropriate levels of protection for particular kinds of data and is trying to balance this problem of privacy with public access. And it is a challenge and it’s going to require some new modes of doing things. (5-11-103111)\r\n\r\nDeveloping these modes of work and processes of consent requires not only the participation of researchers and scholarly societies, but also intensive cooperation with data management specialists, technologists, and archivists.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn53\">[liii]</a>\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusions and Recommendations</b>\r\n\r\nResearchers and archivists alike face tremendous challenges in effectively preserving ethnographic research data and providing meaningful access for researchers and other stakeholders while simultaneously protecting sensitive data. In order to be effective, data sharing, confidentiality, and consent imperatives all require the active participation and investment of researchers themselves. Decisions about access, issues of authorship attribution, adequate consent, and the level of confidentially required cannot be made without the input of someone who is deeply knowledgeable about the contexts in which the research took place. However, as we have seen, none of these decision processes necessarily end at the moment when the materials are deposited in an archives or repository, and a researcher’s ethical obligation to his or her research participants does not end once he or she has transferred responsibility for their preservation. This sense of responsibility makes many researchers reluctant to relinquish control over their ethnographic materials, lest changing political, social, or cultural conditions necessitates a more restrictive approach to data access than was initially required.\r\n\r\nFor example, an Environmental Studies researcher noted that currently her data does not present much risk to her respondents:\r\n\r\nMost of the data I’ve collected really have limited privacy issues or any kind of harm that could come to respondents. There are some topics that I’ve looked at, that depending on, when—you know, timeliness—at what point these were published, that identifying information could be problematic. In [central Asian country] it’s a lot easier—at least currently—the situation for my topics isn’t dangerous. That doesn’t mean it can’t be in the future and if I extended the research to neighboring countries then I would probably have some more serious confidentiality issues. (2-12-111011)\r\n\r\nIf the political situation for her respondents changed, however, this researcher might be ethically obligated to change the access conditions of any materials that she had archived, even if her consent procedures had addressed this eventuality. Repositories for ethnographic materials must be careful to include procedures to respond to these types of situations in their donor agreements, and researchers should discuss the unique qualities of ethnographic materials prior to their deposit. As Parezo points out, “it is unethical and unreasonable to expect the archival community to guess which fieldnotes contain sensitive information and what are reasonable use restrictions.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn54\">[liv]</a>\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, preparing materials for deposit into an archives is often a low priority for ethnographers for a variety of reasons, and the archiving of ethnographic data is further hindered by a persistent lack of training. While comprehensive historical review is beyond the scope of this article, Silverman already noted the problem of a lack of formal training in data collection and management practices among anthropologists almost 20 years ago,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn55\">[lv]</a> before the rise of many of the complications that the expansion of digital data collection created. Almost none of the scholars we interviewed reported that data curation or stewardship training was part of their graduate curriculum, and data management was usually only addressed narrowly in relation to methodological approaches and problems. The ethical and practical difficulties involved in managing and preserving large amounts of research data were rarely addressed, with most researchers acquiring the skills they needed via trial and error.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn56\">[lvi]</a> None of the scholars interviewed during this study expressed satisfaction with their level of expertise in data management, and few had access to individuals who could provide knowledgeable guidance. While it would be preferable for graduate curricula to include this type of training, it seems unlikely that this change will occur in the near term. It is, therefore, likely that archivists and data specialists will need to provide this training, preferably by developing relationships with ethnographic researchers as early as possible in the research process.\r\n\r\nThe lack of confidence in their data-management training compounds researchers’ apprehension about the ethical issues contained in their data. Researchers are naturally—and rightfully—conservative about the potential risks in sharing data, especially if they are not convinced they can protect their respondents’ confidentiality, or that they have obtained appropriate consent—issues that the difficulties of cross-cultural communication make more complex. Without such assurances that these ethical imperatives can be addressed, many researchers are unlikely to invest in archiving their materials. “In many cases, their desire to avoid the ethical risks of inappropriate data release may outweigh the costs of potential data loss.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn57\">[lvii]</a>\r\n\r\nBecause of these interrelated concerns, it is critical that the archival and data curation systems available to ethnographic researchers have multiple and fine-grained levels of access and privacy controls. Tools must be developed that can appropriately manage confidential data and that allow researchers, working in conjunction with their respondents, to exercise control over their data, administer who has access to it, and account for culturally specific restrictions on data use.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn58\">[lviii]</a> One example of a system attempting to address these requirements is the Murkutu content management system (<a href=\"http://www.mukurtu.org/\">http://www.mukurtu.org/</a>), which makes cultural protocols a fundamental part of access to materials. This allows for the easy creation of fine-grained and culturally appropriate user groups with specifically defined usage rights, and it is being developed in cooperation with indigenous communities.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn59\">[lix]</a>\r\n\r\nBecause the nature of ethnographic materials makes them potentially subject to ongoing and evolving dilemmas of confidentiality and consent, archivists and data managers should understand that these materials may require ongoing curation, preferably through processes and procedures that incorporate researchers in a collaborative and meaningful way. Although many researchers would welcome the ability to more easily share their data, particularly in collaborative projects and in response to data-sharing requirements, they are almost universally resistant to any arrangement in which they would relinquish control over access to the data. As one anthropologist described:\r\n\r\nPeople don’t hesitate, at all, to share data with collaborators that they trust. … If you provide a mechanism for collaboration, even if it’s just Google Docs or something, you know, people share data easily and freely. It’s when it becomes an anonymous process that they seem to get balky. (1-02-100511)\r\n\r\nThe goal of making materials publically available online, then, will require archival systems and processes that are cognizant of the complex social relationships embedded within ethnographic materials, not only between the researcher and his or her respondents, but also between and among the many stakeholders in ethnographic data. The development of additional policies, ethical guidelines, and best practices by disciplinary organizations, funding agencies, universities, and cultural institutions could further aid researchers and archivists in navigating the ethical dilemmas contained in the archival process.\r\n\r\nBecause much ethnographic data is collected by individuals in relatively small and often idiosyncratic datasets, it is especially vulnerable to loss due to benign neglect or lack or resources, even if the data are historically unique. A sociologist described one such vulnerable dataset:\r\n\r\nWe did life histories of 45 people in a [church] congregation in [central Pennsylvania town]. . . . It’s probably the only body of material on a single congregation of that depth and complexity that exists, and I’m just too lazy to have figured out what to do with it and write it up and everything, but you could imagine somewhere somebody who wants to do research on congregations would find this incredibly valuable. But what’s going to happen to it [in the long term]? And what’s going to happen to it is, the copies I have will end up in a trash can, and my computer hard drive will eventually crash or get outmoded or get erased, and that’ll be the end of it [if there isn’t a place to archive it]. (2-13-111411)\r\n\r\nIn order to prevent these losses, data management specialists and archivists must specifically curate these materials. They must also build relationships with ethnographers to resolve the unique ethical dilemmas these data present and the uneasy tensions between researchers’ desire to share data publically and obligations to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study.\r\n\r\nFinally, despite the acknowledged importance and value of archival materials to the disciplines and future researchers, academic rewards systems offer very little payoff for the work that goes into making ethnographic materials available, and ethnographic researchers are often under-resourced in the funding, time, and personnel support needed for preparing materials for archiving. <a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn60\">[lx]</a> Archivists must therefore work to make archival systems and the development of archival processes and policies as straightforward for researchers as possible, ideally assisting in integrating the development of metadata and other secondary materials (for example, codebooks, explanatory materials, finding aids, and ontologies) necessary to archiving and ensuring the long-term usefulness of primary data as early in the research process as possible. Likewise, funding agencies should improve funding for long-term data management, preservation, and curatorial services, either directly or via guidelines to institutions for recouping indirect costs, especially when the grant mandates archiving or public data accessibility. By providing these supports, archivists and funders would greatly assist researchers in responding to the imperatives of providing access to data and assuring the confidentiality and consent of their respondents, as well as resolving the ethical dilemmas contained in their data, thereby helping assure the preservation of irreplaceable ethnographic information.\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<hr align=\"left\" size=\"1\" width=\"33%\" />\r\n\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref8\">[viii]</a> American Anthropological Association (AAA), <i>Statement on Ethics: Principals of Professional Responsibility</i>, 2012, http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref9\">[ix]</a> This version was slightly revised in 2009 to make minor changes to some of the statement’s language. Since this revision did not alter the structure or main points of the statement, we continue to refer the 1998 version (as does the AAA’s ethics website). American Anthropological Association, Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, Statement, 1998, B.4-5, C1.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref10\">[x]</a> American Sociological Association, Code of Ethics, 1999, 13.05\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref11\">[xi]</a> Libby Bishop, “Ethical Sharing and Reuse of Qualitative Data,” <i>Australian Journal of Social Issues</i> 44, no. 3 (2009): 266.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref12\">[xii]</a> Johannes Fabian, <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive</i> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), vii.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref13\">[xiii]</a> Ibid., 9-13.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref14\">[xiv]</a> Ibid., 3.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref15\">[xv]</a> Johannes. Fabian, “‘Magic and Modernity’: A Conversation with a Herbalist and Practitioner of Magic,” trans. Johannes Fabian, <i>Archives of Popular Swahili</i> 7 (2005), http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref16\">[xvi]</a> Fabian, “Magic,” 123\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref17\">[xvii]</a> Fabian, <i>Ethnography</i>, 54. One does wonder, however, why Fabian considered a traditionally published monograph necessary to this project, rather than simply including it in the archive. Given that his book annotates the online texts using paragraph numbers that assume a specific online layout, it would seem more effective to have created hyperlinks between the commentary and the primary materials. In this way, the “experiment” seems incomplete.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref18\">[xviii]</a> David Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates,” <i>Annual Review of Anthropology</i> 41, no. 1 (2012): 472, doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145721. See also G. Isaac, “Whose Idea Was This?: Museums, Replicas, and the Reproduction of Knowledge,” <i>Current Anthropology</i> 52, no. 2 (2011) 211-233.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref19\">[xix]</a> Richard Price, <i>First Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 5-6. For additional examples and a discussion of cross-cultural differences in relation to access to knowledge see Nancy J. Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage: CoPAR, Anthropological Records, and the Archival Community,” <i>The American Archivist </i>62 (1999): 285, note 24.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref20\">[xx]</a> Price, <i>First Time, </i>21-23.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref21\">[xxi]</a> Ibid.,<i> </i>23\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref22\">[xxii]</a> Silverman, “Introduction,” 4; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 142.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref23\">[xxiii]</a> Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 141.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref24\">[xxiv]</a> Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref25\">[xxv]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 470.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref26\">[xxvi]</a> Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 148.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref27\">[xxvii]</a> Silverman, “Introduction,” 4-5.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref28\">[xxviii]</a> Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref29\">[xxix]</a> Annamaria Carusi and Marina Jirotka, “From Data Archive to Ethical Labyrinth,” <i>Qualitative Research</i> 9, no. 3 (2009): 292.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref30\">[xxx]</a> Charles K. Humphrey, Carole A. Estabrooks, Judy R. Norris, Jane E. Smith, and Kathryn L. Hesketh, “Archivist on Board: Contributions to the Research Team,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000).\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref31\">[xxxi]</a> Humphrey et al., “Archivist on Board,” 5.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref32\">[xxxii]</a> Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage.”\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref33\">[xxxiii]</a> CoPAR has released a series of fourteen bulletins outlining specific issues involved in the preservation of anthropological materials and addressed to practicing anthropologists. These bulletins are available at <a href=\"http://copar.org/bulletins.htm\">http://copar.org/bulletins.htm</a>. Unfortunately, since most of these bulletins were written in the late 1990s, many of the technology discussions are out of date. However, the conceptual discussions remain highly relevant.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref34\">[xxxiv]</a> ASA, Code of Ethics, 11; AAA, Statement on Ethics (Part 3), 7.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref35\">[xxxv]</a> Zachary M. Schrag, <i>Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 15.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref36\">[xxxvi]</a> For a discussion of the extreme difficulty of archiving video and audio data anonymously, see Louise Corti, Annette Day, and Gill Backhouse, “Confidentiality and Informed Consent: Issues for Consideration in the Preservation of and Provision of Access to Qualitative Data Archives,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 4.4c, <a href=\"http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024\">http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024</a>.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref37\">[xxxvii]</a> A. Narayanan, H. Paskov, N. Z. Gong, J. Bethencourt, E. Stefanov, E. C. R. Shin, and D. Song, “On the Feasibility of Internet-scale Author Identification,” Security and Privacy (SP), 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (May 20-23, 2012): 301, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref38\">[xxxviii]</a> Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” 10-12.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref39\">[xxxix]</a> Ibid., 22.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref40\">[xl]</a> Simon Ottenberg, “Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1990), 153.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref41\">[xli]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref42\">[xlii]</a> Catherine Fowler, \"Ethical Considerations,\" in Silverman and Parezo, <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, 64-65; Robert Leopold, “The Second Life of Ethnographic Fieldnotes,” <i>Ateliers d\'anthropologie</i> 32 (2008): 4.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref43\">[xliii]</a> Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 301-305. See also Louise Corti, “Progress and Problems of Preserving and Providing Access to Qualitative Data for Social Research—The International Picture of an Emerging Culture,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 10.1.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref44\">[xliv]</a> Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref45\">[xlv]</a> Ibid., 264.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref46\">[xlvi]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471; see also Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 147.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref47\">[xlvii]</a> Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref48\">[xlviii]</a> Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 146; AAA, Code of Ethics, III.A.4.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref49\">[xlix]</a> The Society of American Archivists Oral History Section maintains a webpage summarizing the case and providing links to relevant documents at http://www2.archivists.org/groups/oral-history-section/the-belfast-case-information-for-saa-members.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref50\">[l]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref51\">[li]</a> See Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294-95.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref52\">[lii]</a> See Corti, Day, and Backhouse,\" Confidentiality and Informed Consent,\" 4.4, on the expense of creating anonymized archives.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref53\">[liii]</a> ICPSR’s “Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving Phase 5: Preparing Data for Sharing” provides a model for these processes. See <a href=\"http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html\">http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html</a>.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref54\">[liv]</a> Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 285.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref55\">[lv]</a> Silverman, “Introduction,” 6.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref56\">[lvi]</a> Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref57\">[lvii]</a> Ibid.<i>,</i> 17.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref58\">[lviii]</a> Ibid.<i>,</i> 17-18.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref59\">[lix]</a> A list of community groups and organizations participating in the Mukurtu project is available at http://www.mukurtu.org/community.html.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref60\">[lx]</a> The NSF’s recent decision to list datasets as one of the research products to be included in the section of its grant proposals where researchers describe their qualifications does suggest, however, that the current rewards system may gradually be changing (see <a href=\"http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp\">http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp</a>).\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n</div>','Curating the Ethnographic Moment','','inherit','open','open','','4698-revision-6','','','2013-06-17 23:20:42','2013-06-17 23:20:42','',4698,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4698-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(4710,3,'2013-06-17 23:21:07','2013-06-17 23:21:07','<b>Introduction</b>\r\n\r\nBy vastly increasing the volume and types of data that field researchers can collect, digital technologies have reshaped ethnographers’ relationship with their accumulated research data and materials. Whereas paper-based fieldnotes and other physical ethnographic records are often deposited in repositories and made accessible only after a scholar’s death, the emergence of born-digital materials has created and enhanced possibilities for rapidly sharing data, not only with other researchers but also with research subjects and the public at large via online repositories. While many researchers support the principal of public access to research data, making this data available online can compound the ethical dilemmas ethnographers face. Ethnographers often find themselves torn between contradictory imperatives to share data publically and to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study. ((L. Jahnke, A. Asher, and S.D.C. Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>, CLIR Publication #154 (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2012).))\r\n\r\nUnlike experimental data, ethnographic data, by definition, are not reproducible. ((See Sydel Silverman, “Introduction,” in <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, ed. Sydel Silverman and Nancy J. Parezo (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1995), 1.)) Ethnographic fieldwork is inextricably linked to a particular time, place, and society, making the primary data of ethnographers unique and unrecoverable. For this reason, today’s ethnographic fieldnotes are particularly important to preserve as tomorrow’s historical records; they document observations of places and cultures that—because they are in a constant state of change—will never exist in the same configuration again. Since ethnographic fieldnotes provide the empirical basis for researchers’ public authority, it would likewise seem logical for fieldnotes and other ethnographic materials to be made available for verification purposes in online repositories as soon as possible after the publication of research reports, articles, or monographs.\r\n\r\nHowever, several characteristics of ethnographic materials cause them to be particularly difficult to make publically accessible. First, many ethnographic researchers are reluctant to share their data for personal reasons. Ethnographic fieldnotes are intensely personal documents for many researchers, who often view them as extremely valuable for their own work, but doubt that they would be useful to other researchers without the accompanying contexts and experiences in which the materials were collected. Secondly, ethnographic materials also routinely contain private, confidential, or culturally sensitive information about both research subjects and the researcher, which often requires time-consuming or costly procedures to redact, and may limit or prevent public dissemination and secondary analyses of the data. Finally, ethnographic materials are regularly collected in contexts with varying or conflicting cultural standards for consent and data use, raising ethical questions about the efficacy of archiving these materials. For these reasons, balancing the multiple imperatives of data sharing, informed consent, and confidentiality for research participants is a fundamental issue for ethnographers preparing to deposit their materials in an archives, and the ethics surrounding these decisions was one of the most common and recurring themes in the interviews conducted for the study we present here.\r\n\r\nUsing data gathered during the 2011-2012 academic year in a qualitative study of researchers’ data management and curation practices, ((This study was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and managed by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). See Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.)) this article examines the practical and ethical dilemmas ethnographers face as they work with diverse research materials across varying, and sometimes conflicting, cultural standards for consent and data use. By emphasizing the everyday practices of researchers, this study sought to gain a holistic understanding of the workflows involved in the creation, management, and preservation of research data in order to better comprehend researchers’ unmet needs within data curation processes. Twenty-three researchers from varying ranks working in a variety of social science disciplines at five universities ((Penn State University, Lehigh University, Bucknell University, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Pennsylvania.)) participated in interviews for this study (see Table 1), which focused on how researchers collect and analyze data, how they manage and preserve these data, and what training they have had in data-curation practices.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4704\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"273\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4704\" alt=\"Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants.  *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE-273x300.jpg\" width=\"273\" height=\"300\" /></a> Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants. *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.[/caption]\r\n\r\nAlthough scholars across many disciplines were grappling with the ethical and philosophical problems of data sharing—often in the absence of coherent policies for data archiving and release from funding agencies, professional organizations, or their employing institutions—this article will focus on the experiences of nine of these researchers who conducted ethnography as part of their data collection. Because ethnographic research involves a complex social interplay between researchers and respondents, often from differing cultural contexts, the management of these data presents unique difficulties for researchers who usually have little or no training in preservation, curation, or data-stewardship strategies. This article will examine how researchers navigate these difficulties when dealing with the two principal types of ethnographic data: fieldnotes—the diverse array of notes, writings, and other materials upon which researchers base their ethnographies ((Jean E. Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1.))—and the research artifacts, such as transcripts and audio or video recordings, produced from more formal, direct interactions with respondents.\r\n\r\n<b>The Data Sharing Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nFunding agencies—especially agencies administering public funds—are increasingly requiring qualitative research data to be made publically available. Since 1995, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)—a major source of funding for qualitative research in the United Kingdom—has required its awardees to archive their data as a condition of funding. ((See O. Parry and N. S. Mauthner, “Whose Data Are They Anyway?” <i>Sociology</i> 38, no. 1 (2004): 140-41.)) Similarly, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other US funding agencies (e.g. National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities) have begun to require formal data-management plans detailing how researchers will meet data-sharing expectations. Our assumption is that this trend will continue as both public and private funders seek maximum returns on their investment in research. While not always explicitly required, the goal of many of these policies is for research data to be deposited in an appropriate repository with online access for both other researchers and the public. For ethnographers, who are often accustomed to retaining exclusive rights over their fieldnotes and other materials, this can represent an uncomfortable shift in research practice, even when these repositories take into account the particular confidentiality and consent demands inherent to ethnographic research (discussed further below) and implement appropriate safeguards such as embargoing or redacting sensitive materials.\r\n\r\nIn principal, the ethnographic researchers we interviewed for this study saw data preservation and sharing as positive values, even if they were not sure about how to preserve and share data or who would potentially use the materials. When asked about what parts of her research data she would like to preserve, one anthropologist explained:\r\n\r\nThat’s the thing—If you keep anything long enough it becomes interesting. . . . For myself . . . I would love to archive everything and maybe put some kind of time stamp on personal information where it can’t be released for some amount of time. It’s so hard to know what people in the future would be interested in. . . . I try to keep data in such a way that hopefully it would be comprehensible to someone else if they were willing to work through my crazy software. . . . If I had somebody’s fieldnotes from 100 years ago from my field site, I’d be totally fascinated by that, so you never know what people are going to be interested in. (2-16-120211) ((The number in parentheses is the participant identification number; please refer to Table 1.))\r\n\r\nThe scholarly societies to which many of these researchers belong also broadly support data sharing and potential reuse. The most recent 2012 revision on the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) ethics statement explicitly states that it is the obligation of the researcher to preserve records and make results accessible, “Anthropologists have an ethical responsibility for ensuring the integrity, preservation, and protection of their work” and, the “results of anthropological research should be disseminated in a timely fashion” provided it is not “at the expense of protecting confidentiality.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn8\">[viii]</a> The previous 1998 version also addressed data access and preservation, but not as systematically or forcefully.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn9\">[ix]</a> Likewise, the American Sociological Association sets similar expectations in the data sharing section of its Code of Ethics.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn10\">[x]</a>\r\n\r\nThe benefits of data archiving and sharing for scholarly disciplines and the advancement of knowledge are straightforward: preserved materials can be subjected to secondary analysis, unnecessary duplication of research can be minimized, historical records can be maintained, and, importantly, scholars can independently evaluate the validity of published results by consulting the primary data.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn11\">[xi]</a> Furthermore, online repositories might enable new forms of scholarship and writing. For the first time, materials preserved and made accessible online have made it feasible to make publically available the corpus of primary texts that form the basis of support for ethnographic argumentation. While a non-digitized, paper-based collection could also serve this purpose, it is unlikely that more than a handful of interested readers of a particular ethnography would physically travel to the repository to examine the documents. Repositories that make resources available online fundamentally change this dynamic. In <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive, </i>Johannes Fabian explores these possibilities by conducting what he describes as an experiment with “writing ethnography ‘in the presence of texts’” located in a publically accessible online repository.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn12\">[xii]</a> Fabian terms this genre of writing “commentary,” a text-centered form of ethnography that assumes his reader can simultaneously consult a primary text for her or himself via an online archive.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn13\">[xiii]</a>\r\n\r\nThe text Fabian utilizes is a conversation he and Kahenga Mukonkwa Michel had about a ceremony Kahenga conducted at Fabian’s home in Zaire in 1974.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn14\">[xiv]</a> The transcription, translation, and an audio excerpt of the discussion are now housed in the Archives of Popular Swahili on the website of the Language and Popular Culture in Africa project.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn15\">[xv]</a> Fabian argues that the repository of documents serves an important epistemological purpose by “mediat[ing] between . . . events, the presentation of evidence, and our aims and claims to produce anthropological knowledge.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn16\">[xvi]</a> By allowing the reader of an ethnography to interrogate and evaluate the primary data on which it is based, the archive reveals how ethnographies are composed through the confrontation between the researcher, his or her respondents, and the texts they co-create.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn17\">[xvii]</a>\r\n\r\nFabian’s instructive experiment notwithstanding, for many researchers the practice of making ethnographic materials available online is fraught. Ethnography requires researchers to occupy a methodological position that mediates and translates between multiple cultural contexts. This positioning leads to a number of difficulties for ethnographers as they attempt to meet their obligations to multiple constituencies—including funders, cultural institutions, and the researcher’s employing university, in addition to the individuals and communities the researcher works with—while negotiating the processes of placing materials in archives and repositories. When working with human subjects, ethical pitfalls abound, and often ethnographers must resolve contradictions between these groups.\r\n\r\nAt a very basic level, policies requiring access to research data may “directly [contradict] some ethnic groups’ cultural traditions concerning secrecy and controlled access to information.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn18\">[xviii]</a> For example, an anthropologist might gain access to knowledge that is secret, or restricted for cultural or social reasons. During his fieldwork with the Saramaka, a group in Suriname who descended from escaped African slaves, Richard Price gained knowledge about the “Old-Time People” who experienced the war for liberation from roughly 1680 to 1762.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn19\">[xix]</a> The Saramaka consider knowledge about this time and these people powerful, dangerous, and restricted. Price struggled with the ethical implications of publishing a book within a different cultural system that uses this knowledge as its primary subject.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn20\">[xx]</a> Price notes that by putting the information in a public document, he potentially “deprives [the] author of control (except perhaps via the language in which [the book] appears) over [his or her] audience.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn21\">[xxi]</a> This problem is compounded exponentially once information is made available online (as Price’s book now is, at least in part, in Google Books) by removing even the physical restrictions of a bound monograph.\r\n\r\nInformation need not be “exotic” to create publishing difficulties for ethnographers. For example, an ethnographer working in a corporate, government, or other institutional setting in the United States might be privy to proprietary or confidential information about a product or service that must be ethically and legally protected. A researcher in environmental engineering explained her process when conducting interviews:\r\n\r\nAnother big concern is confidentiality because I record those conversations, and then there’s kind of an extended period of time in which I allow those who I’ve talked with to redact parts of our conversation if they’ve talked about things they would prefer to remain private. . . I’m talking to several companies about the development and production of their technologies and so there’s some proprietary information that comes up and that’s really the main concern. (5-20-020212)\r\n\r\nIndeed, accidental release of this type of information might put the researcher at as much legal risk as her respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen preparing to preserve ethnographic data, issues of ownership and authorship are also not always straightforward, and it is imperative that researchers communicate and address these potential problems with archivists, data curators, and repository and digital collection managers before depositing ethnographic materials. For example, consent forms for interviews might not clearly state who holds the copyright or who has a license to use the recording or transcripts, potentially leading to confusion over the legal status of these materials and making it more difficult for a researcher to transfer materials to an archives. Intellectual property and copyright are themselves culturally specific concepts, and a legal right to dispose of or deposit materials as a researcher sees fit does not equal an ethical right to do so. The people providing information, the funders, the institution that employs the researcher, and the community in which the researcher works all have a moral interest in the disposition of the data.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn22\">[xxii]</a> Parry and Mauthner go so far as to say, “[B]ecause the construction of qualitative data is a joint endeavor between respondent and researcher, both parties should retain authorship/ownership rights over the data,” which creates “practical, legal and ethical implications for archiving and re-use.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn23\">[xxiii]</a>\r\n\r\nSome researchers, including Fabian, argue that since ethnographers and their respondents are joint agents in creating ethnographic materials, both parties should be named to acknowledge their contributions.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn24\">[xxiv]</a> However, naming respondents as authors or contributors contradicts an ethnographer’s imperative to protect the confidentiality of their research participants, which is a basic standard required by most Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved research and by professional-ethics statements. While David Zeitlyn observes that “a default assumption that notes will be anonymized conflicts with an individual’s moral right to be recognized as the author of his or her words,”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn25\">[xxv]</a> many, if not most, ethnographers would likely be uncomfortable naming their participants in almost any context, but especially in publically accessible online repositories. This is likely to hold true even if a researcher philosophically accepts that his or her authority to determine the level of sensitivity that the data require privileges the researcher’s position vis-à-vis his or her respondents.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn26\">[xxvi]</a>\r\n\r\nMany ethnographers thus understand themselves not so much as owners of their data, but rather as stewards or custodians of data that are produced by a complex set of relationships between researchers and respondents.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn27\">[xxvii]</a> As the stewards of these data, researchers are often the de facto interpreters of the terms by which data are made available, choosing what and when to publish or deposit materials in repositories or archives. Despite his assertion that correspondents should be named, Fabian notes that he exercises this stewardship by attempting not to publish anything that might be dangerous or damaging to the people with whom he worked—a position that is probably made easier by the fact that the texts he is working with were already 30 years old when he transcribed and posted them on the web.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn28\">[xxviii]</a> Many researchers we interviewed adopted a similar “attitude of moral responsibility towards research participants, expressed in the way in which data are handled,”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn29\">[xxix]</a> citing ethical concerns about appropriate use of the data as well as issues of confidentiality and consent. Even for researchers who support public access to data, these concerns cause them to question funders’ data-sharing requirements. A researcher in education who was preparing to apply for additional funding to create a longitudinal dataset by re-interviewing her previous respondents noted her uncertainty:\r\n\r\nI know that a lot of places when you apply for funding they want eventually for [data] to become public. I haven’t had to deal with it, but I’ve definitely thought about it. . . . I want to make sure to preserve the qualitative data because it’s very important to me . . . so it’s a concern for me personally to save it. . . . [But] once it’s public, or shared between other people, I would like to get help eventually on making the data itself more confidential because they are just interview transcripts which, you know, there are a lot of [confidentiality] issues with that, and that I would have to [make the data itself more confidential] before I shared it. . . . I don’t know if there are limits to the extent to which I can make it public or not. (1-04-100511)\r\n\r\nIn the context of making their data accessible, these confidentiality and consent negotiations are some of the most difficult issues for scholars to resolve before depositing their ethnographic materials in data repositories or archives. These issues are also most effectively addressed as early in a research project as possible, so that researchers can implement the necessary practices and protocols to insure that confidentiality and consent can be assured in the long term prior to data collection. As Charles Humphrey and his colleagues discuss, the integral involvement of archivists and data-curation specialists in the planning stages and throughout qualitative research projects greatly increases the quality of the data products and decreases ethical problems associated with deposition in repositories and archives.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn30\">[xxx]</a> As they point out, this collaboration is beneficial to both researchers and archivists, since good archival preparation practices are often synonymous with good research practices.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn31\">[xxxi]</a>\r\n\r\nDespite efforts by organizations such as the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR) to foster this type of collaboration<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn32\">[xxxii]</a> and educate ethnographers in data curation and archival preparation practices,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn33\">[xxxiii]</a> it appears that relatively few ethnographers seek out the assistance of archivists or data management specialists until after data collection is completed, unless funding requirements compelled them to do so. Of the ethnographers we interviewed, only two had consulted with data management services prior to the data collection phase of their research, both as a result of the NSF’s requirement that data-management plans be included in new funding proposals. Only one project had a systematic plan for depositing its ethnographic data in an archives, principally because this research was conducted as part of a very large and well-funded research initiative. This project had amassed some 40,000 pages of ethnographic fieldnotes, which were being preserved but not yet been shared publically. The researcher leading this project explained:\r\n\r\nIt’s news to anthropologists that data should be made public. It’s not something that’s in their mindset. In fact they are appalled by it. . . . However, that [ethnographic] data was paid for using a million dollars of federal money and I’m using it with some of my grad students who are essentially doing secondary analysis of fieldnotes. I think that in the long run that data should be made public, and could be, but very carefully. . . . I don’t think that’s a problem . . . my guess is we’re going to get there. . . . A very new area now is “what do you do with electronic fieldnotes?” and “can those be made available for researchers?” If nothing else, I think this archive of fieldnotes . . .in 20 or 30 years could be a great historical source and should be preserved on that basis. So, I would like to see us work out ways of carefully having anthropological and ethnographic data made public too. (5-11-103011)\r\n\r\nIn working out the procedures for sharing these materials, this researcher went on to emphasize the paramount importance of protecting research participants’ confidentiality. Indeed, all of the ethnographers cited confidentiality concerns as one of the foremost issues that they would need to discuss and resolve with an archivist or repository manager before depositing their materials, making it perhaps the most critical area for developing collaborative practices between researchers, data curators, and archivists.\r\n\r\n<b>The Confidentiality Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nThe ethics statements of both the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association require researchers to protect the confidentiality of their respondents (although the AAA statement asserts that expectations of credit should also be addressed).<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn34\">[xxxiv]</a> Protecting research participants’ confidentiality is routinely an explicit promise within social science research, and is an almost universally assumed requirement of IRBs when reviewing research proposals. Setting aside the research participant’s potential moral right to authorship as discussed above, the nature of ethnographic research often renders the promise of confidentiality problematic, if not outright impossible. As Zachary Schrag observes, maintaining the confidentiality of fieldwork sites and research participants discussed in publications has been a perennial problem for social science researchers, as details necessary to make ethnographic and other fieldwork-based writing meaningful often simultaneously make these places and people identifiable, especially to people familiar with the location or topic.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn35\">[xxxv]</a> Increasing confidentiality protections almost always come at the cost of decreasing the amount of contextual information included for the ethnography’s audience, and can effectively prevent data from being deposited in an archives or repository (or sometimes even collected). A sociologist recounted the difficulties he encountered on one project:\r\n\r\nI wanted to do life histories with priests [in central Pennsylvania], and part of the problem was . . . we got into a situation where people might tell me things about their personal lives that are sort of not confidential in the IRB sense but that might be upsetting to their congregations—like I talked to one priest who had been married three times, where if the congregation had known about that they would have been very upset. There’s nothing illegal about it; this person’s not shy about telling that, but it could have been damaging. But I had the sense that . . . if I went around and did these interviews, I didn’t want to destroy the data because I thought they had some historical importance. . . . [The IRB said,] “and when you get done with this study if you’re not going to destroy the data you have to store it in an archive for 50 years, and I checked with [university] archives and they said, “we’re not going to store anything like that.” . . . I wanted to preserve the data, but there was no way to do it. . . . I actually quit the project [because the IRB made it impossible to do]. (2-13-111411)\r\n\r\nWhile protecting research participants’ privacy can be difficult, even in carefully prepared and edited publications, the nature of ethnographic materials makes them especially difficult to confidentially preserve over time. Audio and video recordings present obvious confidentiality problems by capturing a respondents’ voice or image,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn36\">[xxxvi]</a> but even interview transcripts can be problematic. A common practice in archiving ethnographic materials is to make attempts to remove potentially identifying information from archived transcripts. However, even these “anonymized” transcripts often still contain personal details that allow the possible identification of research participants. For example, in the interviews conducted for this study, participants regularly discussed their discipline and research interests. Coupled with the names of the universities where the research was conducted—which are contained in all of our research proposals and publications—this seemingly innocuous information would probably render any of our participants identifiable with a simple web search if the full interview transcripts were released. This might not seem like a significant risk for scholars describing projects that they routinely discuss publically, but depending on the other details contained in the transcript it might also be embarrassing or potentially damaging (for example, comments about university administrators, other colleagues, etc.). As is often the case with qualitative research, removing these contextual details would diminish, if not destroy, the usefulness of these data to future researchers—the ostensible audience for these materials. Unfortunately, each piece of contextual detail retained about a research participant to aid in data interpretation simultaneously creates more potential for identification.\r\n\r\nGiven technological advances, removing all conceivably identifying details might still be insufficient to guarantee that transcripts are rendered anonymous. In fact, anonymizing transcripts may soon no longer be technically possible. Arvind Narayana and his colleagues have demonstrated that it is possible to accurately identify anonymous online authors up to 20 percent of the time based on writing style alone, given a sufficient corpus of example texts.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn37\">[xxxvii]</a> As more and more content moves online, one can only assume that these techniques will become more robust, so that identifying a participant from the vocabulary or speech patterns in a transcript may eventually become a matter of applying the correct software. These realities set up even the most well-intentioned researchers to fail to meet the obligations required by IRBs and the agreements made with their respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen archiving ethnographic materials, confidentiality can also be equally important for protecting the researcher. This is especially true for the archiving of fieldnotes, which are profoundly personal for many ethnographic researchers. Researchers are often quite ambivalent about these data, regularly describing feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, or embarrassment about their work and what it reveals about them as scholars.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn38\">[xxxviii]</a> When talking about her data collection process, an anthropologist in our study observed:\r\n\r\nThat’s the thing with fieldnotes, you never show them to anyone . . . as long as it works for you . . . it’s not like you have to show it to someone else and have them make sense of it, which is kind of a shame because it would be nice to have data in formats where people could, you know, sort of, archive that information. (2-16-120211)\r\n\r\nIn his study of fieldnote practices, Jean Jackson observes, “Many respondents point out that the highly personal nature of fieldnotes influences the extent of one’s willingness to share them: ‘Fieldnotes can reveal how worthless your work was, the lacunae, your linguistic incompetence, your not being made a blood brother, your childish temper.’”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn39\">[xxxix]</a> Anthropologist Simon Ottenberg describes his fieldnotes similarly, “[W]hen I was younger, I would have felt uncomfortable at the thought of someone else using my notes, whether I was alive or dead—they are so much a private thing, so much an aspect of personal field experience, so much a private language, so much part of my ego, my childhood [as an anthropologist], and my personal maturity.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn40\">[xl]</a> This attachment and ambivalence may make researchers reluctant to turn over control of their notes to an archives—especially one that has the purpose of making materials available publically on the internet. This professional practice not only makes it very difficult to substantiate or verify ethnographers’ data, suggesting a need for ethnographers to develop more proactive and sensitive data-sharing procedures, but also creates a situation where ethnographic materials are saved, but with inadequate plans for preservation. Zeitlyn notes, “Paradoxically most anthropologists want neither to destroy their field material nor archive it.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn41\">[xli]</a> So, too, with our study: almost no one had made plans for their data beyond the short term, let alone the final dispensation of their materials at the end of their career or after their death.\r\n\r\nWhile archivists regularly assure scholars that the papers of “ordinary” or not-famous researchers are sometimes the most valuable,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn42\">[xlii]</a> researchers themselves are often unconvinced. Many of our respondents had trouble imagining the potential audience for their data and primary materials, although one Environmental Studies researcher shared data on graffiti images she collected during fieldwork following a particular ethnic conflict event. The data were not directly related to her primary research questions, but another scholar used them in a Master’s thesis (and possibly in a future dissertation). Nevertheless, doubts about future usefulness contribute to researchers’ reluctance to undertake sometimes arduous and time-consuming data preservation and annotation tasks, such as redacting confidential information, and to neglect advance planning for the eventual archiving of their materials, such as assuring adequate consent procedures. This is potentially a key area of advocacy for data curators and archivists, who are well positioned to both educate researchers in the importance of preserving primary data for future generations of researchers, even if its immediate value is not apparent, and to provide tools such as cross-indexes and finding aids that make these data more useful and comparable.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn43\">[xliii]</a>\r\n\r\n<b>The Consent Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nBoth IRBs and disciplinary societies’ ethics statements emphasize the importance and necessity of obtaining informed consent from research participants. Given the possibility of archiving materials indefinitely, and especially for web publication, obtaining fully informed consent may be a futile endeavor. Libby Bishop points out that because researchers cannot adequately speculate on all the uses in which data might be employed, explicit consent is “logically impossible.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn44\">[xliv]</a> However, Bishop also observes that this should not paralyze researchers from depositing their materials in archives, since consent for the primary research activity is in itself partial and no researcher can fully explain all information about any research project.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn45\">[xlv]</a> Zeitlyn makes this point in another way, noting that cultural differences may also limit the ability of a researcher to obtain consent in a way that is recognizable to IRBs: “Once material is archived, it may be consulted by unknown others who might use it in novel ways. . . . Can a researcher obtain meaningful prior informed consent if the uses to which the material might be put in the future cannot be explained?”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn46\">[xlvi]</a>\r\n\r\nWhile Bishop suggests responding to this problem by providing examples of how archived research might be reused or by obtaining open-ended consent,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn47\">[xlvii]</a> others suggest a more comprehensive approach that understands consent as a process rather than a one-time event.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn48\">[xlviii]</a> This approach presents significant difficulties when applied to the lifecycle of an entire ethnographic research project, especially once data and other fieldwork materials are deposited in an archives for the purpose of long-term access and preservation. If appropriate consent for archiving is not obtained at the outset of a project, or is sought when new uses are discovered for materials, contacting participants to authorize this usage can be extremely difficult and costly for ethnographers, if not outright impossible. Furthermore, a consent model that requires re-contacting participants also requires confidentiality or anonymization procedures to be reversible, meaning that the researcher must retain records that can link individuals to the materials about them. Retaining contact information or other identifying records is not best practice for assuring participant confidentiality, and in the case of truly sensitive research, doing so unnecessarily maintains records that could be subject to subpoena or otherwise compromised. For example, in 2012 the US Department of Justice issued a subpoena in connection with a murder investigation on behalf of Great Britain for access to oral history interviews conducted with Irish Republican Army and Loyalist paramilitary members as part of “The Belfast Project,” archived at Boston College’s Burns Library. While the project’s confidentiality agreement promised interviewees that these materials would be embargoed until their death, this guarantee was subject to exceptions required by American law; a point that may have been unclear to the research participants. Both Boston College and the researchers are presently contesting the subpoenas, but the initial rulings by a federal district court and the First Circuit Court of Appeals have found that the subpoenas are legal.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn49\">[xlix]</a> As this case demonstrates, whenever identifying information exists, there is a possibility that its disclosure can be compelled. From the point of view of research-participant confidentiality, it is therefore preferable to destroy materials that enable identification or re-contact as soon as possible after research is complete.\r\n\r\nSince anonymization is an all-or-nothing decision that must be irreversible, even for the researcher, if it is to be effective,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn50\">[l]</a> in order to make consent an ongoing process, one must also accept that the data cannot be made fully anonymous. The question then becomes how researchers can meaningfully extend consent decisions to include archives without rendering them unmanageable for their administrators or unnecessarily diminishing their analytical value.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn51\">[li]</a> Balancing the need to maintain appropriate levels of confidentiality with the administrative costs is a critical area for collaboration between researchers, archivists, and data specialists. Fully anonymizing datasets is probably neither necessary, nor cost effective, for relatively low-risk materials,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn52\">[lii]</a> but both the researcher and the archivists must fully understand the potential risk scenarios before these decisions can be made, particularly in an environment where privacy protections are an increasing concern for research participants. While discussing the challenges he faces in complying with funder’s public access requirements, a sociologist observed:\r\n\r\nClearly the biggest problem is the problem of protection of privacy. The concern of privacy has been ramped up tremendously over the last 10 or 15 years, and the process of getting permission to analyze data can be difficult, but a trend in social science data is to include more and more information that\'s sensitive. . . . I think the field is trying to now establish appropriate levels of protection for particular kinds of data and is trying to balance this problem of privacy with public access. And it is a challenge and it’s going to require some new modes of doing things. (5-11-103111)\r\n\r\nDeveloping these modes of work and processes of consent requires not only the participation of researchers and scholarly societies, but also intensive cooperation with data management specialists, technologists, and archivists.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn53\">[liii]</a>\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusions and Recommendations</b>\r\n\r\nResearchers and archivists alike face tremendous challenges in effectively preserving ethnographic research data and providing meaningful access for researchers and other stakeholders while simultaneously protecting sensitive data. In order to be effective, data sharing, confidentiality, and consent imperatives all require the active participation and investment of researchers themselves. Decisions about access, issues of authorship attribution, adequate consent, and the level of confidentially required cannot be made without the input of someone who is deeply knowledgeable about the contexts in which the research took place. However, as we have seen, none of these decision processes necessarily end at the moment when the materials are deposited in an archives or repository, and a researcher’s ethical obligation to his or her research participants does not end once he or she has transferred responsibility for their preservation. This sense of responsibility makes many researchers reluctant to relinquish control over their ethnographic materials, lest changing political, social, or cultural conditions necessitates a more restrictive approach to data access than was initially required.\r\n\r\nFor example, an Environmental Studies researcher noted that currently her data does not present much risk to her respondents:\r\n\r\nMost of the data I’ve collected really have limited privacy issues or any kind of harm that could come to respondents. There are some topics that I’ve looked at, that depending on, when—you know, timeliness—at what point these were published, that identifying information could be problematic. In [central Asian country] it’s a lot easier—at least currently—the situation for my topics isn’t dangerous. That doesn’t mean it can’t be in the future and if I extended the research to neighboring countries then I would probably have some more serious confidentiality issues. (2-12-111011)\r\n\r\nIf the political situation for her respondents changed, however, this researcher might be ethically obligated to change the access conditions of any materials that she had archived, even if her consent procedures had addressed this eventuality. Repositories for ethnographic materials must be careful to include procedures to respond to these types of situations in their donor agreements, and researchers should discuss the unique qualities of ethnographic materials prior to their deposit. As Parezo points out, “it is unethical and unreasonable to expect the archival community to guess which fieldnotes contain sensitive information and what are reasonable use restrictions.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn54\">[liv]</a>\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, preparing materials for deposit into an archives is often a low priority for ethnographers for a variety of reasons, and the archiving of ethnographic data is further hindered by a persistent lack of training. While comprehensive historical review is beyond the scope of this article, Silverman already noted the problem of a lack of formal training in data collection and management practices among anthropologists almost 20 years ago,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn55\">[lv]</a> before the rise of many of the complications that the expansion of digital data collection created. Almost none of the scholars we interviewed reported that data curation or stewardship training was part of their graduate curriculum, and data management was usually only addressed narrowly in relation to methodological approaches and problems. The ethical and practical difficulties involved in managing and preserving large amounts of research data were rarely addressed, with most researchers acquiring the skills they needed via trial and error.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn56\">[lvi]</a> None of the scholars interviewed during this study expressed satisfaction with their level of expertise in data management, and few had access to individuals who could provide knowledgeable guidance. While it would be preferable for graduate curricula to include this type of training, it seems unlikely that this change will occur in the near term. It is, therefore, likely that archivists and data specialists will need to provide this training, preferably by developing relationships with ethnographic researchers as early as possible in the research process.\r\n\r\nThe lack of confidence in their data-management training compounds researchers’ apprehension about the ethical issues contained in their data. Researchers are naturally—and rightfully—conservative about the potential risks in sharing data, especially if they are not convinced they can protect their respondents’ confidentiality, or that they have obtained appropriate consent—issues that the difficulties of cross-cultural communication make more complex. Without such assurances that these ethical imperatives can be addressed, many researchers are unlikely to invest in archiving their materials. “In many cases, their desire to avoid the ethical risks of inappropriate data release may outweigh the costs of potential data loss.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn57\">[lvii]</a>\r\n\r\nBecause of these interrelated concerns, it is critical that the archival and data curation systems available to ethnographic researchers have multiple and fine-grained levels of access and privacy controls. Tools must be developed that can appropriately manage confidential data and that allow researchers, working in conjunction with their respondents, to exercise control over their data, administer who has access to it, and account for culturally specific restrictions on data use.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn58\">[lviii]</a> One example of a system attempting to address these requirements is the Murkutu content management system (<a href=\"http://www.mukurtu.org/\">http://www.mukurtu.org/</a>), which makes cultural protocols a fundamental part of access to materials. This allows for the easy creation of fine-grained and culturally appropriate user groups with specifically defined usage rights, and it is being developed in cooperation with indigenous communities.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn59\">[lix]</a>\r\n\r\nBecause the nature of ethnographic materials makes them potentially subject to ongoing and evolving dilemmas of confidentiality and consent, archivists and data managers should understand that these materials may require ongoing curation, preferably through processes and procedures that incorporate researchers in a collaborative and meaningful way. Although many researchers would welcome the ability to more easily share their data, particularly in collaborative projects and in response to data-sharing requirements, they are almost universally resistant to any arrangement in which they would relinquish control over access to the data. As one anthropologist described:\r\n\r\nPeople don’t hesitate, at all, to share data with collaborators that they trust. … If you provide a mechanism for collaboration, even if it’s just Google Docs or something, you know, people share data easily and freely. It’s when it becomes an anonymous process that they seem to get balky. (1-02-100511)\r\n\r\nThe goal of making materials publically available online, then, will require archival systems and processes that are cognizant of the complex social relationships embedded within ethnographic materials, not only between the researcher and his or her respondents, but also between and among the many stakeholders in ethnographic data. The development of additional policies, ethical guidelines, and best practices by disciplinary organizations, funding agencies, universities, and cultural institutions could further aid researchers and archivists in navigating the ethical dilemmas contained in the archival process.\r\n\r\nBecause much ethnographic data is collected by individuals in relatively small and often idiosyncratic datasets, it is especially vulnerable to loss due to benign neglect or lack or resources, even if the data are historically unique. A sociologist described one such vulnerable dataset:\r\n\r\nWe did life histories of 45 people in a [church] congregation in [central Pennsylvania town]. . . . It’s probably the only body of material on a single congregation of that depth and complexity that exists, and I’m just too lazy to have figured out what to do with it and write it up and everything, but you could imagine somewhere somebody who wants to do research on congregations would find this incredibly valuable. But what’s going to happen to it [in the long term]? And what’s going to happen to it is, the copies I have will end up in a trash can, and my computer hard drive will eventually crash or get outmoded or get erased, and that’ll be the end of it [if there isn’t a place to archive it]. (2-13-111411)\r\n\r\nIn order to prevent these losses, data management specialists and archivists must specifically curate these materials. They must also build relationships with ethnographers to resolve the unique ethical dilemmas these data present and the uneasy tensions between researchers’ desire to share data publically and obligations to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study.\r\n\r\nFinally, despite the acknowledged importance and value of archival materials to the disciplines and future researchers, academic rewards systems offer very little payoff for the work that goes into making ethnographic materials available, and ethnographic researchers are often under-resourced in the funding, time, and personnel support needed for preparing materials for archiving. <a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn60\">[lx]</a> Archivists must therefore work to make archival systems and the development of archival processes and policies as straightforward for researchers as possible, ideally assisting in integrating the development of metadata and other secondary materials (for example, codebooks, explanatory materials, finding aids, and ontologies) necessary to archiving and ensuring the long-term usefulness of primary data as early in the research process as possible. Likewise, funding agencies should improve funding for long-term data management, preservation, and curatorial services, either directly or via guidelines to institutions for recouping indirect costs, especially when the grant mandates archiving or public data accessibility. By providing these supports, archivists and funders would greatly assist researchers in responding to the imperatives of providing access to data and assuring the confidentiality and consent of their respondents, as well as resolving the ethical dilemmas contained in their data, thereby helping assure the preservation of irreplaceable ethnographic information.\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<hr align=\"left\" size=\"1\" width=\"33%\" />\r\n\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref8\">[viii]</a> American Anthropological Association (AAA), <i>Statement on Ethics: Principals of Professional Responsibility</i>, 2012, http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref9\">[ix]</a> This version was slightly revised in 2009 to make minor changes to some of the statement’s language. Since this revision did not alter the structure or main points of the statement, we continue to refer the 1998 version (as does the AAA’s ethics website). American Anthropological Association, Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, Statement, 1998, B.4-5, C1.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref10\">[x]</a> American Sociological Association, Code of Ethics, 1999, 13.05\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref11\">[xi]</a> Libby Bishop, “Ethical Sharing and Reuse of Qualitative Data,” <i>Australian Journal of Social Issues</i> 44, no. 3 (2009): 266.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref12\">[xii]</a> Johannes Fabian, <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive</i> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), vii.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref13\">[xiii]</a> Ibid., 9-13.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref14\">[xiv]</a> Ibid., 3.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref15\">[xv]</a> Johannes. Fabian, “‘Magic and Modernity’: A Conversation with a Herbalist and Practitioner of Magic,” trans. Johannes Fabian, <i>Archives of Popular Swahili</i> 7 (2005), http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref16\">[xvi]</a> Fabian, “Magic,” 123\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref17\">[xvii]</a> Fabian, <i>Ethnography</i>, 54. One does wonder, however, why Fabian considered a traditionally published monograph necessary to this project, rather than simply including it in the archive. Given that his book annotates the online texts using paragraph numbers that assume a specific online layout, it would seem more effective to have created hyperlinks between the commentary and the primary materials. In this way, the “experiment” seems incomplete.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref18\">[xviii]</a> David Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates,” <i>Annual Review of Anthropology</i> 41, no. 1 (2012): 472, doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145721. See also G. Isaac, “Whose Idea Was This?: Museums, Replicas, and the Reproduction of Knowledge,” <i>Current Anthropology</i> 52, no. 2 (2011) 211-233.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref19\">[xix]</a> Richard Price, <i>First Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 5-6. For additional examples and a discussion of cross-cultural differences in relation to access to knowledge see Nancy J. Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage: CoPAR, Anthropological Records, and the Archival Community,” <i>The American Archivist </i>62 (1999): 285, note 24.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref20\">[xx]</a> Price, <i>First Time, </i>21-23.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref21\">[xxi]</a> Ibid.,<i> </i>23\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref22\">[xxii]</a> Silverman, “Introduction,” 4; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 142.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref23\">[xxiii]</a> Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 141.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref24\">[xxiv]</a> Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref25\">[xxv]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 470.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref26\">[xxvi]</a> Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 148.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref27\">[xxvii]</a> Silverman, “Introduction,” 4-5.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref28\">[xxviii]</a> Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref29\">[xxix]</a> Annamaria Carusi and Marina Jirotka, “From Data Archive to Ethical Labyrinth,” <i>Qualitative Research</i> 9, no. 3 (2009): 292.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref30\">[xxx]</a> Charles K. Humphrey, Carole A. Estabrooks, Judy R. Norris, Jane E. Smith, and Kathryn L. Hesketh, “Archivist on Board: Contributions to the Research Team,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000).\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref31\">[xxxi]</a> Humphrey et al., “Archivist on Board,” 5.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref32\">[xxxii]</a> Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage.”\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref33\">[xxxiii]</a> CoPAR has released a series of fourteen bulletins outlining specific issues involved in the preservation of anthropological materials and addressed to practicing anthropologists. These bulletins are available at <a href=\"http://copar.org/bulletins.htm\">http://copar.org/bulletins.htm</a>. Unfortunately, since most of these bulletins were written in the late 1990s, many of the technology discussions are out of date. However, the conceptual discussions remain highly relevant.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref34\">[xxxiv]</a> ASA, Code of Ethics, 11; AAA, Statement on Ethics (Part 3), 7.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref35\">[xxxv]</a> Zachary M. Schrag, <i>Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 15.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref36\">[xxxvi]</a> For a discussion of the extreme difficulty of archiving video and audio data anonymously, see Louise Corti, Annette Day, and Gill Backhouse, “Confidentiality and Informed Consent: Issues for Consideration in the Preservation of and Provision of Access to Qualitative Data Archives,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 4.4c, <a href=\"http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024\">http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024</a>.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref37\">[xxxvii]</a> A. Narayanan, H. Paskov, N. Z. Gong, J. Bethencourt, E. Stefanov, E. C. R. Shin, and D. Song, “On the Feasibility of Internet-scale Author Identification,” Security and Privacy (SP), 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (May 20-23, 2012): 301, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref38\">[xxxviii]</a> Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” 10-12.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref39\">[xxxix]</a> Ibid., 22.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref40\">[xl]</a> Simon Ottenberg, “Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1990), 153.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref41\">[xli]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref42\">[xlii]</a> Catherine Fowler, \"Ethical Considerations,\" in Silverman and Parezo, <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, 64-65; Robert Leopold, “The Second Life of Ethnographic Fieldnotes,” <i>Ateliers d\'anthropologie</i> 32 (2008): 4.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref43\">[xliii]</a> Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 301-305. See also Louise Corti, “Progress and Problems of Preserving and Providing Access to Qualitative Data for Social Research—The International Picture of an Emerging Culture,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 10.1.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref44\">[xliv]</a> Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref45\">[xlv]</a> Ibid., 264.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref46\">[xlvi]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471; see also Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 147.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref47\">[xlvii]</a> Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref48\">[xlviii]</a> Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 146; AAA, Code of Ethics, III.A.4.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref49\">[xlix]</a> The Society of American Archivists Oral History Section maintains a webpage summarizing the case and providing links to relevant documents at http://www2.archivists.org/groups/oral-history-section/the-belfast-case-information-for-saa-members.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref50\">[l]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref51\">[li]</a> See Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294-95.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref52\">[lii]</a> See Corti, Day, and Backhouse,\" Confidentiality and Informed Consent,\" 4.4, on the expense of creating anonymized archives.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref53\">[liii]</a> ICPSR’s “Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving Phase 5: Preparing Data for Sharing” provides a model for these processes. See <a href=\"http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html\">http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html</a>.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref54\">[liv]</a> Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 285.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref55\">[lv]</a> Silverman, “Introduction,” 6.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref56\">[lvi]</a> Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref57\">[lvii]</a> Ibid.<i>,</i> 17.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref58\">[lviii]</a> Ibid.<i>,</i> 17-18.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref59\">[lix]</a> A list of community groups and organizations participating in the Mukurtu project is available at http://www.mukurtu.org/community.html.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref60\">[lx]</a> The NSF’s recent decision to list datasets as one of the research products to be included in the section of its grant proposals where researchers describe their qualifications does suggest, however, that the current rewards system may gradually be changing (see <a href=\"http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp\">http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp</a>).\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n</div>','Curating the Ethnographic Moment','','inherit','open','open','','4698-revision-7','','','2013-06-17 23:21:07','2013-06-17 23:21:07','',4698,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4698-revision-7/',0,'revision','',0),(4719,3,'2013-06-17 23:58:47','2013-06-17 23:58:47','<b>Introduction</b>\r\n\r\nBy vastly increasing the volume and types of data that field researchers can collect, digital technologies have reshaped ethnographers’ relationship with their accumulated research data and materials. Whereas paper-based fieldnotes and other physical ethnographic records are often deposited in repositories and made accessible only after a scholar’s death, the emergence of born-digital materials has created and enhanced possibilities for rapidly sharing data, not only with other researchers but also with research subjects and the public at large via online repositories. While many researchers support the principal of public access to research data, making this data available online can compound the ethical dilemmas ethnographers face. Ethnographers often find themselves torn between contradictory imperatives to share data publically and to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study. ((L. Jahnke, A. Asher, and S.D.C. Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>, CLIR Publication #154 (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2012).))\r\n\r\nUnlike experimental data, ethnographic data, by definition, are not reproducible. ((See Sydel Silverman, “Introduction,” in <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, ed. Sydel Silverman and Nancy J. Parezo (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1995), 1.)) Ethnographic fieldwork is inextricably linked to a particular time, place, and society, making the primary data of ethnographers unique and unrecoverable. For this reason, today’s ethnographic fieldnotes are particularly important to preserve as tomorrow’s historical records; they document observations of places and cultures that—because they are in a constant state of change—will never exist in the same configuration again. Since ethnographic fieldnotes provide the empirical basis for researchers’ public authority, it would likewise seem logical for fieldnotes and other ethnographic materials to be made available for verification purposes in online repositories as soon as possible after the publication of research reports, articles, or monographs.\r\n\r\nHowever, several characteristics of ethnographic materials cause them to be particularly difficult to make publically accessible. First, many ethnographic researchers are reluctant to share their data for personal reasons. Ethnographic fieldnotes are intensely personal documents for many researchers, who often view them as extremely valuable for their own work, but doubt that they would be useful to other researchers without the accompanying contexts and experiences in which the materials were collected. Secondly, ethnographic materials also routinely contain private, confidential, or culturally sensitive information about both research subjects and the researcher, which often requires time-consuming or costly procedures to redact, and may limit or prevent public dissemination and secondary analyses of the data. Finally, ethnographic materials are regularly collected in contexts with varying or conflicting cultural standards for consent and data use, raising ethical questions about the efficacy of archiving these materials. For these reasons, balancing the multiple imperatives of data sharing, informed consent, and confidentiality for research participants is a fundamental issue for ethnographers preparing to deposit their materials in an archives, and the ethics surrounding these decisions was one of the most common and recurring themes in the interviews conducted for the study we present here.\r\n\r\nUsing data gathered during the 2011-2012 academic year in a qualitative study of researchers’ data management and curation practices, ((This study was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and managed by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). See Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.)) this article examines the practical and ethical dilemmas ethnographers face as they work with diverse research materials across varying, and sometimes conflicting, cultural standards for consent and data use. By emphasizing the everyday practices of researchers, this study sought to gain a holistic understanding of the workflows involved in the creation, management, and preservation of research data in order to better comprehend researchers’ unmet needs within data curation processes. Twenty-three researchers from varying ranks working in a variety of social science disciplines at five universities ((Penn State University, Lehigh University, Bucknell University, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Pennsylvania.)) participated in interviews for this study (see Table 1), which focused on how researchers collect and analyze data, how they manage and preserve these data, and what training they have had in data-curation practices.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4704\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"273\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4704\" alt=\"Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants.  *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE-273x300.jpg\" width=\"273\" height=\"300\" /></a> Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants. *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.[/caption]\r\n\r\nAlthough scholars across many disciplines were grappling with the ethical and philosophical problems of data sharing—often in the absence of coherent policies for data archiving and release from funding agencies, professional organizations, or their employing institutions—this article will focus on the experiences of nine of these researchers who conducted ethnography as part of their data collection. Because ethnographic research involves a complex social interplay between researchers and respondents, often from differing cultural contexts, the management of these data presents unique difficulties for researchers who usually have little or no training in preservation, curation, or data-stewardship strategies. This article will examine how researchers navigate these difficulties when dealing with the two principal types of ethnographic data: fieldnotes—the diverse array of notes, writings, and other materials upon which researchers base their ethnographies ((Jean E. Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1.))—and the research artifacts, such as transcripts and audio or video recordings, produced from more formal, direct interactions with respondents.\r\n\r\n<b>The Data Sharing Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nFunding agencies—especially agencies administering public funds—are increasingly requiring qualitative research data to be made publically available. Since 1995, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)—a major source of funding for qualitative research in the United Kingdom—has required its awardees to archive their data as a condition of funding. ((See O. Parry and N. S. Mauthner, “Whose Data Are They Anyway?” <i>Sociology</i> 38, no. 1 (2004): 140-41.)) Similarly, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other US funding agencies (e.g. National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities) have begun to require formal data-management plans detailing how researchers will meet data-sharing expectations. Our assumption is that this trend will continue as both public and private funders seek maximum returns on their investment in research. While not always explicitly required, the goal of many of these policies is for research data to be deposited in an appropriate repository with online access for both other researchers and the public. For ethnographers, who are often accustomed to retaining exclusive rights over their fieldnotes and other materials, this can represent an uncomfortable shift in research practice, even when these repositories take into account the particular confidentiality and consent demands inherent to ethnographic research (discussed further below) and implement appropriate safeguards such as embargoing or redacting sensitive materials.\r\n\r\nIn principal, the ethnographic researchers we interviewed for this study saw data preservation and sharing as positive values, even if they were not sure about how to preserve and share data or who would potentially use the materials. When asked about what parts of her research data she would like to preserve, one anthropologist explained:\r\n\r\n<blockquote>That’s the thing—If you keep anything long enough it becomes interesting. . . . For myself . . . I would love to archive everything and maybe put some kind of time stamp on personal information where it can’t be released for some amount of time. It’s so hard to know what people in the future would be interested in. . . . I try to keep data in such a way that hopefully it would be comprehensible to someone else if they were willing to work through my crazy software. . . . If I had somebody’s fieldnotes from 100 years ago from my field site, I’d be totally fascinated by that, so you never know what people are going to be interested in. (2-16-120211) ((The number in parentheses is the participant identification number; please refer to Table 1.))<</blockquote>>\r\n\r\nThe scholarly societies to which many of these researchers belong also broadly support data sharing and potential reuse. The most recent 2012 revision on the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) ethics statement explicitly states that it is the obligation of the researcher to preserve records and make results accessible, “Anthropologists have an ethical responsibility for ensuring the integrity, preservation, and protection of their work” and, the “results of anthropological research should be disseminated in a timely fashion” provided it is not “at the expense of protecting confidentiality.” ((American Anthropological Association (AAA), <i>Statement on Ethics: Principals of Professional Responsibility</i>, 2012, <a href=\"http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf\">http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf</a>.)) The previous 1998 version also addressed data access and preservation, but not as systematically or forcefully. ((This version was slightly revised in 2009 to make minor changes to some of the statement’s language. Since this revision did not alter the structure or main points of the statement, we continue to refer the 1998 version (as does the AAA’s ethics website). American Anthropological Association, Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, Statement, 1998, B.4-5, C1.)) Likewise, the American Sociological Association sets similar expectations in the data sharing section of its Code of Ethics. ((American Sociological Association, Code of Ethics, 1999, 13.05.))\r\n\r\nThe benefits of data archiving and sharing for scholarly disciplines and the advancement of knowledge are straightforward: preserved materials can be subjected to secondary analysis, unnecessary duplication of research can be minimized, historical records can be maintained, and, importantly, scholars can independently evaluate the validity of published results by consulting the primary data. ((Libby Bishop, “Ethical Sharing and Reuse of Qualitative Data,” <i>Australian Journal of Social Issues</i> 44, no. 3 (2009): 266.)) Furthermore, online repositories might enable new forms of scholarship and writing. For the first time, materials preserved and made accessible online have made it feasible to make publically available the corpus of primary texts that form the basis of support for ethnographic argumentation. While a non-digitized, paper-based collection could also serve this purpose, it is unlikely that more than a handful of interested readers of a particular ethnography would physically travel to the repository to examine the documents. Repositories that make resources available online fundamentally change this dynamic. In <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive, </i>Johannes Fabian explores these possibilities by conducting what he describes as an experiment with “writing ethnography ‘in the presence of texts’” located in a publically accessible online repository. ((Johannes Fabian, <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive</i> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), vii.)) Fabian terms this genre of writing “commentary,” a text-centered form of ethnography that assumes his reader can simultaneously consult a primary text for her or himself via an online archive. ((Ibid., 9-13.))\r\n\r\nThe text Fabian utilizes is a conversation he and Kahenga Mukonkwa Michel had about a ceremony Kahenga conducted at Fabian’s home in Zaire in 1974. ((Ibid., 3.)) The transcription, translation, and an audio excerpt of the discussion are now housed in the Archives of Popular Swahili on the website of the Language and Popular Culture in Africa project. ((Johannes. Fabian, “‘Magic and Modernity’: A Conversation with a Herbalist and Practitioner of Magic,” trans. Johannes Fabian, <i>Archives of Popular Swahili</i> 7 (2005), <a href=\"http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction\">http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction</a>.)) Fabian argues that the repository of documents serves an important epistemological purpose by “mediat[ing] between . . . events, the presentation of evidence, and our aims and claims to produce anthropological knowledge.” ((Fabian, “Magic,” 123.)) By allowing the reader of an ethnography to interrogate and evaluate the primary data on which it is based, the archive reveals how ethnographies are composed through the confrontation between the researcher, his or her respondents, and the texts they co-create. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography</i>, 54. One does wonder, however, why Fabian considered a traditionally published monograph necessary to this project, rather than simply including it in the archive. Given that his book annotates the online texts using paragraph numbers that assume a specific online layout, it would seem more effective to have created hyperlinks between the commentary and the primary materials. In this way, the “experiment” seems incomplete.))\r\n\r\nFabian’s instructive experiment notwithstanding, for many researchers the practice of making ethnographic materials available online is fraught. Ethnography requires researchers to occupy a methodological position that mediates and translates between multiple cultural contexts. This positioning leads to a number of difficulties for ethnographers as they attempt to meet their obligations to multiple constituencies—including funders, cultural institutions, and the researcher’s employing university, in addition to the individuals and communities the researcher works with—while negotiating the processes of placing materials in archives and repositories. When working with human subjects, ethical pitfalls abound, and often ethnographers must resolve contradictions between these groups.\r\n\r\nAt a very basic level, policies requiring access to research data may “directly [contradict] some ethnic groups’ cultural traditions concerning secrecy and controlled access to information.” ((David Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates,” <i>Annual Review of Anthropology</i> 41, no. 1 (2012): 472, doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145721. See also G. Isaac, “Whose Idea Was This?: Museums, Replicas, and the Reproduction of Knowledge,” <i>Current Anthropology</i> 52, no. 2 (2011) 211-233.)) For example, an anthropologist might gain access to knowledge that is secret, or restricted for cultural or social reasons. During his fieldwork with the Saramaka, a group in Suriname who descended from escaped African slaves, Richard Price gained knowledge about the “Old-Time People” who experienced the war for liberation from roughly 1680 to 1762. ((Richard Price, <i>First Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 5-6. For additional examples and a discussion of cross-cultural differences in relation to access to knowledge see Nancy J. Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage: CoPAR, Anthropological Records, and the Archival Community,” <i>The American Archivist </i>62 (1999): 285, note 24.)) The Saramaka consider knowledge about this time and these people powerful, dangerous, and restricted. Price struggled with the ethical implications of publishing a book within a different cultural system that uses this knowledge as its primary subject. ((Price, <i>First Time, </i>21-23.)) Price notes that by putting the information in a public document, he potentially “deprives [the] author of control (except perhaps via the language in which [the book] appears) over [his or her] audience.” ((Ibid., 23.)) This problem is compounded exponentially once information is made available online (as Price’s book now is, at least in part, in Google Books) by removing even the physical restrictions of a bound monograph.\r\n\r\nInformation need not be “exotic” to create publishing difficulties for ethnographers. For example, an ethnographer working in a corporate, government, or other institutional setting in the United States might be privy to proprietary or confidential information about a product or service that must be ethically and legally protected. A researcher in environmental engineering explained her process when conducting interviews:\r\n\r\nAnother big concern is confidentiality because I record those conversations, and then there’s kind of an extended period of time in which I allow those who I’ve talked with to redact parts of our conversation if they’ve talked about things they would prefer to remain private. . . I’m talking to several companies about the development and production of their technologies and so there’s some proprietary information that comes up and that’s really the main concern. (5-20-020212)\r\n\r\nIndeed, accidental release of this type of information might put the researcher at as much legal risk as her respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen preparing to preserve ethnographic data, issues of ownership and authorship are also not always straightforward, and it is imperative that researchers communicate and address these potential problems with archivists, data curators, and repository and digital collection managers before depositing ethnographic materials. For example, consent forms for interviews might not clearly state who holds the copyright or who has a license to use the recording or transcripts, potentially leading to confusion over the legal status of these materials and making it more difficult for a researcher to transfer materials to an archives. Intellectual property and copyright are themselves culturally specific concepts, and a legal right to dispose of or deposit materials as a researcher sees fit does not equal an ethical right to do so. The people providing information, the funders, the institution that employs the researcher, and the community in which the researcher works all have a moral interest in the disposition of the data. ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 4; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 142.)) Parry and Mauthner go so far as to say, “[B]ecause the construction of qualitative data is a joint endeavor between respondent and researcher, both parties should retain authorship/ownership rights over the data,” which creates “practical, legal and ethical implications for archiving and re-use.” ((Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 141.))\r\n\r\nSome researchers, including Fabian, argue that since ethnographers and their respondents are joint agents in creating ethnographic materials, both parties should be named to acknowledge their contributions. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.)) However, naming respondents as authors or contributors contradicts an ethnographer’s imperative to protect the confidentiality of their research participants, which is a basic standard required by most Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved research and by professional-ethics statements. While David Zeitlyn observes that “a default assumption that notes will be anonymized conflicts with an individual’s moral right to be recognized as the author of his or her words,” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 470.)) many, if not most, ethnographers would likely be uncomfortable naming their participants in almost any context, but especially in publically accessible online repositories. This is likely to hold true even if a researcher philosophically accepts that his or her authority to determine the level of sensitivity that the data require privileges the researcher’s position vis-à-vis his or her respondents. ((Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 148.))\r\n\r\nMany ethnographers thus understand themselves not so much as owners of their data, but rather as stewards or custodians of data that are produced by a complex set of relationships between researchers and respondents. ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 4-5.)) As the stewards of these data, researchers are often the de facto interpreters of the terms by which data are made available, choosing what and when to publish or deposit materials in repositories or archives. Despite his assertion that correspondents should be named, Fabian notes that he exercises this stewardship by attempting not to publish anything that might be dangerous or damaging to the people with whom he worked—a position that is probably made easier by the fact that the texts he is working with were already 30 years old when he transcribed and posted them on the web. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.)) Many researchers we interviewed adopted a similar “attitude of moral responsibility towards research participants, expressed in the way in which data are handled,” ((Annamaria Carusi and Marina Jirotka, “From Data Archive to Ethical Labyrinth,” <i>Qualitative Research</i> 9, no. 3 (2009): 292.)) citing ethical concerns about appropriate use of the data as well as issues of confidentiality and consent. Even for researchers who support public access to data, these concerns cause them to question funders’ data-sharing requirements. A researcher in education who was preparing to apply for additional funding to create a longitudinal dataset by re-interviewing her previous respondents noted her uncertainty:\r\n\r\nI know that a lot of places when you apply for funding they want eventually for [data] to become public. I haven’t had to deal with it, but I’ve definitely thought about it. . . . I want to make sure to preserve the qualitative data because it’s very important to me . . . so it’s a concern for me personally to save it. . . . [But] once it’s public, or shared between other people, I would like to get help eventually on making the data itself more confidential because they are just interview transcripts which, you know, there are a lot of [confidentiality] issues with that, and that I would have to [make the data itself more confidential] before I shared it. . . . I don’t know if there are limits to the extent to which I can make it public or not. (1-04-100511)\r\n\r\nIn the context of making their data accessible, these confidentiality and consent negotiations are some of the most difficult issues for scholars to resolve before depositing their ethnographic materials in data repositories or archives. These issues are also most effectively addressed as early in a research project as possible, so that researchers can implement the necessary practices and protocols to insure that confidentiality and consent can be assured in the long term prior to data collection. As Charles Humphrey and his colleagues discuss, the integral involvement of archivists and data-curation specialists in the planning stages and throughout qualitative research projects greatly increases the quality of the data products and decreases ethical problems associated with deposition in repositories and archives. ((Charles K. Humphrey, Carole A. Estabrooks, Judy R. Norris, Jane E. Smith, and Kathryn L. Hesketh, “Archivist on Board: Contributions to the Research Team,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000).)) As they point out, this collaboration is beneficial to both researchers and archivists, since good archival preparation practices are often synonymous with good research practices. ((Humphrey et al., “Archivist on Board,” 5.))\r\n\r\nDespite efforts by organizations such as the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR) to foster this type of collaboration ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage.”)) and educate ethnographers in data curation and archival preparation practices, ((CoPAR has released a series of fourteen bulletins outlining specific issues involved in the preservation of anthropological materials and addressed to practicing anthropologists. These bulletins are available at <a href=\"http://copar.org/bulletins.htm\">http://copar.org/bulletins.htm</a>. Unfortunately, since most of these bulletins were written in the late 1990s, many of the technology discussions are out of date. However, the conceptual discussions remain highly relevant.)) it appears that relatively few ethnographers seek out the assistance of archivists or data management specialists until after data collection is completed, unless funding requirements compelled them to do so. Of the ethnographers we interviewed, only two had consulted with data management services prior to the data collection phase of their research, both as a result of the NSF’s requirement that data-management plans be included in new funding proposals. Only one project had a systematic plan for depositing its ethnographic data in an archives, principally because this research was conducted as part of a very large and well-funded research initiative. This project had amassed some 40,000 pages of ethnographic fieldnotes, which were being preserved but not yet been shared publically. The researcher leading this project explained:\r\n\r\nIt’s news to anthropologists that data should be made public. It’s not something that’s in their mindset. In fact they are appalled by it. . . . However, that [ethnographic] data was paid for using a million dollars of federal money and I’m using it with some of my grad students who are essentially doing secondary analysis of fieldnotes. I think that in the long run that data should be made public, and could be, but very carefully. . . . I don’t think that’s a problem . . . my guess is we’re going to get there. . . . A very new area now is “what do you do with electronic fieldnotes?” and “can those be made available for researchers?” If nothing else, I think this archive of fieldnotes . . .in 20 or 30 years could be a great historical source and should be preserved on that basis. So, I would like to see us work out ways of carefully having anthropological and ethnographic data made public too. (5-11-103011)\r\n\r\nIn working out the procedures for sharing these materials, this researcher went on to emphasize the paramount importance of protecting research participants’ confidentiality. Indeed, all of the ethnographers cited confidentiality concerns as one of the foremost issues that they would need to discuss and resolve with an archivist or repository manager before depositing their materials, making it perhaps the most critical area for developing collaborative practices between researchers, data curators, and archivists.\r\n\r\n<b>The Confidentiality Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nThe ethics statements of both the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association require researchers to protect the confidentiality of their respondents (although the AAA statement asserts that expectations of credit should also be addressed). ((ASA, Code of Ethics, 11; AAA, Statement on Ethics (Part 3), 7.)) Protecting research participants’ confidentiality is routinely an explicit promise within social science research, and is an almost universally assumed requirement of IRBs when reviewing research proposals. Setting aside the research participant’s potential moral right to authorship as discussed above, the nature of ethnographic research often renders the promise of confidentiality problematic, if not outright impossible. As Zachary Schrag observes, maintaining the confidentiality of fieldwork sites and research participants discussed in publications has been a perennial problem for social science researchers, as details necessary to make ethnographic and other fieldwork-based writing meaningful often simultaneously make these places and people identifiable, especially to people familiar with the location or topic. ((Zachary M. Schrag, <i>Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 15.)) Increasing confidentiality protections almost always come at the cost of decreasing the amount of contextual information included for the ethnography’s audience, and can effectively prevent data from being deposited in an archives or repository (or sometimes even collected). A sociologist recounted the difficulties he encountered on one project:\r\n\r\nI wanted to do life histories with priests [in central Pennsylvania], and part of the problem was . . . we got into a situation where people might tell me things about their personal lives that are sort of not confidential in the IRB sense but that might be upsetting to their congregations—like I talked to one priest who had been married three times, where if the congregation had known about that they would have been very upset. There’s nothing illegal about it; this person’s not shy about telling that, but it could have been damaging. But I had the sense that . . . if I went around and did these interviews, I didn’t want to destroy the data because I thought they had some historical importance. . . . [The IRB said,] “and when you get done with this study if you’re not going to destroy the data you have to store it in an archive for 50 years, and I checked with [university] archives and they said, “we’re not going to store anything like that.” . . . I wanted to preserve the data, but there was no way to do it. . . . I actually quit the project [because the IRB made it impossible to do]. (2-13-111411)\r\n\r\nWhile protecting research participants’ privacy can be difficult, even in carefully prepared and edited publications, the nature of ethnographic materials makes them especially difficult to confidentially preserve over time. Audio and video recordings present obvious confidentiality problems by capturing a respondents’ voice or image, ((For a discussion of the extreme difficulty of archiving video and audio data anonymously, see Louise Corti, Annette Day, and Gill Backhouse, “Confidentiality and Informed Consent: Issues for Consideration in the Preservation of and Provision of Access to Qualitative Data Archives,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 4.4c, <a href=\"http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024\">http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024</a>.)) but even interview transcripts can be problematic. A common practice in archiving ethnographic materials is to make attempts to remove potentially identifying information from archived transcripts. However, even these “anonymized” transcripts often still contain personal details that allow the possible identification of research participants. For example, in the interviews conducted for this study, participants regularly discussed their discipline and research interests. Coupled with the names of the universities where the research was conducted—which are contained in all of our research proposals and publications—this seemingly innocuous information would probably render any of our participants identifiable with a simple web search if the full interview transcripts were released. This might not seem like a significant risk for scholars describing projects that they routinely discuss publically, but depending on the other details contained in the transcript it might also be embarrassing or potentially damaging (for example, comments about university administrators, other colleagues, etc.). As is often the case with qualitative research, removing these contextual details would diminish, if not destroy, the usefulness of these data to future researchers—the ostensible audience for these materials. Unfortunately, each piece of contextual detail retained about a research participant to aid in data interpretation simultaneously creates more potential for identification.\r\n\r\nGiven technological advances, removing all conceivably identifying details might still be insufficient to guarantee that transcripts are rendered anonymous. In fact, anonymizing transcripts may soon no longer be technically possible. Arvind Narayana and his colleagues have demonstrated that it is possible to accurately identify anonymous online authors up to 20 percent of the time based on writing style alone, given a sufficient corpus of example texts. ((A. Narayanan, H. Paskov, N. Z. Gong, J. Bethencourt, E. Stefanov, E. C. R. Shin, and D. Song, “On the Feasibility of Internet-scale Author Identification,” Security and Privacy (SP), 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (May 20-23, 2012): 301, <a href=\"http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420\">http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420</a>.)) As more and more content moves online, one can only assume that these techniques will become more robust, so that identifying a participant from the vocabulary or speech patterns in a transcript may eventually become a matter of applying the correct software. These realities set up even the most well-intentioned researchers to fail to meet the obligations required by IRBs and the agreements made with their respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen archiving ethnographic materials, confidentiality can also be equally important for protecting the researcher. This is especially true for the archiving of fieldnotes, which are profoundly personal for many ethnographic researchers. Researchers are often quite ambivalent about these data, regularly describing feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, or embarrassment about their work and what it reveals about them as scholars. ((Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” 10-12.)) When talking about her data collection process, an anthropologist in our study observed:\r\n\r\nThat’s the thing with fieldnotes, you never show them to anyone . . . as long as it works for you . . . it’s not like you have to show it to someone else and have them make sense of it, which is kind of a shame because it would be nice to have data in formats where people could, you know, sort of, archive that information. (2-16-120211)\r\n\r\nIn his study of fieldnote practices, Jean Jackson observes, “Many respondents point out that the highly personal nature of fieldnotes influences the extent of one’s willingness to share them: ‘Fieldnotes can reveal how worthless your work was, the lacunae, your linguistic incompetence, your not being made a blood brother, your childish temper.’” ((Ibid., 22.)) Anthropologist Simon Ottenberg describes his fieldnotes similarly, “[W]hen I was younger, I would have felt uncomfortable at the thought of someone else using my notes, whether I was alive or dead—they are so much a private thing, so much an aspect of personal field experience, so much a private language, so much part of my ego, my childhood [as an anthropologist], and my personal maturity.” ((Simon Ottenberg, “Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1990), 153.)) This attachment and ambivalence may make researchers reluctant to turn over control of their notes to an archives—especially one that has the purpose of making materials available publically on the internet. This professional practice not only makes it very difficult to substantiate or verify ethnographers’ data, suggesting a need for ethnographers to develop more proactive and sensitive data-sharing procedures, but also creates a situation where ethnographic materials are saved, but with inadequate plans for preservation. Zeitlyn notes, “Paradoxically most anthropologists want neither to destroy their field material nor archive it.” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.)) So, too, with our study: almost no one had made plans for their data beyond the short term, let alone the final dispensation of their materials at the end of their career or after their death.\r\n\r\nWhile archivists regularly assure scholars that the papers of “ordinary” or not-famous researchers are sometimes the most valuable, ((Catherine Fowler, \"Ethical Considerations,\" in Silverman and Parezo, <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, 64-65; Robert Leopold, “The Second Life of Ethnographic Fieldnotes,” <i>Ateliers d\'anthropologie</i> 32 (2008): 4.)) researchers themselves are often unconvinced. Many of our respondents had trouble imagining the potential audience for their data and primary materials, although one Environmental Studies researcher shared data on graffiti images she collected during fieldwork following a particular ethnic conflict event. The data were not directly related to her primary research questions, but another scholar used them in a Master’s thesis (and possibly in a future dissertation). Nevertheless, doubts about future usefulness contribute to researchers’ reluctance to undertake sometimes arduous and time-consuming data preservation and annotation tasks, such as redacting confidential information, and to neglect advance planning for the eventual archiving of their materials, such as assuring adequate consent procedures. This is potentially a key area of advocacy for data curators and archivists, who are well positioned to both educate researchers in the importance of preserving primary data for future generations of researchers, even if its immediate value is not apparent, and to provide tools such as cross-indexes and finding aids that make these data more useful and comparable. ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 301-305. See also Louise Corti, “Progress and Problems of Preserving and Providing Access to Qualitative Data for Social Research—The International Picture of an Emerging Culture,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 10.1.))\r\n\r\n<b>The Consent Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nBoth IRBs and disciplinary societies’ ethics statements emphasize the importance and necessity of obtaining informed consent from research participants. Given the possibility of archiving materials indefinitely, and especially for web publication, obtaining fully informed consent may be a futile endeavor. Libby Bishop points out that because researchers cannot adequately speculate on all the uses in which data might be employed, explicit consent is “logically impossible.” ((Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.)) However, Bishop also observes that this should not paralyze researchers from depositing their materials in archives, since consent for the primary research activity is in itself partial and no researcher can fully explain all information about any research project. ((Ibid., 264.)) Zeitlyn makes this point in another way, noting that cultural differences may also limit the ability of a researcher to obtain consent in a way that is recognizable to IRBs: “Once material is archived, it may be consulted by unknown others who might use it in novel ways. . . . Can a researcher obtain meaningful prior informed consent if the uses to which the material might be put in the future cannot be explained?” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471; see also Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 147.))\r\n\r\nWhile Bishop suggests responding to this problem by providing examples of how archived research might be reused or by obtaining open-ended consent, ((Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.)) others suggest a more comprehensive approach that understands consent as a process rather than a one-time event. ((Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 146; AAA, Code of Ethics, III.A.4.)) This approach presents significant difficulties when applied to the lifecycle of an entire ethnographic research project, especially once data and other fieldwork materials are deposited in an archives for the purpose of long-term access and preservation. If appropriate consent for archiving is not obtained at the outset of a project, or is sought when new uses are discovered for materials, contacting participants to authorize this usage can be extremely difficult and costly for ethnographers, if not outright impossible. Furthermore, a consent model that requires re-contacting participants also requires confidentiality or anonymization procedures to be reversible, meaning that the researcher must retain records that can link individuals to the materials about them. Retaining contact information or other identifying records is not best practice for assuring participant confidentiality, and in the case of truly sensitive research, doing so unnecessarily maintains records that could be subject to subpoena or otherwise compromised. For example, in 2012 the US Department of Justice issued a subpoena in connection with a murder investigation on behalf of Great Britain for access to oral history interviews conducted with Irish Republican Army and Loyalist paramilitary members as part of “The Belfast Project,” archived at Boston College’s Burns Library. While the project’s confidentiality agreement promised interviewees that these materials would be embargoed until their death, this guarantee was subject to exceptions required by American law; a point that may have been unclear to the research participants. Both Boston College and the researchers are presently contesting the subpoenas, but the initial rulings by a federal district court and the First Circuit Court of Appeals have found that the subpoenas are legal. ((The Society of American Archivists Oral History Section maintains a webpage summarizing the case and providing links to relevant documents at <a href=\"http://www2.archivists.org/groups/oral-history-section/the-belfast-case-information-for-saa-members\">http://www2.archivists.org/groups/oral-history-section/the-belfast-case-information-for-saa-members</a>.)) As this case demonstrates, whenever identifying information exists, there is a possibility that its disclosure can be compelled. From the point of view of research-participant confidentiality, it is therefore preferable to destroy materials that enable identification or re-contact as soon as possible after research is complete.\r\n\r\nSince anonymization is an all-or-nothing decision that must be irreversible, even for the researcher, if it is to be effective, ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.)) in order to make consent an ongoing process, one must also accept that the data cannot be made fully anonymous. The question then becomes how researchers can meaningfully extend consent decisions to include archives without rendering them unmanageable for their administrators or unnecessarily diminishing their analytical value. ((See Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294-95.)) Balancing the need to maintain appropriate levels of confidentiality with the administrative costs is a critical area for collaboration between researchers, archivists, and data specialists. Fully anonymizing datasets is probably neither necessary, nor cost effective, for relatively low-risk materials, ((See Corti, Day, and Backhouse,\" Confidentiality and Informed Consent,\" 4.4, on the expense of creating anonymized archives.)) but both the researcher and the archivists must fully understand the potential risk scenarios before these decisions can be made, particularly in an environment where privacy protections are an increasing concern for research participants. While discussing the challenges he faces in complying with funder’s public access requirements, a sociologist observed:\r\n\r\nClearly the biggest problem is the problem of protection of privacy. The concern of privacy has been ramped up tremendously over the last 10 or 15 years, and the process of getting permission to analyze data can be difficult, but a trend in social science data is to include more and more information that\'s sensitive. . . . I think the field is trying to now establish appropriate levels of protection for particular kinds of data and is trying to balance this problem of privacy with public access. And it is a challenge and it’s going to require some new modes of doing things. (5-11-103111)\r\n\r\nDeveloping these modes of work and processes of consent requires not only the participation of researchers and scholarly societies, but also intensive cooperation with data management specialists, technologists, and archivists. ((ICPSR’s “Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving Phase 5: Preparing Data for Sharing” provides a model for these processes. See <a href=\"http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html\">http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html</a>.))\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusions and Recommendations</b>\r\n\r\nResearchers and archivists alike face tremendous challenges in effectively preserving ethnographic research data and providing meaningful access for researchers and other stakeholders while simultaneously protecting sensitive data. In order to be effective, data sharing, confidentiality, and consent imperatives all require the active participation and investment of researchers themselves. Decisions about access, issues of authorship attribution, adequate consent, and the level of confidentially required cannot be made without the input of someone who is deeply knowledgeable about the contexts in which the research took place. However, as we have seen, none of these decision processes necessarily end at the moment when the materials are deposited in an archives or repository, and a researcher’s ethical obligation to his or her research participants does not end once he or she has transferred responsibility for their preservation. This sense of responsibility makes many researchers reluctant to relinquish control over their ethnographic materials, lest changing political, social, or cultural conditions necessitates a more restrictive approach to data access than was initially required.\r\n\r\nFor example, an Environmental Studies researcher noted that currently her data does not present much risk to her respondents:\r\n\r\nMost of the data I’ve collected really have limited privacy issues or any kind of harm that could come to respondents. There are some topics that I’ve looked at, that depending on, when—you know, timeliness—at what point these were published, that identifying information could be problematic. In [central Asian country] it’s a lot easier—at least currently—the situation for my topics isn’t dangerous. That doesn’t mean it can’t be in the future and if I extended the research to neighboring countries then I would probably have some more serious confidentiality issues. (2-12-111011)\r\n\r\nIf the political situation for her respondents changed, however, this researcher might be ethically obligated to change the access conditions of any materials that she had archived, even if her consent procedures had addressed this eventuality. Repositories for ethnographic materials must be careful to include procedures to respond to these types of situations in their donor agreements, and researchers should discuss the unique qualities of ethnographic materials prior to their deposit. As Parezo points out, “it is unethical and unreasonable to expect the archival community to guess which fieldnotes contain sensitive information and what are reasonable use restrictions.” ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 285.))\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, preparing materials for deposit into an archives is often a low priority for ethnographers for a variety of reasons, and the archiving of ethnographic data is further hindered by a persistent lack of training. While comprehensive historical review is beyond the scope of this article, Silverman already noted the problem of a lack of formal training in data collection and management practices among anthropologists almost 20 years ago, ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 6.)) before the rise of many of the complications that the expansion of digital data collection created. Almost none of the scholars we interviewed reported that data curation or stewardship training was part of their graduate curriculum, and data management was usually only addressed narrowly in relation to methodological approaches and problems. The ethical and practical difficulties involved in managing and preserving large amounts of research data were rarely addressed, with most researchers acquiring the skills they needed via trial and error. ((Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.)) None of the scholars interviewed during this study expressed satisfaction with their level of expertise in data management, and few had access to individuals who could provide knowledgeable guidance. While it would be preferable for graduate curricula to include this type of training, it seems unlikely that this change will occur in the near term. It is, therefore, likely that archivists and data specialists will need to provide this training, preferably by developing relationships with ethnographic researchers as early as possible in the research process.\r\n\r\nThe lack of confidence in their data-management training compounds researchers’ apprehension about the ethical issues contained in their data. Researchers are naturally—and rightfully—conservative about the potential risks in sharing data, especially if they are not convinced they can protect their respondents’ confidentiality, or that they have obtained appropriate consent—issues that the difficulties of cross-cultural communication make more complex. Without such assurances that these ethical imperatives can be addressed, many researchers are unlikely to invest in archiving their materials. “In many cases, their desire to avoid the ethical risks of inappropriate data release may outweigh the costs of potential data loss.” ((Ibid., 17.))\r\n\r\nBecause of these interrelated concerns, it is critical that the archival and data curation systems available to ethnographic researchers have multiple and fine-grained levels of access and privacy controls. Tools must be developed that can appropriately manage confidential data and that allow researchers, working in conjunction with their respondents, to exercise control over their data, administer who has access to it, and account for culturally specific restrictions on data use. ((Ibid., 17-18.)) One example of a system attempting to address these requirements is the Murkutu content management system (<a href=\"http://www.mukurtu.org/\">http://www.mukurtu.org/</a>), which makes cultural protocols a fundamental part of access to materials. This allows for the easy creation of fine-grained and culturally appropriate user groups with specifically defined usage rights, and it is being developed in cooperation with indigenous communities. ((A list of community groups and organizations participating in the Mukurtu project is available at <a href=\"http://www.mukurtu.org/community.html\">http://www.mukurtu.org/community.html</a>.))\r\n\r\nBecause the nature of ethnographic materials makes them potentially subject to ongoing and evolving dilemmas of confidentiality and consent, archivists and data managers should understand that these materials may require ongoing curation, preferably through processes and procedures that incorporate researchers in a collaborative and meaningful way. Although many researchers would welcome the ability to more easily share their data, particularly in collaborative projects and in response to data-sharing requirements, they are almost universally resistant to any arrangement in which they would relinquish control over access to the data. As one anthropologist described:\r\n\r\nPeople don’t hesitate, at all, to share data with collaborators that they trust. … If you provide a mechanism for collaboration, even if it’s just Google Docs or something, you know, people share data easily and freely. It’s when it becomes an anonymous process that they seem to get balky. (1-02-100511)\r\n\r\nThe goal of making materials publically available online, then, will require archival systems and processes that are cognizant of the complex social relationships embedded within ethnographic materials, not only between the researcher and his or her respondents, but also between and among the many stakeholders in ethnographic data. The development of additional policies, ethical guidelines, and best practices by disciplinary organizations, funding agencies, universities, and cultural institutions could further aid researchers and archivists in navigating the ethical dilemmas contained in the archival process.\r\n\r\nBecause much ethnographic data is collected by individuals in relatively small and often idiosyncratic datasets, it is especially vulnerable to loss due to benign neglect or lack or resources, even if the data are historically unique. A sociologist described one such vulnerable dataset:\r\n\r\nWe did life histories of 45 people in a [church] congregation in [central Pennsylvania town]. . . . It’s probably the only body of material on a single congregation of that depth and complexity that exists, and I’m just too lazy to have figured out what to do with it and write it up and everything, but you could imagine somewhere somebody who wants to do research on congregations would find this incredibly valuable. But what’s going to happen to it [in the long term]? And what’s going to happen to it is, the copies I have will end up in a trash can, and my computer hard drive will eventually crash or get outmoded or get erased, and that’ll be the end of it [if there isn’t a place to archive it]. (2-13-111411)\r\n\r\nIn order to prevent these losses, data management specialists and archivists must specifically curate these materials. They must also build relationships with ethnographers to resolve the unique ethical dilemmas these data present and the uneasy tensions between researchers’ desire to share data publically and obligations to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study.\r\n\r\nFinally, despite the acknowledged importance and value of archival materials to the disciplines and future researchers, academic rewards systems offer very little payoff for the work that goes into making ethnographic materials available, and ethnographic researchers are often under-resourced in the funding, time, and personnel support needed for preparing materials for archiving. ((The NSF’s recent decision to list datasets as one of the research products to be included in the section of its grant proposals where researchers describe their qualifications does suggest, however, that the current rewards system may gradually be changing (see <a href=\"http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp\">http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp</a>).)) Archivists must therefore work to make archival systems and the development of archival processes and policies as straightforward for researchers as possible, ideally assisting in integrating the development of metadata and other secondary materials (for example, codebooks, explanatory materials, finding aids, and ontologies) necessary to archiving and ensuring the long-term usefulness of primary data as early in the research process as possible. Likewise, funding agencies should improve funding for long-term data management, preservation, and curatorial services, either directly or via guidelines to institutions for recouping indirect costs, especially when the grant mandates archiving or public data accessibility. By providing these supports, archivists and funders would greatly assist researchers in responding to the imperatives of providing access to data and assuring the confidentiality and consent of their respondents, as well as resolving the ethical dilemmas contained in their data, thereby helping assure the preservation of irreplaceable ethnographic information.','Curating the Ethnographic Moment','','inherit','open','open','','4698-revision-16','','','2013-06-17 23:58:47','2013-06-17 23:58:47','',4698,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4698-revision-16/',0,'revision','',0),(4720,3,'2013-06-18 00:03:49','2013-06-18 00:03:49','<b>Introduction</b>\r\n\r\nBy vastly increasing the volume and types of data that field researchers can collect, digital technologies have reshaped ethnographers’ relationship with their accumulated research data and materials. Whereas paper-based fieldnotes and other physical ethnographic records are often deposited in repositories and made accessible only after a scholar’s death, the emergence of born-digital materials has created and enhanced possibilities for rapidly sharing data, not only with other researchers but also with research subjects and the public at large via online repositories. While many researchers support the principal of public access to research data, making this data available online can compound the ethical dilemmas ethnographers face. Ethnographers often find themselves torn between contradictory imperatives to share data publically and to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study. ((L. Jahnke, A. Asher, and S.D.C. Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>, CLIR Publication #154 (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2012).))\r\n\r\nUnlike experimental data, ethnographic data, by definition, are not reproducible. ((See Sydel Silverman, “Introduction,” in <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, ed. Sydel Silverman and Nancy J. Parezo (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1995), 1.)) Ethnographic fieldwork is inextricably linked to a particular time, place, and society, making the primary data of ethnographers unique and unrecoverable. For this reason, today’s ethnographic fieldnotes are particularly important to preserve as tomorrow’s historical records; they document observations of places and cultures that—because they are in a constant state of change—will never exist in the same configuration again. Since ethnographic fieldnotes provide the empirical basis for researchers’ public authority, it would likewise seem logical for fieldnotes and other ethnographic materials to be made available for verification purposes in online repositories as soon as possible after the publication of research reports, articles, or monographs.\r\n\r\nHowever, several characteristics of ethnographic materials cause them to be particularly difficult to make publically accessible. First, many ethnographic researchers are reluctant to share their data for personal reasons. Ethnographic fieldnotes are intensely personal documents for many researchers, who often view them as extremely valuable for their own work, but doubt that they would be useful to other researchers without the accompanying contexts and experiences in which the materials were collected. Secondly, ethnographic materials also routinely contain private, confidential, or culturally sensitive information about both research subjects and the researcher, which often requires time-consuming or costly procedures to redact, and may limit or prevent public dissemination and secondary analyses of the data. Finally, ethnographic materials are regularly collected in contexts with varying or conflicting cultural standards for consent and data use, raising ethical questions about the efficacy of archiving these materials. For these reasons, balancing the multiple imperatives of data sharing, informed consent, and confidentiality for research participants is a fundamental issue for ethnographers preparing to deposit their materials in an archives, and the ethics surrounding these decisions was one of the most common and recurring themes in the interviews conducted for the study we present here.\r\n\r\nUsing data gathered during the 2011-2012 academic year in a qualitative study of researchers’ data management and curation practices, ((This study was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and managed by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). See Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.)) this article examines the practical and ethical dilemmas ethnographers face as they work with diverse research materials across varying, and sometimes conflicting, cultural standards for consent and data use. By emphasizing the everyday practices of researchers, this study sought to gain a holistic understanding of the workflows involved in the creation, management, and preservation of research data in order to better comprehend researchers’ unmet needs within data curation processes. Twenty-three researchers from varying ranks working in a variety of social science disciplines at five universities ((Penn State University, Lehigh University, Bucknell University, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Pennsylvania.)) participated in interviews for this study (see Table 1), which focused on how researchers collect and analyze data, how they manage and preserve these data, and what training they have had in data-curation practices.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4704\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"273\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4704\" alt=\"Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants.  *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE-273x300.jpg\" width=\"273\" height=\"300\" /></a> Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants. *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.[/caption]\r\n\r\nAlthough scholars across many disciplines were grappling with the ethical and philosophical problems of data sharing—often in the absence of coherent policies for data archiving and release from funding agencies, professional organizations, or their employing institutions—this article will focus on the experiences of nine of these researchers who conducted ethnography as part of their data collection. Because ethnographic research involves a complex social interplay between researchers and respondents, often from differing cultural contexts, the management of these data presents unique difficulties for researchers who usually have little or no training in preservation, curation, or data-stewardship strategies. This article will examine how researchers navigate these difficulties when dealing with the two principal types of ethnographic data: fieldnotes—the diverse array of notes, writings, and other materials upon which researchers base their ethnographies ((Jean E. Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1.))—and the research artifacts, such as transcripts and audio or video recordings, produced from more formal, direct interactions with respondents.\r\n\r\n<b>The Data Sharing Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nFunding agencies—especially agencies administering public funds—are increasingly requiring qualitative research data to be made publically available. Since 1995, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)—a major source of funding for qualitative research in the United Kingdom—has required its awardees to archive their data as a condition of funding. ((See O. Parry and N. S. Mauthner, “Whose Data Are They Anyway?” <i>Sociology</i> 38, no. 1 (2004): 140-41.)) Similarly, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other US funding agencies (e.g. National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities) have begun to require formal data-management plans detailing how researchers will meet data-sharing expectations. Our assumption is that this trend will continue as both public and private funders seek maximum returns on their investment in research. While not always explicitly required, the goal of many of these policies is for research data to be deposited in an appropriate repository with online access for both other researchers and the public. For ethnographers, who are often accustomed to retaining exclusive rights over their fieldnotes and other materials, this can represent an uncomfortable shift in research practice, even when these repositories take into account the particular confidentiality and consent demands inherent to ethnographic research (discussed further below) and implement appropriate safeguards such as embargoing or redacting sensitive materials.\r\n\r\nIn principal, the ethnographic researchers we interviewed for this study saw data preservation and sharing as positive values, even if they were not sure about how to preserve and share data or who would potentially use the materials. When asked about what parts of her research data she would like to preserve, one anthropologist explained:\r\n\r\n<blockquote>That’s the thing—If you keep anything long enough it becomes interesting. . . . For myself . . . I would love to archive everything and maybe put some kind of time stamp on personal information where it can’t be released for some amount of time. It’s so hard to know what people in the future would be interested in. . . . I try to keep data in such a way that hopefully it would be comprehensible to someone else if they were willing to work through my crazy software. . . . If I had somebody’s fieldnotes from 100 years ago from my field site, I’d be totally fascinated by that, so you never know what people are going to be interested in. (2-16-120211) ((The number in parentheses is the participant identification number; please refer to Table 1.))</blockquote>\r\n\r\nThe scholarly societies to which many of these researchers belong also broadly support data sharing and potential reuse. The most recent 2012 revision on the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) ethics statement explicitly states that it is the obligation of the researcher to preserve records and make results accessible, “Anthropologists have an ethical responsibility for ensuring the integrity, preservation, and protection of their work” and, the “results of anthropological research should be disseminated in a timely fashion” provided it is not “at the expense of protecting confidentiality.” ((American Anthropological Association (AAA), <i>Statement on Ethics: Principals of Professional Responsibility</i>, 2012, <a href=\"http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf\">http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf</a>.)) The previous 1998 version also addressed data access and preservation, but not as systematically or forcefully. ((This version was slightly revised in 2009 to make minor changes to some of the statement’s language. Since this revision did not alter the structure or main points of the statement, we continue to refer the 1998 version (as does the AAA’s ethics website). American Anthropological Association, Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, Statement, 1998, B.4-5, C1.)) Likewise, the American Sociological Association sets similar expectations in the data sharing section of its Code of Ethics. ((American Sociological Association, Code of Ethics, 1999, 13.05.))\r\n\r\nThe benefits of data archiving and sharing for scholarly disciplines and the advancement of knowledge are straightforward: preserved materials can be subjected to secondary analysis, unnecessary duplication of research can be minimized, historical records can be maintained, and, importantly, scholars can independently evaluate the validity of published results by consulting the primary data. ((Libby Bishop, “Ethical Sharing and Reuse of Qualitative Data,” <i>Australian Journal of Social Issues</i> 44, no. 3 (2009): 266.)) Furthermore, online repositories might enable new forms of scholarship and writing. For the first time, materials preserved and made accessible online have made it feasible to make publically available the corpus of primary texts that form the basis of support for ethnographic argumentation. While a non-digitized, paper-based collection could also serve this purpose, it is unlikely that more than a handful of interested readers of a particular ethnography would physically travel to the repository to examine the documents. Repositories that make resources available online fundamentally change this dynamic. In <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive, </i>Johannes Fabian explores these possibilities by conducting what he describes as an experiment with “writing ethnography ‘in the presence of texts’” located in a publically accessible online repository. ((Johannes Fabian, <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive</i> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), vii.)) Fabian terms this genre of writing “commentary,” a text-centered form of ethnography that assumes his reader can simultaneously consult a primary text for her or himself via an online archive. ((Ibid., 9-13.))\r\n\r\nThe text Fabian utilizes is a conversation he and Kahenga Mukonkwa Michel had about a ceremony Kahenga conducted at Fabian’s home in Zaire in 1974. ((Ibid., 3.)) The transcription, translation, and an audio excerpt of the discussion are now housed in the Archives of Popular Swahili on the website of the Language and Popular Culture in Africa project. ((Johannes. Fabian, “‘Magic and Modernity’: A Conversation with a Herbalist and Practitioner of Magic,” trans. Johannes Fabian, <i>Archives of Popular Swahili</i> 7 (2005), <a href=\"http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction\">http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction</a>.)) Fabian argues that the repository of documents serves an important epistemological purpose by “mediat[ing] between . . . events, the presentation of evidence, and our aims and claims to produce anthropological knowledge.” ((Fabian, “Magic,” 123.)) By allowing the reader of an ethnography to interrogate and evaluate the primary data on which it is based, the archive reveals how ethnographies are composed through the confrontation between the researcher, his or her respondents, and the texts they co-create. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography</i>, 54. One does wonder, however, why Fabian considered a traditionally published monograph necessary to this project, rather than simply including it in the archive. Given that his book annotates the online texts using paragraph numbers that assume a specific online layout, it would seem more effective to have created hyperlinks between the commentary and the primary materials. In this way, the “experiment” seems incomplete.))\r\n\r\nFabian’s instructive experiment notwithstanding, for many researchers the practice of making ethnographic materials available online is fraught. Ethnography requires researchers to occupy a methodological position that mediates and translates between multiple cultural contexts. This positioning leads to a number of difficulties for ethnographers as they attempt to meet their obligations to multiple constituencies—including funders, cultural institutions, and the researcher’s employing university, in addition to the individuals and communities the researcher works with—while negotiating the processes of placing materials in archives and repositories. When working with human subjects, ethical pitfalls abound, and often ethnographers must resolve contradictions between these groups.\r\n\r\nAt a very basic level, policies requiring access to research data may “directly [contradict] some ethnic groups’ cultural traditions concerning secrecy and controlled access to information.” ((David Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates,” <i>Annual Review of Anthropology</i> 41, no. 1 (2012): 472, doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145721. See also G. Isaac, “Whose Idea Was This?: Museums, Replicas, and the Reproduction of Knowledge,” <i>Current Anthropology</i> 52, no. 2 (2011) 211-233.)) For example, an anthropologist might gain access to knowledge that is secret, or restricted for cultural or social reasons. During his fieldwork with the Saramaka, a group in Suriname who descended from escaped African slaves, Richard Price gained knowledge about the “Old-Time People” who experienced the war for liberation from roughly 1680 to 1762. ((Richard Price, <i>First Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 5-6. For additional examples and a discussion of cross-cultural differences in relation to access to knowledge see Nancy J. Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage: CoPAR, Anthropological Records, and the Archival Community,” <i>The American Archivist </i>62 (1999): 285, note 24.)) The Saramaka consider knowledge about this time and these people powerful, dangerous, and restricted. Price struggled with the ethical implications of publishing a book within a different cultural system that uses this knowledge as its primary subject. ((Price, <i>First Time, </i>21-23.)) Price notes that by putting the information in a public document, he potentially “deprives [the] author of control (except perhaps via the language in which [the book] appears) over [his or her] audience.” ((Ibid., 23.)) This problem is compounded exponentially once information is made available online (as Price’s book now is, at least in part, in Google Books) by removing even the physical restrictions of a bound monograph.\r\n\r\nInformation need not be “exotic” to create publishing difficulties for ethnographers. For example, an ethnographer working in a corporate, government, or other institutional setting in the United States might be privy to proprietary or confidential information about a product or service that must be ethically and legally protected. A researcher in environmental engineering explained her process when conducting interviews:\r\n\r\n<blockquote>Another big concern is confidentiality because I record those conversations, and then there’s kind of an extended period of time in which I allow those who I’ve talked with to redact parts of our conversation if they’ve talked about things they would prefer to remain private. . . I’m talking to several companies about the development and production of their technologies and so there’s some proprietary information that comes up and that’s really the main concern. (5-20-020212)</blockquote>\r\n\r\nIndeed, accidental release of this type of information might put the researcher at as much legal risk as her respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen preparing to preserve ethnographic data, issues of ownership and authorship are also not always straightforward, and it is imperative that researchers communicate and address these potential problems with archivists, data curators, and repository and digital collection managers before depositing ethnographic materials. For example, consent forms for interviews might not clearly state who holds the copyright or who has a license to use the recording or transcripts, potentially leading to confusion over the legal status of these materials and making it more difficult for a researcher to transfer materials to an archives. Intellectual property and copyright are themselves culturally specific concepts, and a legal right to dispose of or deposit materials as a researcher sees fit does not equal an ethical right to do so. The people providing information, the funders, the institution that employs the researcher, and the community in which the researcher works all have a moral interest in the disposition of the data. ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 4; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 142.)) Parry and Mauthner go so far as to say, “[B]ecause the construction of qualitative data is a joint endeavor between respondent and researcher, both parties should retain authorship/ownership rights over the data,” which creates “practical, legal and ethical implications for archiving and re-use.” ((Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 141.))\r\n\r\nSome researchers, including Fabian, argue that since ethnographers and their respondents are joint agents in creating ethnographic materials, both parties should be named to acknowledge their contributions. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.)) However, naming respondents as authors or contributors contradicts an ethnographer’s imperative to protect the confidentiality of their research participants, which is a basic standard required by most Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved research and by professional-ethics statements. While David Zeitlyn observes that “a default assumption that notes will be anonymized conflicts with an individual’s moral right to be recognized as the author of his or her words,” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 470.)) many, if not most, ethnographers would likely be uncomfortable naming their participants in almost any context, but especially in publically accessible online repositories. This is likely to hold true even if a researcher philosophically accepts that his or her authority to determine the level of sensitivity that the data require privileges the researcher’s position vis-à-vis his or her respondents. ((Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 148.))\r\n\r\nMany ethnographers thus understand themselves not so much as owners of their data, but rather as stewards or custodians of data that are produced by a complex set of relationships between researchers and respondents. ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 4-5.)) As the stewards of these data, researchers are often the de facto interpreters of the terms by which data are made available, choosing what and when to publish or deposit materials in repositories or archives. Despite his assertion that correspondents should be named, Fabian notes that he exercises this stewardship by attempting not to publish anything that might be dangerous or damaging to the people with whom he worked—a position that is probably made easier by the fact that the texts he is working with were already 30 years old when he transcribed and posted them on the web. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.)) Many researchers we interviewed adopted a similar “attitude of moral responsibility towards research participants, expressed in the way in which data are handled,” ((Annamaria Carusi and Marina Jirotka, “From Data Archive to Ethical Labyrinth,” <i>Qualitative Research</i> 9, no. 3 (2009): 292.)) citing ethical concerns about appropriate use of the data as well as issues of confidentiality and consent. Even for researchers who support public access to data, these concerns cause them to question funders’ data-sharing requirements. A researcher in education who was preparing to apply for additional funding to create a longitudinal dataset by re-interviewing her previous respondents noted her uncertainty:\r\n\r\n<blockquote>I know that a lot of places when you apply for funding they want eventually for [data] to become public. I haven’t had to deal with it, but I’ve definitely thought about it. . . . I want to make sure to preserve the qualitative data because it’s very important to me . . . so it’s a concern for me personally to save it. . . . [But] once it’s public, or shared between other people, I would like to get help eventually on making the data itself more confidential because they are just interview transcripts which, you know, there are a lot of [confidentiality] issues with that, and that I would have to [make the data itself more confidential] before I shared it. . . . I don’t know if there are limits to the extent to which I can make it public or not. (1-04-100511)</blockquote>\r\n\r\nIn the context of making their data accessible, these confidentiality and consent negotiations are some of the most difficult issues for scholars to resolve before depositing their ethnographic materials in data repositories or archives. These issues are also most effectively addressed as early in a research project as possible, so that researchers can implement the necessary practices and protocols to insure that confidentiality and consent can be assured in the long term prior to data collection. As Charles Humphrey and his colleagues discuss, the integral involvement of archivists and data-curation specialists in the planning stages and throughout qualitative research projects greatly increases the quality of the data products and decreases ethical problems associated with deposition in repositories and archives. ((Charles K. Humphrey, Carole A. Estabrooks, Judy R. Norris, Jane E. Smith, and Kathryn L. Hesketh, “Archivist on Board: Contributions to the Research Team,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000).)) As they point out, this collaboration is beneficial to both researchers and archivists, since good archival preparation practices are often synonymous with good research practices. ((Humphrey et al., “Archivist on Board,” 5.))\r\n\r\nDespite efforts by organizations such as the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR) to foster this type of collaboration ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage.”)) and educate ethnographers in data curation and archival preparation practices, ((CoPAR has released a series of fourteen bulletins outlining specific issues involved in the preservation of anthropological materials and addressed to practicing anthropologists. These bulletins are available at <a href=\"http://copar.org/bulletins.htm\">http://copar.org/bulletins.htm</a>. Unfortunately, since most of these bulletins were written in the late 1990s, many of the technology discussions are out of date. However, the conceptual discussions remain highly relevant.)) it appears that relatively few ethnographers seek out the assistance of archivists or data management specialists until after data collection is completed, unless funding requirements compelled them to do so. Of the ethnographers we interviewed, only two had consulted with data management services prior to the data collection phase of their research, both as a result of the NSF’s requirement that data-management plans be included in new funding proposals. Only one project had a systematic plan for depositing its ethnographic data in an archives, principally because this research was conducted as part of a very large and well-funded research initiative. This project had amassed some 40,000 pages of ethnographic fieldnotes, which were being preserved but not yet been shared publically. The researcher leading this project explained:\r\n\r\n<blockquote>It’s news to anthropologists that data should be made public. It’s not something that’s in their mindset. In fact they are appalled by it. . . . However, that [ethnographic] data was paid for using a million dollars of federal money and I’m using it with some of my grad students who are essentially doing secondary analysis of fieldnotes. I think that in the long run that data should be made public, and could be, but very carefully. . . . I don’t think that’s a problem . . . my guess is we’re going to get there. . . . A very new area now is “what do you do with electronic fieldnotes?” and “can those be made available for researchers?” If nothing else, I think this archive of fieldnotes . . .in 20 or 30 years could be a great historical source and should be preserved on that basis. So, I would like to see us work out ways of carefully having anthropological and ethnographic data made public too. (5-11-103011)</blockquote>\r\n\r\nIn working out the procedures for sharing these materials, this researcher went on to emphasize the paramount importance of protecting research participants’ confidentiality. Indeed, all of the ethnographers cited confidentiality concerns as one of the foremost issues that they would need to discuss and resolve with an archivist or repository manager before depositing their materials, making it perhaps the most critical area for developing collaborative practices between researchers, data curators, and archivists.\r\n\r\n<b>The Confidentiality Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nThe ethics statements of both the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association require researchers to protect the confidentiality of their respondents (although the AAA statement asserts that expectations of credit should also be addressed). ((ASA, Code of Ethics, 11; AAA, Statement on Ethics (Part 3), 7.)) Protecting research participants’ confidentiality is routinely an explicit promise within social science research, and is an almost universally assumed requirement of IRBs when reviewing research proposals. Setting aside the research participant’s potential moral right to authorship as discussed above, the nature of ethnographic research often renders the promise of confidentiality problematic, if not outright impossible. As Zachary Schrag observes, maintaining the confidentiality of fieldwork sites and research participants discussed in publications has been a perennial problem for social science researchers, as details necessary to make ethnographic and other fieldwork-based writing meaningful often simultaneously make these places and people identifiable, especially to people familiar with the location or topic. ((Zachary M. Schrag, <i>Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 15.)) Increasing confidentiality protections almost always come at the cost of decreasing the amount of contextual information included for the ethnography’s audience, and can effectively prevent data from being deposited in an archives or repository (or sometimes even collected). A sociologist recounted the difficulties he encountered on one project:\r\n\r\n<blockquote>I wanted to do life histories with priests [in central Pennsylvania], and part of the problem was . . . we got into a situation where people might tell me things about their personal lives that are sort of not confidential in the IRB sense but that might be upsetting to their congregations—like I talked to one priest who had been married three times, where if the congregation had known about that they would have been very upset. There’s nothing illegal about it; this person’s not shy about telling that, but it could have been damaging. But I had the sense that . . . if I went around and did these interviews, I didn’t want to destroy the data because I thought they had some historical importance. . . . [The IRB said,] “and when you get done with this study if you’re not going to destroy the data you have to store it in an archive for 50 years, and I checked with [university] archives and they said, “we’re not going to store anything like that.” . . . I wanted to preserve the data, but there was no way to do it. . . . I actually quit the project [because the IRB made it impossible to do]. (2-13-111411)</blockquote>\r\n\r\nWhile protecting research participants’ privacy can be difficult, even in carefully prepared and edited publications, the nature of ethnographic materials makes them especially difficult to confidentially preserve over time. Audio and video recordings present obvious confidentiality problems by capturing a respondents’ voice or image, ((For a discussion of the extreme difficulty of archiving video and audio data anonymously, see Louise Corti, Annette Day, and Gill Backhouse, “Confidentiality and Informed Consent: Issues for Consideration in the Preservation of and Provision of Access to Qualitative Data Archives,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 4.4c, <a href=\"http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024\">http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024</a>.)) but even interview transcripts can be problematic. A common practice in archiving ethnographic materials is to make attempts to remove potentially identifying information from archived transcripts. However, even these “anonymized” transcripts often still contain personal details that allow the possible identification of research participants. For example, in the interviews conducted for this study, participants regularly discussed their discipline and research interests. Coupled with the names of the universities where the research was conducted—which are contained in all of our research proposals and publications—this seemingly innocuous information would probably render any of our participants identifiable with a simple web search if the full interview transcripts were released. This might not seem like a significant risk for scholars describing projects that they routinely discuss publically, but depending on the other details contained in the transcript it might also be embarrassing or potentially damaging (for example, comments about university administrators, other colleagues, etc.). As is often the case with qualitative research, removing these contextual details would diminish, if not destroy, the usefulness of these data to future researchers—the ostensible audience for these materials. Unfortunately, each piece of contextual detail retained about a research participant to aid in data interpretation simultaneously creates more potential for identification.\r\n\r\nGiven technological advances, removing all conceivably identifying details might still be insufficient to guarantee that transcripts are rendered anonymous. In fact, anonymizing transcripts may soon no longer be technically possible. Arvind Narayana and his colleagues have demonstrated that it is possible to accurately identify anonymous online authors up to 20 percent of the time based on writing style alone, given a sufficient corpus of example texts. ((A. Narayanan, H. Paskov, N. Z. Gong, J. Bethencourt, E. Stefanov, E. C. R. Shin, and D. Song, “On the Feasibility of Internet-scale Author Identification,” Security and Privacy (SP), 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (May 20-23, 2012): 301, <a href=\"http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420\">http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420</a>.)) As more and more content moves online, one can only assume that these techniques will become more robust, so that identifying a participant from the vocabulary or speech patterns in a transcript may eventually become a matter of applying the correct software. These realities set up even the most well-intentioned researchers to fail to meet the obligations required by IRBs and the agreements made with their respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen archiving ethnographic materials, confidentiality can also be equally important for protecting the researcher. This is especially true for the archiving of fieldnotes, which are profoundly personal for many ethnographic researchers. Researchers are often quite ambivalent about these data, regularly describing feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, or embarrassment about their work and what it reveals about them as scholars. ((Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” 10-12.)) When talking about her data collection process, an anthropologist in our study observed:\r\n\r\n<blockquote>That’s the thing with fieldnotes, you never show them to anyone . . . as long as it works for you . . . it’s not like you have to show it to someone else and have them make sense of it, which is kind of a shame because it would be nice to have data in formats where people could, you know, sort of, archive that information. (2-16-120211)</blockquote>\r\n\r\nIn his study of fieldnote practices, Jean Jackson observes, “Many respondents point out that the highly personal nature of fieldnotes influences the extent of one’s willingness to share them: ‘Fieldnotes can reveal how worthless your work was, the lacunae, your linguistic incompetence, your not being made a blood brother, your childish temper.’” ((Ibid., 22.)) Anthropologist Simon Ottenberg describes his fieldnotes similarly, “[W]hen I was younger, I would have felt uncomfortable at the thought of someone else using my notes, whether I was alive or dead—they are so much a private thing, so much an aspect of personal field experience, so much a private language, so much part of my ego, my childhood [as an anthropologist], and my personal maturity.” ((Simon Ottenberg, “Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1990), 153.)) This attachment and ambivalence may make researchers reluctant to turn over control of their notes to an archives—especially one that has the purpose of making materials available publically on the internet. This professional practice not only makes it very difficult to substantiate or verify ethnographers’ data, suggesting a need for ethnographers to develop more proactive and sensitive data-sharing procedures, but also creates a situation where ethnographic materials are saved, but with inadequate plans for preservation. Zeitlyn notes, “Paradoxically most anthropologists want neither to destroy their field material nor archive it.” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.)) So, too, with our study: almost no one had made plans for their data beyond the short term, let alone the final dispensation of their materials at the end of their career or after their death.\r\n\r\nWhile archivists regularly assure scholars that the papers of “ordinary” or not-famous researchers are sometimes the most valuable, ((Catherine Fowler, \"Ethical Considerations,\" in Silverman and Parezo, <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, 64-65; Robert Leopold, “The Second Life of Ethnographic Fieldnotes,” <i>Ateliers d\'anthropologie</i> 32 (2008): 4.)) researchers themselves are often unconvinced. Many of our respondents had trouble imagining the potential audience for their data and primary materials, although one Environmental Studies researcher shared data on graffiti images she collected during fieldwork following a particular ethnic conflict event. The data were not directly related to her primary research questions, but another scholar used them in a Master’s thesis (and possibly in a future dissertation). Nevertheless, doubts about future usefulness contribute to researchers’ reluctance to undertake sometimes arduous and time-consuming data preservation and annotation tasks, such as redacting confidential information, and to neglect advance planning for the eventual archiving of their materials, such as assuring adequate consent procedures. This is potentially a key area of advocacy for data curators and archivists, who are well positioned to both educate researchers in the importance of preserving primary data for future generations of researchers, even if its immediate value is not apparent, and to provide tools such as cross-indexes and finding aids that make these data more useful and comparable. ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 301-305. See also Louise Corti, “Progress and Problems of Preserving and Providing Access to Qualitative Data for Social Research—The International Picture of an Emerging Culture,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 10.1.))\r\n\r\n<b>The Consent Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nBoth IRBs and disciplinary societies’ ethics statements emphasize the importance and necessity of obtaining informed consent from research participants. Given the possibility of archiving materials indefinitely, and especially for web publication, obtaining fully informed consent may be a futile endeavor. Libby Bishop points out that because researchers cannot adequately speculate on all the uses in which data might be employed, explicit consent is “logically impossible.” ((Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.)) However, Bishop also observes that this should not paralyze researchers from depositing their materials in archives, since consent for the primary research activity is in itself partial and no researcher can fully explain all information about any research project. ((Ibid., 264.)) Zeitlyn makes this point in another way, noting that cultural differences may also limit the ability of a researcher to obtain consent in a way that is recognizable to IRBs: “Once material is archived, it may be consulted by unknown others who might use it in novel ways. . . . Can a researcher obtain meaningful prior informed consent if the uses to which the material might be put in the future cannot be explained?” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471; see also Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 147.))\r\n\r\nWhile Bishop suggests responding to this problem by providing examples of how archived research might be reused or by obtaining open-ended consent, ((Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.)) others suggest a more comprehensive approach that understands consent as a process rather than a one-time event. ((Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 146; AAA, Code of Ethics, III.A.4.)) This approach presents significant difficulties when applied to the lifecycle of an entire ethnographic research project, especially once data and other fieldwork materials are deposited in an archives for the purpose of long-term access and preservation. If appropriate consent for archiving is not obtained at the outset of a project, or is sought when new uses are discovered for materials, contacting participants to authorize this usage can be extremely difficult and costly for ethnographers, if not outright impossible. Furthermore, a consent model that requires re-contacting participants also requires confidentiality or anonymization procedures to be reversible, meaning that the researcher must retain records that can link individuals to the materials about them. Retaining contact information or other identifying records is not best practice for assuring participant confidentiality, and in the case of truly sensitive research, doing so unnecessarily maintains records that could be subject to subpoena or otherwise compromised. For example, in 2012 the US Department of Justice issued a subpoena in connection with a murder investigation on behalf of Great Britain for access to oral history interviews conducted with Irish Republican Army and Loyalist paramilitary members as part of “The Belfast Project,” archived at Boston College’s Burns Library. While the project’s confidentiality agreement promised interviewees that these materials would be embargoed until their death, this guarantee was subject to exceptions required by American law; a point that may have been unclear to the research participants. Both Boston College and the researchers are presently contesting the subpoenas, but the initial rulings by a federal district court and the First Circuit Court of Appeals have found that the subpoenas are legal. ((The Society of American Archivists Oral History Section maintains a webpage summarizing the case and providing links to relevant documents at <a href=\"http://www2.archivists.org/groups/oral-history-section/the-belfast-case-information-for-saa-members\">http://www2.archivists.org/groups/oral-history-section/the-belfast-case-information-for-saa-members</a>.)) As this case demonstrates, whenever identifying information exists, there is a possibility that its disclosure can be compelled. From the point of view of research-participant confidentiality, it is therefore preferable to destroy materials that enable identification or re-contact as soon as possible after research is complete.\r\n\r\nSince anonymization is an all-or-nothing decision that must be irreversible, even for the researcher, if it is to be effective, ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.)) in order to make consent an ongoing process, one must also accept that the data cannot be made fully anonymous. The question then becomes how researchers can meaningfully extend consent decisions to include archives without rendering them unmanageable for their administrators or unnecessarily diminishing their analytical value. ((See Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294-95.)) Balancing the need to maintain appropriate levels of confidentiality with the administrative costs is a critical area for collaboration between researchers, archivists, and data specialists. Fully anonymizing datasets is probably neither necessary, nor cost effective, for relatively low-risk materials, ((See Corti, Day, and Backhouse,\" Confidentiality and Informed Consent,\" 4.4, on the expense of creating anonymized archives.)) but both the researcher and the archivists must fully understand the potential risk scenarios before these decisions can be made, particularly in an environment where privacy protections are an increasing concern for research participants. While discussing the challenges he faces in complying with funder’s public access requirements, a sociologist observed:\r\n\r\n<blockquote>Clearly the biggest problem is the problem of protection of privacy. The concern of privacy has been ramped up tremendously over the last 10 or 15 years, and the process of getting permission to analyze data can be difficult, but a trend in social science data is to include more and more information that\'s sensitive. . . . I think the field is trying to now establish appropriate levels of protection for particular kinds of data and is trying to balance this problem of privacy with public access. And it is a challenge and it’s going to require some new modes of doing things. (5-11-103111)</blockquote>\r\n\r\nDeveloping these modes of work and processes of consent requires not only the participation of researchers and scholarly societies, but also intensive cooperation with data management specialists, technologists, and archivists. ((ICPSR’s “Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving Phase 5: Preparing Data for Sharing” provides a model for these processes. See <a href=\"http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html\">http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html</a>.))\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusions and Recommendations</b>\r\n\r\nResearchers and archivists alike face tremendous challenges in effectively preserving ethnographic research data and providing meaningful access for researchers and other stakeholders while simultaneously protecting sensitive data. In order to be effective, data sharing, confidentiality, and consent imperatives all require the active participation and investment of researchers themselves. Decisions about access, issues of authorship attribution, adequate consent, and the level of confidentially required cannot be made without the input of someone who is deeply knowledgeable about the contexts in which the research took place. However, as we have seen, none of these decision processes necessarily end at the moment when the materials are deposited in an archives or repository, and a researcher’s ethical obligation to his or her research participants does not end once he or she has transferred responsibility for their preservation. This sense of responsibility makes many researchers reluctant to relinquish control over their ethnographic materials, lest changing political, social, or cultural conditions necessitates a more restrictive approach to data access than was initially required.\r\n\r\nFor example, an Environmental Studies researcher noted that currently her data does not present much risk to her respondents:\r\n\r\n<blockquote>Most of the data I’ve collected really have limited privacy issues or any kind of harm that could come to respondents. There are some topics that I’ve looked at, that depending on, when—you know, timeliness—at what point these were published, that identifying information could be problematic. In [central Asian country] it’s a lot easier—at least currently—the situation for my topics isn’t dangerous. That doesn’t mean it can’t be in the future and if I extended the research to neighboring countries then I would probably have some more serious confidentiality issues. (2-12-111011)</blockquote>\r\n\r\nIf the political situation for her respondents changed, however, this researcher might be ethically obligated to change the access conditions of any materials that she had archived, even if her consent procedures had addressed this eventuality. Repositories for ethnographic materials must be careful to include procedures to respond to these types of situations in their donor agreements, and researchers should discuss the unique qualities of ethnographic materials prior to their deposit. As Parezo points out, “it is unethical and unreasonable to expect the archival community to guess which fieldnotes contain sensitive information and what are reasonable use restrictions.” ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 285.))\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, preparing materials for deposit into an archives is often a low priority for ethnographers for a variety of reasons, and the archiving of ethnographic data is further hindered by a persistent lack of training. While comprehensive historical review is beyond the scope of this article, Silverman already noted the problem of a lack of formal training in data collection and management practices among anthropologists almost 20 years ago, ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 6.)) before the rise of many of the complications that the expansion of digital data collection created. Almost none of the scholars we interviewed reported that data curation or stewardship training was part of their graduate curriculum, and data management was usually only addressed narrowly in relation to methodological approaches and problems. The ethical and practical difficulties involved in managing and preserving large amounts of research data were rarely addressed, with most researchers acquiring the skills they needed via trial and error. ((Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.)) None of the scholars interviewed during this study expressed satisfaction with their level of expertise in data management, and few had access to individuals who could provide knowledgeable guidance. While it would be preferable for graduate curricula to include this type of training, it seems unlikely that this change will occur in the near term. It is, therefore, likely that archivists and data specialists will need to provide this training, preferably by developing relationships with ethnographic researchers as early as possible in the research process.\r\n\r\nThe lack of confidence in their data-management training compounds researchers’ apprehension about the ethical issues contained in their data. Researchers are naturally—and rightfully—conservative about the potential risks in sharing data, especially if they are not convinced they can protect their respondents’ confidentiality, or that they have obtained appropriate consent—issues that the difficulties of cross-cultural communication make more complex. Without such assurances that these ethical imperatives can be addressed, many researchers are unlikely to invest in archiving their materials. “In many cases, their desire to avoid the ethical risks of inappropriate data release may outweigh the costs of potential data loss.” ((Ibid., 17.))\r\n\r\nBecause of these interrelated concerns, it is critical that the archival and data curation systems available to ethnographic researchers have multiple and fine-grained levels of access and privacy controls. Tools must be developed that can appropriately manage confidential data and that allow researchers, working in conjunction with their respondents, to exercise control over their data, administer who has access to it, and account for culturally specific restrictions on data use. ((Ibid., 17-18.)) One example of a system attempting to address these requirements is the Murkutu content management system (<a href=\"http://www.mukurtu.org/\">http://www.mukurtu.org/</a>), which makes cultural protocols a fundamental part of access to materials. This allows for the easy creation of fine-grained and culturally appropriate user groups with specifically defined usage rights, and it is being developed in cooperation with indigenous communities. ((A list of community groups and organizations participating in the Mukurtu project is available at <a href=\"http://www.mukurtu.org/community.html\">http://www.mukurtu.org/community.html</a>.))\r\n\r\nBecause the nature of ethnographic materials makes them potentially subject to ongoing and evolving dilemmas of confidentiality and consent, archivists and data managers should understand that these materials may require ongoing curation, preferably through processes and procedures that incorporate researchers in a collaborative and meaningful way. Although many researchers would welcome the ability to more easily share their data, particularly in collaborative projects and in response to data-sharing requirements, they are almost universally resistant to any arrangement in which they would relinquish control over access to the data. As one anthropologist described:\r\n\r\n<blockquote>People don’t hesitate, at all, to share data with collaborators that they trust. … If you provide a mechanism for collaboration, even if it’s just Google Docs or something, you know, people share data easily and freely. It’s when it becomes an anonymous process that they seem to get balky. (1-02-100511)</blockquote>\r\n\r\nThe goal of making materials publically available online, then, will require archival systems and processes that are cognizant of the complex social relationships embedded within ethnographic materials, not only between the researcher and his or her respondents, but also between and among the many stakeholders in ethnographic data. The development of additional policies, ethical guidelines, and best practices by disciplinary organizations, funding agencies, universities, and cultural institutions could further aid researchers and archivists in navigating the ethical dilemmas contained in the archival process.\r\n\r\nBecause much ethnographic data is collected by individuals in relatively small and often idiosyncratic datasets, it is especially vulnerable to loss due to benign neglect or lack or resources, even if the data are historically unique. A sociologist described one such vulnerable dataset:\r\n\r\n<blockquote>We did life histories of 45 people in a [church] congregation in [central Pennsylvania town]. . . . It’s probably the only body of material on a single congregation of that depth and complexity that exists, and I’m just too lazy to have figured out what to do with it and write it up and everything, but you could imagine somewhere somebody who wants to do research on congregations would find this incredibly valuable. But what’s going to happen to it [in the long term]? And what’s going to happen to it is, the copies I have will end up in a trash can, and my computer hard drive will eventually crash or get outmoded or get erased, and that’ll be the end of it [if there isn’t a place to archive it]. (2-13-111411)</blockquote>\r\n\r\nIn order to prevent these losses, data management specialists and archivists must specifically curate these materials. They must also build relationships with ethnographers to resolve the unique ethical dilemmas these data present and the uneasy tensions between researchers’ desire to share data publically and obligations to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study.\r\n\r\nFinally, despite the acknowledged importance and value of archival materials to the disciplines and future researchers, academic rewards systems offer very little payoff for the work that goes into making ethnographic materials available, and ethnographic researchers are often under-resourced in the funding, time, and personnel support needed for preparing materials for archiving. ((The NSF’s recent decision to list datasets as one of the research products to be included in the section of its grant proposals where researchers describe their qualifications does suggest, however, that the current rewards system may gradually be changing (see <a href=\"http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp\">http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp</a>).)) Archivists must therefore work to make archival systems and the development of archival processes and policies as straightforward for researchers as possible, ideally assisting in integrating the development of metadata and other secondary materials (for example, codebooks, explanatory materials, finding aids, and ontologies) necessary to archiving and ensuring the long-term usefulness of primary data as early in the research process as possible. Likewise, funding agencies should improve funding for long-term data management, preservation, and curatorial services, either directly or via guidelines to institutions for recouping indirect costs, especially when the grant mandates archiving or public data accessibility. By providing these supports, archivists and funders would greatly assist researchers in responding to the imperatives of providing access to data and assuring the confidentiality and consent of their respondents, as well as resolving the ethical dilemmas contained in their data, thereby helping assure the preservation of irreplaceable ethnographic information.','Curating the Ethnographic Moment','','inherit','open','open','','4698-revision-17','','','2013-06-18 00:03:49','2013-06-18 00:03:49','',4698,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4698-revision-17/',0,'revision','',0),(4721,1,'2013-06-15 22:19:16','2013-06-15 22:19:16','Data curation is important to non-data curators because they do not want to have to spend time thinking about data curation. Data creators and users want to focus on creating and using data, engaging in research, and producing knowledge. Data curation is a means to an end for most creators and users, and it functions best if it requires as little effort as possible on their part. While they may not be interested in the details, a data curation service can provide valuable benefits to non-data curators, including:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Ensuring the authenticity and integrity of data</li>\r\n	<li>Assistance with grant funding for data management requirements</li>\r\n	<li>Increased access and distribution of data</li>\r\n	<li>Increased opportunities for new uses</li>\r\n	<li>Increased visibility of research through data citation</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nBeyond the sphere of the individual creator and researcher, data curation has important applications at the organization or institutional level. In a university context, many fundamental business functions rely on the creation of, management of, and access to data assets. The principles of data curation have a direct application at the organizational level, especially in relation to maintaining the authenticity and integrity of the data. As most university business functions are built into enterprise-level systems, data curators have an important role to play in providing guidance on the types of system functionality needed to provide both near-term and potentially long-term access to data assets. The terminology and approach of data curation may not be familiar to non-data curators, potentially necessitating an outreach and education strategy. A good communication strategy to educate and inform non-data curators includes a balance of the benefits of integrating the data curation perspective and the potential risks of not incorporating this approach into enterprise-level system development.','Meister - Question 3','','inherit','open','open','','4625-revision-6','','','2013-06-15 22:19:16','2013-06-15 22:19:16','',4625,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4625-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(4722,3,'2013-06-18 01:20:52','2013-06-18 01:20:52','<b>Introduction</b>\r\n\r\nIn her article, “<a title=\"Disciplinarity and Disorder\" href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue/1/archives-remixed/disciplinarity-and-disorder/\">Disciplinarity and Disorder</a>,” in Issue 1 of this journal, Gabrielle Dean opens her essay with a detailed and expressive “fantasy” describing the “primal scene of archival research [that] takes place in a dreary reading room,” featuring an archivist, a researcher, a cart, dusty gray boxes, and a “numbered file folder.” As her fantasy takes flight, with the researcher scribbling away and papers swirling and new collections sprouting up organically, she crafts an evocative metaphor for the life cycle of preservation and regeneration that archivists aim to enable through access to primary sources. Dean cogently deconstructs the origins and implications of this “primal scene” over the course of her essay. But what also merits highlighting in her opening metaphor are the accoutrements that populate it—the cart, the box, the file folder—familiar players on the stage of the archival encounter. These objects and symbols are evocative of that idealized moment of archaeological discovery that characterizes the use of the archive. They are objects and symbols of history, certainly, but relics, alas, of an analog age.\r\n\r\nA similar fantasy, one potentially more fraught with anxiety and dread, must darken the reveries of archivists as they attempt to provide access to more contemporary materials. A daydream involving the researcher of tomorrow may instead feature dreadful moments of “file cannot be opened” error messages, of FTP transfers gone awry, of decaying media orphaned from long-lost playback devices. Our imaginary researcher will not be awaiting archival discovery sitting in a dreary reading room, but instead exist in some networked who-knows-where, furiously emailing an endless stream of access and transfer requests and constantly griping about obsolete formats and buggy interfaces. At the same time, our imaginary archivist will not be pushing carts or shelving boxes, but creating user accounts for virtual reading rooms, running pattern-recognition text-mining queries, uploading disk images, or helping users with emulation software. Like the content of our archives themselves, the props and symbols of our archival fantasies increasingly will be associated with born-digital materials.\r\n\r\nHow will traditional principles of archival arrangement and description be challenged or modified to account for born-digital materials? Arrangement and description have long been the primary method of facilitating the use of archives, and their methodologies have been dependent upon the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i>. The articulation of this theory in 1841 has been held as the “starting point” or beginning of the modern era of archival theory, a “watershed” event establishing the “basic principle” and “very core” of the archival endeavor. Superlatives abound. <i>Respect des fonds</i>, “more than any other principle, has come to provide the archival profession with a unique identity.” ((Nancy Bartlett, “The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance,” in <i>Bibliographical Foundations of French Historical Studies</i> (New York: Haworth Press, 1992), 108.))\r\n\r\nBut <i>respect des fonds</i> was born of a particular historic moment, for a particular type of archival document, and was conceived to address the practical needs of specific social circumstances. Even as <i>respect des fonds</i> has mutated and evolved over the decades, subject to revisions, contestations, and reaffirmations, its methodologies have largely been a product of the nature of the archival record as a physical document to be sorted, grouped, and described after receipt from a single donating entity. In an era defined by digital materials and their affordances and limitations, one in which narrative linearity often seems replaced by data-driven relationalism, the meaning of <i>respect des fonds</i> is ever more slippery.\r\n\r\nBroadly stated, <i>respect des fonds</i> is the principle of grouping records by the administration, organization, individual, or creating body in which they originated. <i>Respect des fonds</i> mandates that the records of the creating entity not be mixed with those of a different entity. It prioritizes the “organic” nature of archival records, identifying the locus of their generation, and the evidence their consolidation provides about that originating body, as essential to preserving and maintaining context. Comprised of the related “principle of original order” and “the principle of provenance,” <i>respect des fonds</i> displaced prior methods of archival arrangement that were predicated upon classifications by subject, function, topic, legal utility, chronology, and other categories. Though often referenced as a core component of archival identity, as a theoretical concept, <i>respect des fonds</i> is, as one writer says, “elusive and oft-misunderstood.” ((Dan Zelenyj, “Linchpin Imperilled: The Functional Interpretation of Series and the Principle of Respect des Fonds,” <i>Archivaria</i> 42 (1996): 126.))\r\n\r\nThe introduction of born-digital records into the archives offers an opportunity to examine how the practical methodologies of arrangement and description are shifting and how those changing practices lead to a reconsideration of <i>respect des fonds</i>. Much as digital records’ technological dependencies, ease of duplication, and subordination to features of systems and storage have led to a reassessment of the existing precepts of archival appraisal and selection, they also prompt a similar analysis of arrangement and description. One of those axioms due reassessment is the theory of <i>respect des fonds</i>.\r\n\r\nThis essay details the social and material conditions of the emergence of <i>respect des fonds</i>, the theory’s complex practical implementations and contested assumption, the emergence of alternate models, and how born-digital materials illuminate the theory’s analog origins and limitations. I will also explain the specific qualities of digital objects, including the nature of inscription and its impact on notions of original order and authenticity, as well as how nonlinear retrieval supplants the narrative logic of <i>respect des fonds</i> with a broader notion of context and discoverability. I will then consider recent interpretive methods, such as data visualization and text mining, as potential harbingers of new modes of representing and creating interfaces to digital collections—representations that better capitalize on the possibilities of digital materials. Finally, I will argue that the affordances of born-digital archives—such as their potential for parallel representation, machine-enabled interpretation, and expansive contextual and intellectual availability—provoke a reconsideration of the place of privilege of <i>respect des fonds </i>in archival arrangement and description.\r\n\r\n<b>The Old Regime</b>\r\n\r\nBefore <i>respect des</i> <i>fonds</i> can be respected, disrespected, or neglected, a better understanding of its origins is warranted, along with an examination of how the principle has (or has not) been applied and its periodic contestation. The seductive purity of the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i> often overshadows the concept’s decidedly complex origins. <i>Respect des fonds</i> as a guiding method of archival control was never as ennobled an idea as its contemporary evocation often implies. Its original articulation was mired in professional infighting, reductive practicalities, and the tumult and disorganization of political change.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4724\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4724\" alt=\"Figure 1. Storming of the Bastille and arrest of the Governor M. de Launay, July 14, 1789. Those are probably archival records burning in the background.  Public domain Image via Wikimedia Commons. Artist unknown.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image1-300x237.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"237\" /></a> Figure 1. Storming of the Bastille and arrest of the Governor M. de Launay, July 14, 1789. Those are probably archival records burning in the background. Public domain Image via Wikimedia Commons. Artist unknown.[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhile we can find records grouped according to creator in some earlier instances, ((Luciana Duranti, “Origin and Development of Archival Description,” <i>Archivaria</i> 35 (1993): 50.)) the formal articulation of the concept of <i>respect des fonds</i> was, like much of modernity, a by-product of the French Revolution. The Revolution featured a simultaneous destruction and reconstruction of the archive, an attempt to both erase and recast the historical record. Most famously, when revolutionaries stormed the Bastille they destroyed its documentary contents—records that instantiated the subjugation and exploitation of the despised monarchy. (See Figure 1.)\r\n\r\nYet the revolutionaries’ also scrupulously preserved the record of their own activities. The <i>Archives Nationales</i> was established in 1790, with a head archivist, hours designated for the general public, and a centralized administration tasked both with preserving the legacy of the new government and managing select records of the Old Regime. Those tasks, however, were segregated in ways that impacted how each class of documents was handled. Records of the National Assembly were to be scrupulously maintained, while feudal titles were widely destroyed. As one Minster put it, “all the old documents with gothic script are … only legal titles of feudalism, of the subjection of the feeble to the strong.” ((As cited in Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development since the French Revolution,” <i>The American Archivist</i> 3, no. 3 (1940): 162.))\r\n\r\nThe management of archives during this time was chaotic. Property records were sent to one administrative body within the <i>Archives Nationales</i>, legal records to another, and documents of historical interest went to the <i>Bibliotheque Nationales</i>. At the same time, archivists were tasked with maintaining a distinction between records documenting pre- and post-Revolutionary activities. In addition, the first two administrative heads of the <i>Archives Nationales</i>, Armand-Gaston Camus and Pierre Daunou, were both trained as librarians and had, by the early 1800s, established twenty-four “groupings” of records into which future accessions were to be integrated. Within these groups, additional classifications and intellectual methods of ordering existed. The archives, then, were “arranged in accordance with an arbitrarily devised ‘methodical’ scheme that was derived from library experience.” ((T. R Schellenberg, <i>Modern Archive : Principles and Techniques</i> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 169.)) As well, political tumult and instability of governance continued to have an impact on the arrangement of the archives, and “decisions about preservation, classification, inventory, and access were therefore the result not just of practical considerations or the opinions of individual archivists and librarians, but also of key shifts in national politics.” ((Lara Moore, <i>Restoring Order: The Ecole Des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870</i> (Duluth, Minnesota: Litwin Books, 2008), 17.))\r\n\r\n<b>The Origins of <i>Respect des Fonds</i></b>\r\n\r\nWhile the true extent of records destruction during the post-Revolutionary years is disputed, ((Carl Lokke, “Archives and the French Revolution,” <i>The American Archivist</i> 31, no. 1 (January 1968): 30-31.)) as Judith Panitch notes, “this chaotic episode of archival history reveals much about archives themselves, suggesting specifically their fundamental fragility and malleability.” ((Judith Panitch, “Liberty, equality, posterity? Some Archival Lessons from the Case of the French Revolution,” <i>The American Archivist</i> 59, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 33.)) That malleability is evident in the conflicting approaches to archival arrangement and description that characterized this era, practices that lead up to the declaration of the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i>. Records of the time were arranged primarily by sometimes-quixotic methods of classification, by schema idiosyncratic in origin and inconsistent in application. ((Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development,” 167.))\r\n\r\nA number of developments in the next few decades pushed this lack of uniformity to its breaking point and helped impel the conceptualization of <i>respect des fonds</i> as an archival principle, if, as I will show, less of an actual practice. The establishment of the <i>Ecole des Chartes</i> in 1821 created a formal institution to train archivists to staff both the <i>Archives Nationales</i> and the over 2500 provincial archives across France. Laws passed in the 1830s also drastically expanded the number of archivists mandated to work both in the <i>Archives Nationales</i> and in the provincial archives. Formal training and new positions, however, when combined with lax oversight and inconsistent guidance on practices, led, predictably, to a near-comic proliferation of methods of classification and arrangement. (See Figure 2.) Due to the proliferation of classification systems and schema, change was inevitable.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5104\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"576\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/bailey_archivejournal_image2-e1373515802809.jpg\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-5104\" alt=\"Figure 2. The many arrangement methods of some Ecole des Chartes graduates prior to the emergence of respect des fonds as a methodology. Image from Lara Moore\'s &quot;Restoring Order,&quot; 114.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/bailey_archivejournal_image2-e1373515802809.jpg\" width=\"576\" height=\"435\" /></a> Figure 2. The many arrangement methods of some Ecole des Chartes graduates prior to the emergence of respect des fonds as a methodology. Image from Lara Moore\'s \"Restoring Order,\" 114.[/caption]\r\n\r\nThat change came in the form of the infamous “Circular no. 14,” released in 1841 by Natalis de Wailly, Administrative Head of the <i>Archives Nationales</i>. This document is recognized as the first articulation of the fonds as the fundamental method of archival arrangement, the purpose of which was “to form a collection of all the documents which originate from a body, an organization, a family or an individual, and to arrange the different fonds according to a certain order.” ((As quoted in Nancy Bartlett, “The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance,” 107.)) <i>Respect des fonds</i> made creatorship the organizing principle of archival records and espoused the formation of collections according to the organization, entity, family, or individual responsible for their creation. Such an arrangement would ensure, as one writer later put it, the essential need “to know where it [the archival document] was created, in the framework of what process, to what end, for whom, when and how it was received by the addressee, and how it came into our hands.” ((Michael Duchein, “Theoretical Principles and Practical Problems of Respect des fonds in Archival Science,” <i>Archivaria</i> 16 (Summer 1983): 67.))\r\n\r\nHowever, as Nancy Bartlett has explicated, this “watershed” moment was less momentous than contemporary evocations suggest. For one, de Wailly’s circular dictated “that <i>respect des fonds</i> was prescribed only for archival records created prior to 1789.” More contemporary fonds were to continue to be arranged categorically. In addition, minutes from subsequent meetings of the commission overseeing the work of archivists—a commission on which de Wailly served—reveal that “<i>respect des fonds</i> was if nothing more a preliminary standard for archival arrangement and description in departmental archives, a means of insuring that beginning archivists without the benefit of direct supervision might not cause too much intellectual damage to vulnerable records in their care.” ((Bartlett, “The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance,” 111.))\r\n\r\nThe principle was, in fact, a practical exigency, a method to simplify archival arrangement seen as more easily implemented by novice archivists than the more rigorous arrangement by classification. Bartlett also notes that <i>respect des fonds</i> remained absent from both the curriculum of the <i>Ecole des Chartes</i> as well as the publications of the professional society of its graduates. Lastly, the principle was, at the time, not applied to accessions into the <i>Archive Nationales</i> itself, as it operated under a different administrative department than de Wailly’s Interior Ministry.\r\n\r\n<i>Respect des fonds</i>, then, was never a perfectly realized theory. Its formation was a contingency of a unique historical moment; its conception depended upon practical necessities and its implementation was inconsistent and disputed. What today seems near dogma—that archives be arranged by fonds—was at the time novel and simplistic, more the product of utility and political manipulation than a grand inspiration regarding the functional authenticity of fonds or evidential purity towards their arrangement.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4726\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"183\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image3.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4726 \" alt=\"Figure 3. Front page of the proceedings of the 1910 Congres de Bruxelles, the First International Congress of Archivists and Librarians. The full proceedings are available online at http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/menu.html. Google Translate does a passable job of translating.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image3-183x300.jpg\" width=\"183\" height=\"300\" /></a> Figure 3. Front page of the proceedings of the 1910 Congres de Bruxelles, the First International Congress of Archivists and Librarians. The full proceedings are available online at http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/menu.html. Google Translate does a passable job of translating.[/caption]\r\n\r\n<b>The Original Original Order</b>\r\n\r\nThough implemented inconsistently in its home country, the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i> gained a wide acceptance across Europe. In Prussia, the theory (known as <i>Provenienzprinzip,</i> the principle of provenance) mandated that “official papers are to be maintained in the order and with the designations which they received in the course of the official activity of the agency concerned.” ((Schellenberg, <i>Modern Archives</i>, 175.)) <i>Respect des fonds</i> received its most elaborate and sustained justification, and expansion, however, in the Netherlands, where the Dutch archivists Muller, Feith, and Fruin produced their famous <i>Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives</i> in 1898. Often referred to colloquially as the “Dutch Manual” and seen as the “starting point of archival theory and methodology,” ((Peter Horsman, Eric Ketelaar, and Theo Thomassen, “New Respect for the Old Order: The Context of the Dutch Manual,” <i>The American Archivist </i>66, no. 2 (2003): 249.)) the work provided a detailed set of guidelines for the arrangement of records. The principle of <i>respect des fonds</i> gained even wider acceptance and popularity after its ratification at the First International Congress of Archivists meeting in Brussels in 1910. ((Lawrence D. Geller, “Joseph Cuvelier, Belgian Archival Education, and the First International Congress of Archivists, Brussels, 1910,” <i>Archivaria</i> 16 (Summer 1983): 16. Proceedings from the 1910 meeting can be found online at <a href=\"http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/\">http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/</a>.)) (See Figure 3.)\r\n\r\nThe Dutch Manual, and the methodologies implemented in its wake, not only forbid the intermingling of the fonds of one agency with those of another—in keeping with the French conception of <i>respect des fonds</i>—but also expanded the theory to apply to the records within each fond—the internal arrangement of the archival collection. Or as the Dutch Manual put it, “the system of arrangement must be based on the original organization of the archival collection.” ((Samuel Muller, Johan Adriaan Feith, and Robert Fruin, <i>Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives</i> (H.W. Wilson Co., 1968), 52.)) This concept has come to be known as the “principle of original order,” an intra-fonds corollary to the external means of arrangement associated with the principle of provenance; <i>respect des fonds</i> encompasses both principles.\r\n\r\nA closer examination of the Dutch Manual, however, reveals certain methodological impracticalities that even its authors admit. First, they claim that the original order within a fonds may be modified or “restored” to account for multiple transfers from an agency, not all of which may truly represent the idealized “original order.” As well, records may be reorganized to account for “inconsequential irregularities attributable to record-keeping officials.” The authors also note that reconstituting the original order may be avoided when “the trouble which would have to be taken in order to reconstruct the old organization is out of proportion to the result to be obtained.” ((Muller et al., <i>Manual</i>, 83.)) Needless to say, the simple idea of “restoring original order” seems itself problematic, fraught with subjective decision-making likely far removed from whatever idealized “organic” origin archivists may discover within fonds. The complicated approach to “restoration” and “reconstruction” that the Dutch Manual advises often borders on, as one writer put it, “abandoning entirely their carefully developed ethic of conservation.” ((Frank Boles, “Disrespecting Original Order,” <i>The American Archivist </i>45, no. 1 (1982): 28.))\r\n\r\n<b>Critique des Fonds</b>\r\n\r\nThe widespread adoption <i>of respect des fonds</i> did not proceed unquestioned, however. As early as the 1930s, some archivists were taking issue with the methodology of arranging collections according to original order. In his survey of the development of archival theory, Ernst Posner points to the German Max Bar and two Swedish archivists who demonstrated “that slavish preservation of the original arrangement of a fonds is often insufficient,” the principle of provenance “is subject to certain restrictions” that make blanket adoption impractical, and adherence to <i>respect des fonds</i> often impedes use of archival materials. ((Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development,” 169.))\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4747\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image4.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4747 \" alt=\"Figure 4. Peter Scott\'s diagram depicting his system of archival arrangement based on grouping records at the series level. From Scott, &quot;The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment,&quot; 1966. \" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image4-300x177.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"177\" /></a> Figure 4. Peter Scott\'s diagram depicting his system of archival arrangement based on grouping records at the series level. From Scott, \"The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment,\" 1966.[/caption]\r\n\r\nSome Australian and American archivists in the 1960s, primarily Peter Scott and Mario Fenyo, challenged the definition of fonds even further. The problems with the traditional concept of the fonds were manifold. Defining fonds as the records of a “transferring or controlling agency” was problematic since the agent of transfer was not always the creating agency. Fonds could also be mixed or “broken” into multiple transfers to an archive, making reconstitution difficult. Fonds could also be the result of “a succession of agencies,” blurring true creatorship. Ordering series within fonds was difficult since future accessions may need to be inserted at different places in the existing organizational system, leading to physical disorder or the constant revision of finding aids or inventories. After reviewing minutes of early NARA meetings in an attempt to define what, exactly, constitutes a fonds, Fenyo succinctly pointed out, “no one knows what the word fonds means, not even the French who invented it.” ((Mario D. Fenyo, “The Record Group Concept: A Critique,” <i>The American Archivist </i>29, no. 2 (April 1966): 230.)) For Scott, his belief that “the very arbitrariness of the concept [of the fonds] is sufficient to make one question its usefulness,” ((Peter Scott, “The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment,” <i>The American Archivist </i>29, no. 4 (October 1966): 497.)) led him to develop the “series system” (See Figure 4) which sought to orient arrangement and description according to function and use instead of agent or material type—a theory that, Terry Cook noted, “shifted the entire archival description enterprise from a static cataloging mode to a dynamic system of multiple interrelationships.” ((Terry Cook, “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” <i>Archivaria</i> 43 (1999): 38.))\r\n\r\nThe principle of original order underwent a similar critique. A lack of clarity on the custodianship of records prior to their delivery to an archive, the problem of multiple and ongoing accessions, and the potential for incoherent or unknown methods of ordering or classification by creating bodies all led Fenyo to proclaim, “archivists generally believe that the arrangement of series within a record group reflects to some extent the organization and even history of the agency that created those records.… But the records in the National Archives reflect no such thing.” ((Fenyo, \"The Record Group Concept,\" 236.)) For archives consisting of personal papers, original order is seen as particularly problematic, since a chronological arrangement seemingly provides the greatest meaning and value to the records of an individual, but is unlikely to be the order of records upon accession. Restoration of original order also risks destroying the contextual information accrued by collections that have passed through multiple states of custodianship prior to their acceptance into the archive. ((Debra Barr, “Protecting Provenance: Response to the Report of the Working Group on Description at the Fonds Level,” <i>Archivaria</i> 28 (Summer 1989): 141-145. See also Robert Edwards, “‘With Respect to Original Order’: Changing Values in Archival Arrangement,” <i>Archives Association of British Columbia</i> 11, no. 1 (Winter 2001).)) Lastly, the principle of original order prioritizes filing systems of unknown or dubious legitimacy over the principle of use or accessibility. As Frank Boles states, “usability acknowledges the evidential superiority of documents over filing systems by placing primary emphasis on access to documents.” ((Boles, “Disrespecting Original Order,” 31.)) In this critique, usability and original order are often in conflict.\r\n\r\n<b>Of Bonds and Parallels</b>\r\n\r\nOther conceptual models besides the series system have attempted to address these critiques by forming new ideas about how order or grouping can evidence archival authenticity, identity, and meaning. One theory to articulate the interrelations of individual records can be found in Luciana Duranti’s notion of the archival bond, which she defines as the “network of relations that each record has with the records belonging in the same aggregation.” ((Luciana Duranti, “The Archival Bond,” <i>Archives and Museum Informatics</i> 11 (1997): 213-18.)) Not to be confused with context, which exists outside the record, the archival bond, for Duranti, is core to the identity of the record. As she states, “documents that are expressions of a transaction are not records until they are put into relation with other records.” ((Ibid., 216.)) Emerging from research into the authenticity of electronic records (including the InterPARES project), the archival bond identifies a web of documentary co-dependencies that presumes an inheritance and relationship between records based on functional proximity. ((“The InterPARES Project,” accessed October 2012, <a href=\"http://www.interpares.org\">www.interpares.org</a>.))\r\n\r\nPerhaps the most exhaustive attempt to deal with many difficulties that exist within the gulf between <i>respect des fonds</i> as principle and practice was undertaken by Michel Duchein in 1983. ((Duchein, \"Theoretical Principles and Practical Problems,\" 64–82.)) While Duchein proposes solutions to the many problems of the fonds concept, the reader cannot help but be overwhelmed by the fact that his cataloging of the “theoretical problems” and “practical difficulties” far outnumber, and begin to drown out, his proposed solutions. For Duchein, within fonds there can be all sorts of nebulous, arbitrary, and forgotten methods of classification “from which all imaginable disorders flow.” He calls these, in a poetic moment, “brutal manipulations.” ((Ibid., 77.)) But after this disquisition, on the last page of his article Duchein mentions one idea that seems if not prescient, then at least transitive in the way it conceives of context: the <i>parallelismus membrorum</i>, “the similarity of parallel files.” <i>Parallelismus membrorum</i> is a rhetorical term referring to the patterns within a text formed by the utilization of repeated grammatical structures. (“I came. I saw. I conquered,” is a brief example). Duchein here employs the motif to refer to the contextual relations that exist between records of different fonds, the network of meanings that stretch across the archive.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4927\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image5.gif\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4927  \" alt=\"Figure 5. Chris Hurly\'s diagram of parallel provenance, &quot;The Little Truck.&quot; The little truck is a metaphor for archival description. From Hurley, &quot;Parallel Provenance: (1) What if Anything is Archival Description?”\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image5-300x199.gif\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" /></a> Figure 5. Chris Hurly\'s diagram of parallel provenance, \"The Little Truck.\" The little truck is a metaphor for archival description. From Hurley, \"Parallel Provenance: (1) What if Anything is Archival Description?”[/caption]\r\n\r\nChris Hurley explored an idea similar to <i>parallelismus membrorum</i> in his delineation of “parallel provenance” a concept built around “composing different things from the same particles—combining things in different ways to produce a variety of views of what they look like in the aggregate … not so much about identifying a different creator as recognizing manifold context.” ((Chris Hurley, “Parallel Provenance: (1) What if Anything is Archival Description?,” <i>Archives and Manuscripts</i> 33, no. 1 (2005): 126.)) (See Figure 5.) Other contemporary writers, such as Laura Millar and Geoffrey Yeo, have sought to stretch the meaning of the fonds even further, arguing it exists purely at the conceptual level. ((Geoffrey Yeo, “The Conceptual Fonds and the Physical Collection,” <i>Archivaria</i> 73 (Spring 2012): 43-91; Laura Millar, “The Death of the Fonds and the Resurrection of Provenance: Archival Context in Space and Time,” <i>Archivaria</i> 53 (Spring 2002): 1-15.)) But as the definition of the fonds becomes more distant, more abstract, its privileging as a form of aggregation seems less certain, especially in a digital environment in which creatorship is but one of many means of grouping records.\r\n\r\nThe archival bond, the series system, <i>parallelismus membrorum, </i>and parallel provenance all mark attempts to theorize relationships between records and collections in ways that can elide the practical problems of <i>res</i><i>pect des fonds</i>. Equally, these ideas represent a continued expansion of context beyond the limitations of grouping by creatorship or creator-derived order. In each case, similarities and dependencies emerge out of cross-collection networks or semantically derived principles. As the models gain distance from the vagaries of the individual records, one starts to recognize a familiar pattern of removal—not a disjunction, exactly, but a subtle passage from the material trace to the abstract representation. The familiarity is borne of the similar movement from item to representation that characterizes electronic records and their attendant phenomenological tension between the physical inscription on a drive and the symbolic interface on a screen.\r\n\r\n<b>Bit Level Processing</b>\r\n\r\nBut enough of models. Consider instead the bit, the binary, the magnetic flux reversal of the spinning disk that is the origin of the digital object. Material inscription offers a good point to segue into an examination of digital records and how they both complicate or even circumvent historical notions of <i>respect des fonds </i> while at the same time enabling realization of a more expansive notion of context and interrelation.\r\n\r\nStarting at the bit level, the characteristics of inscription (how digital information is written onto storage media) call into question the idea of original order. When data is written to a storage device, it has a material, physical trace, but that trace is far from the legibility or interpretability we associate with analog documents. As Matt Kirschenbaum has noted in his study of new media and digital forensics, “we write <i>on</i> paper, but we write <i>to</i> a magnetic disk (or tape)”; the semantic difference signifies that the act of inscription is “logically distinct” from the act of creation and intellectual manipulation. ((Matt Kirschenbaum, <i>Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination</i> (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 87. Emphasis in original.)) (See Figure 6.) In addition, a key component of storage media is that it is random access; that means the bits composing a record are inscribed to available clusters across the platter of a drive depending on which tracks and sectors are available for inscription. That is, the component bits of a digital object are non-sequential in their material physical arrangement. Aggregated, they can create an interpretable object, but their component location is nonlinear. Here, even at the bit level of a single item, there is no original order. Furthermore, each time these bits are reconstructed, each time the file is accessed and translated into an interpretable, editable representation, the file will be altered in minute ways (for instance, a file’s “last opened” date) and thus be composed of a new order as new bits are assigned to other available areas of the disk. As Kirschenbaum notes, quoting a dictum of forensic science, “every contact leaves a trace.” The act of interpreting a digital object, thus, continually alters its material order.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4729\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image6.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4729 \" title=\"bailey_archivejournal_image6\" alt=\"Figure 6. Close-up of a disk drive at the Computer History Museum, showing arms and a read/write head. Processing Born-Digital Materials Using AccessData FTK at Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, 2011.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image6-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Figure 6. Close-up of a disk drive at the Computer History Museum, showing arms and a read/write head.<br />Processing Born-Digital Materials Using AccessData FTK at Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, 2011.[/caption]\r\n\r\nMoving beyond the non-sequential arrangement of bits of individual records, but remaining at the forensic level, other features of the digital environment challenge long-standing presumptions of authenticity and uniqueness that are dependent upon physical arrangement or description. Temporary files, such as those stored by auto-save or recovery programs, mean that a drive can contain multiple versions of identical files, many of them beyond the management (or even awareness) of their creator. This “ambient data” is matched by other features of data dispersal throughout a storage system, such as “swap space” (disk space sometimes allocated for use by RAM) and “disk slack” (which accounts for the difference between the actual file size and the disk space used for storage) that themselves complicate ideas of order and linearity. Storage becomes a hidden, dynamic world in which physical arrangement on a spinning drive consists of the equivalent of dispersed crevices, hidey-holes, and secret areas where data proliferates. Kirschenbaum asserts, “there is, in short, no simple way to know how many instances of a single file are residing in how many states, in how many different locations, at any given moment in the operating system.” ((Ibid., 52.)) As well, digital objects themselves have the potential to contain trace data that, while possibly not achieving the singular identity of a record, can have evidential value or help establish provenance.\r\n\r\nTake, for instance, Kirschenbaum’s exploration of a floppy disk image, in which he finds evidence of how the storage media was used over time and what its hidden and partially deleted data can manifest about its user: “[W]e discover on the original diskette the incompletely overwritten remains of previous software … a piece of 1980s software culture frozen in allographic amber.” ((Ibid., 140.)) Discovering this legacy information reveals multiple levels of creatorship and a trail of ownership and social and cultural meaning that extend beyond the object, the creator, or the fonds. In this case, the unintentionally preserved (by the user, at least) data provides a testament to its origins that is not visible in the individual files themselves. Here provenance is not a result of aggregation or description but a characteristic of how digital information is created and transmitted. Context is not just relational, implied, or conceptualized, but can be a part of the very media itself, like secret, half-formed barnacles clinging to the vessel of the digital record. Incomplete but decipherable. Fragmentary but meaningful. Allographic amber.\r\n\r\n<b>Fonds Essentialism</b>\r\n\r\nNeedless to say, most people do not interact with digital information at the forensic level. In Kenneth Thibodeau’s useful model, digital objects are compounds, composed of a physical, logical, and conceptual object. Respectively, those adjectives refer to the physical inscription on storage media; the logical suite of translational software and processes that access and “read” that inscription; and the conceptual object the user interacts with, such as the text, image, or interface on a screen. ((Kenneth Thibodeau, “Overview of Technological Approaches to Digital Preservation and Challenges in Coming Years,” in <i>The State of Digital Preservation: An International Perspective</i> (Washington D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2002).)) The conceptual object—the representational environment of the screen as experienced in the word processing program, the image editor, the social media app—inculcates its own affordances and logic on the creation or use of records. In fact, given the hidden, inscrutable nature of storage and inscription, the formal representation of digital objects on a screen can have an outsized influence on their creation, management, and perception—an interpretive tendency that Nick Montford calls “screen essentialism.” Considering the extensive influence that the theory of <i>respect des fonds</i> has had, historically, on how archival collections are arranged and described, a similar predilection may characterize the archival enterprise—call it <i>fonds essentialism</i>.\r\n\r\nThe conceptual object—the screen—presents its own challenges to the implied narrative of current modes of archival description. The way that a user interacts with an aggregation of digital materials is fundamentally different from how a user would interact with a set of document boxes or a finding aid. The screen imposes its own logic, its own “formal regimen,” in Kirschenbaum’s terms, on how digital objects are interpreted or accessed, but also how they are described. Traditional archival representation for analog materials emerges from a narrative: a story about what a collection is, what it holds, and the order and location of its contents. It moves through a descriptive summary of contextual detail and administrative information and on to a hierarchy of series and subseries often arranged by type, function, chronology, or other broad categories. Papers, folders, boxes, and series must be arranged in physical space, after all, and that comes to shape how they are arranged in the intellectual space of description. A finding aid is a narrative to be read and its intellectual availability is largely linear and structural. The conceptual object of the digital record and the interface to an aggregation of digital records offer quite a different type of interaction.\r\n\r\nText mining and hyperlinks are simple examples of ways to navigate large groups of materials absent a singular narrative sequence. Lev Manovich, in theorizing new media, has noted that the database (or, the database logic) has supplanted narrative as the method of interacting with digital information. In new media, “narrative becomes just one method of accessing data among others,” and digital information assumes “the projection of the ontology of a computer onto culture itself.” ((Lev Manovich, “Database as a Genre of New Media,” <i>Journal of A&amp;I Society</i> 14, no. 2 (May 2000): 176-77.)) In a database, objects are related but not ordered. The database logic is nonlinear and there is no original order because order is dependent upon query. Search and navigation become algorithm-dependent and not predetermined by a creator, an archivist, or a static finding aid—though all of those organizations are themselves available. Digital objects will have an identifier, yes, but where they “rest” in intellectual space is contingent, mutable. The key point is that, even at the level of representation, arrangement is dynamic: access and representation need not depend on the fonds. Description becomes relational as well and can extend beyond individual aggregations of records. The logic of physical space no longer drives retrieval or predominates in description. Original order and provenance are not lost or obviated in this model, but they are not the exclusive means of access, either.\r\n\r\n<b>Recent Practices</b>\r\n\r\nCase studies from projects handling significant amounts of born-digital records provide insight into the theoretical and practical problems of <i>respect des fonds</i>. As the Emory University project asked of the born-digital content in its Salmon Rushdie acquisition, “Would we treat the born-digital files the same as print material? Would we impose any sort of arrangement on the materials? How much added description could we provide? As the following discussion will reveal, the application of archival theory and principles may shift to accommodate the differences between paper and born-digital archives.” ((Laura Carroll et al., “A Comprehensive Approach to Born-Digital Archives,” <i>Archivaria</i> 72 (Fall 2011): 72.)) Or, as the large-scale, born-digital Vancouver Olympics project team put it, “core archival activities may diverge from long-established practices when moving into the digital environment.” ((Courtney C. Mumma, Glenn Dingwall, and Sue Bigelow, “A First Look at the Acquisition and Appraisal of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Fonds: Or, SELECT * FROM VANOC_Records AS Archives WHERE Value=‘true’;,” <i>Archivaria</i> 72 (Fall 2011): 93.)) Along with the multi-institutional AIMS project and the PARADIGM (Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media) project in the UK, these case studies detail the practical issues involved in rethinking arrangement and description in born-digital archives. ((AIMS Work Group, “AIMS Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship,” 2012, <a href=\"http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/\">http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/</a>; Paradigm project, “Workbook on Digital Private Papers,” The Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media (Paradigm) Project, accessed October 2012,  <a href=\"http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/workbook/index.html\">http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/workbook/index.html</a>.))\r\n\r\nTaken together, the projects provide an overview of how arrangement may look in entirely born-digital collections. All note the difficulty in parsing user-generated description and the often quixotic or meaningless nature of directory structures and naming. The projects largely employed filtering, text mining, and other cross-record queries to determine the content of most files. The sheer volume of files contained in accessions precluded any item-level content review or hierarchical rearrangement; yet, at the same time, “the creation of file and item descriptions and inventories is not only easier and faster, it yields much richer information.… What takes hours or days to perform in the paper environment takes mere seconds to accomplish in the digital environment, and is done to a greater level of detail.” ((Mumma et al., \"A First Look,\" 115-16.))\r\n\r\nThough the many technical processes necessary for format validation, emulation, automated metadata extraction, and other methods of processing born-digital archives are too complex to be fully recounted here, these case studies point to their key characteristics. (See Video 1.) Arrangement, as we think of it, is no longer a process of imposing intellectualized hierarchies or physical relocation; instead, it becomes largely automated, algorithmic, and batch processed. At the same time, archival representation will build upon the affordances of the digital objects themselves to extract and compile metadata that can then be repurposed to bridge and augment a wealth of contextual relations far beyond the order of their creation and their agency of origin.\r\n\r\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDAhbR8dyp8\r\n<div class=\"wp-caption-text\">Video 1. Processing Born-Digital Materials Using AccessData FTK at Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. 2011.</div>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Visual Descriptions</b>\r\n\r\nAs the “logical associations of records extend beyond the records themselves and embrace relations with other entities in the wider world,” as Geoffrey Yeo puts it, archivists will be tasked with building interfaces that draw upon these aforementioned possibilities and linking them to the online interfaces through which records will be made available. ((Yeo, “The Conceptual Fonds,” 71.)) The interface thus becomes the “critical element in the interaction between documentary evidence and its consumers.” ((Margaret Hedstrom, “Archives, Memory, and Interfaces with the Past,” <i>Archival Science</i> 2, no. 1-2 (2002): 24.))\r\n\r\nSince few archives are accessioning entirely born-digital collections, it is difficult to find archival examples of a description for such a collection. Born-digital content that is currently being processed is usually a small portion of a larger physical collection and, as such, is integrated in a hybrid fashion into traditional finding aids; see, for instance, \"<a href=\"http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt9p3038mq/\">Series 8: Born digital files</a>,\" \"<a href=\"http://findingaids.library.emory.edu/documents/rushdie1000/\">Series 11: Computers and related devices</a>,\" or \"<a href=\"http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/creeley.html\">Series 13: Computer files</a>.\"\r\n\r\nThere are, however, some archival projects, as well as work in the digital humanities, that offer a window into how researchers and scholars are making using of large sets of digital data. While the data sets and digital records being utilized are not necessarily archival collections, the tools, methods of inquiry, and cross-collection, multi-institutional repositories that emerge from these projects presage both how entirely born-digital archives may come to be used and what digital archival collection interfaces may look like in the future.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4928\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image7.gif\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4928  \" alt=\"Figure 7. Image from &quot;Data Mining with Criminal Intent&quot; presentation by Briquet et al. at Digging into Data Challenge, Washington D.C., 2009. Slides available at http://criminalintent.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/criminal_intent_digging_into_data_meeting_10jun2011.pdf.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image7-300x179.gif\" width=\"300\" height=\"179\" /></a> Figure 7. Image from \"Data Mining with Criminal Intent\" presentation by Briquet et al. at Digging into Data Challenge, Washington D.C., 2009. Slides available at http://criminalintent.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/criminal_intent_digging_into_data_meeting_10jun2011.pdf.[/caption]\r\n\r\nTwo projects taking an innovative, insightful approach to exploring archival collections through the mining of large archival corpora are The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online and Cameron Blevins’s work text mining and topic modeling Martha Ballard’s diary. ((The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online can be found at <a href=\"http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/\">http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/</a>, and the associated Criminal Intent project can be found at <a href=\"http://criminalintent.org/category/old-bailey-online/\">http://criminalintent.org/category/old-bailey-online/</a>. Cameron Blevin’s work with Martha Ballard’s diary can be found online at <a href=\"http://historying.org/martha-ballards-diary/\">http://historying.org/martha-ballards-diary/</a> and at <a href=\"http://dh2011abstracts.stanford.edu/xtf/view?docId=tei/ab-173.xml\">http://dh2011abstracts.stanford.edu/xtf/view?docId=tei/ab-173.xml</a>.)) The Old Bailey Proceedings provides access to nearly 200,000 digitized trial records from London’s criminal courts, spans almost 250 years, allows full text searching, and has an API through which users can query the archive. The With Criminal Intent project has built a suite of related tools that can help perform data-mining projects using this archive. (See Figure 7.) This project measures and visualizes trends over time as a means of revealing historical themes, building and revealing new narratives, and providing insights into the past through data-driven analysis.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4731\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image8.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4731 \" alt=\"Figure 8. Screenshot from &quot;Mining the Dispatch&quot; website, http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/Topics/view/27.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image8-300x210.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"210\" /></a> Figure 8. Screenshot from \"Mining the Dispatch\" website, http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/Topics/view/27.[/caption]\r\n\r\nBlevins’s work with Martha Ballard’s diary features a different collection, a single diary by an eighteenth-century housewife composed of almost 10,000 entries from 1785 to 1812. This project aspires to a similar goal of revealing novel insights into, and interpretations of, historical material through the ability of digital tools to mine vast sets of information. Blevins uses topic modeling—an algorithmic method that searches word patterns and groupings throughout large collections of texts (for Ballard’s diary, each entry was treated as a different “text”)—to chart and track thematic trends across the diary. A similar approach has been taken by the Mining the Dispatch project, which examines changing sentiments toward the Civil War over the course of six years (over 112,000 items) in the Richmond, Virginia <i>Daily Dispatch</i> newspaper. ((“Mining the Dispatch,” accessed October 2012, <a href=\"http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/\">http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/</a>.)) (See Figure 8.)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nThese projects may fall under the broader rubric of the digital humanities, and the collections they are working with may not be archival collections in the traditional sense, but they offer a glimpse of the discovery, navigation, exploration, and analytic tools that foreshadow uses of digital archival collections. Other initiatives have sought to build upon the network of social relations that influence records creation. The SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context) Project “provides access to the socio-historical contexts ([including] people, families, and corporate bodies) in which the records were created” through the use of the EAC-CPF standard that describes corporate bodies, persons, and families. ((“SNAC: The Social Networks and Archival Context Project,” accessed October 2012, <a href=\"http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/\">http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/</a>.)) Early results show a promising method for using social context for discovery and interpretation.  (See Figure 9.) The archivists at Stanford University who are managing the Robert Creeley collection, which contains a significant quantity of born-digital content, especially emails, have used the custom-built MUSE tool for exploring semantic patterns in email archives. ((The Robert Creeley collection can be found at <a href=\"http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/creeley.html\">http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/creeley.html</a>. For more information on the MUSE tool visit <a href=\"http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/muse/\">http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/muse/</a>.)) (See Figure 10.) Similarly, other projects have explored building unique visual interfaces to archival collections that extend contextual relations across collections, archives, and disciplines. (See Video 2.)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4732\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image9.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4732 \" alt=\"Figure 9. Image from &quot;Historic Social Networks&quot; presentation by Brian Tingle at SAA 2012 Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA. Slides available at http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/images/NAAC-dc-2012_SAA2012_Tingle.pdf.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image9-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Figure 9. Image from \"Historic Social Networks\" presentation by Brian Tingle at SAA 2012 Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA. Slides available at http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/images/NAAC-dc-2012_SAA2012_Tingle.pdf.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4727\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image10.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4727 \" alt=\"Figure 10. Network analysis of Robert Creeley email archive. Image by Elijah Meeks, captured from https://dhs.stanford.edu/visualization/robert-creeley-e-mail-correspodence-network/.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image10-300x265.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"265\" /></a> Figure 10. Network analysis of Robert Creeley email archive. Image by Elijah Meeks, captured from https://dhs.stanford.edu/visualization/robert-creeley-e-mail-correspodence-network/.[/caption]\r\n\r\nhttp://vimeo.com/6694353\r\n<div class=\"wp-caption-text\" style=\"text-align: center;\">Video 2. Visible Archive Series Browser, Mitchell Whitelaw. 2012.</div>\r\nWhat distinguishes these projects from archival representations of old is that context and meaning are not exclusively provided through descriptive, narrative details that precede an arrangement and location list, but instead through networks, inter-linkages, modeling, and content analysis. Users can move dynamically within a collection and laterally across collections. Search, query, and tools like topic modeling also allow the user to build their own patterns and hierarchies for discovery. In this view, archival description still plays a crucial role in providing information on what something is or how it came to be created, but no longer is the fonds or idea of original order the sole determinant of representation.\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusion</b>\r\n\r\nAs Luciana Duranti has noted, archival description “has been carried out or not carried out depending on specific needs and conditions, attitudes and requirements, and its products have consistently reflected the conceptions about archives held by the society of the time.” ((Duranti, “Origin and Development,” 53.)) In the physical world of items, folders, boxes, and shelves, the archive must be sorted, ordered, and stored sequentially in space. Those properties, along with social, cultural, and political attitudes have driven how archival arrangement and description are theorized and practiced. Indeed, description itself has always had to serve multiple purposes: to provide historical or biographical information, scope and content detail, physical location for retrieval, administrative information for ongoing management, and restrictions and material types governing use. In a sense, description itself is a compound object, tugged between the needs of physical arrangement, intellectual representation, and user expectation. The properties of digital records allow archivists to revisit that negotiation. At the same time, other qualities of digital information, like the forensic disk image, have the potential to preserve both a mechanical version of “order” as well as provenancial and contextual information that formerly were provided through description. File fixity, forensic imaging, directory manifests, and auto-generated metadata may all come to play a larger role in defining provenance.\r\n\r\nWe disrespect des fonds, then, not as an act of elimination or insubordination, but in order to bring other contextual relations to its same level of privilege. Consider it less a disrespect, perhaps, than a humbling; or, instead, consider it a reaffirmation that the multiplicity of meanings possible with digital records can be better realized through an ongoing interrogation of archival traditions of arrangement and description. In rethinking <i>respect des fonds</i>, we gain a better awareness of the extent to which the material affordances of paper records have had an undue influence on how we conceptualize and practice grouping and describing collections. Bits, however, are fundamentally different at the material and symbolic levels. The use of digital objects is different as well, influenced by computational processing, algorithmic query, automation, and dynamism, not to mention social conditions, user expectations, technology dependencies, storage requirements, and a host of other characteristics of how we create and use technology.\r\n\r\nParallels and bonds, series and topics, models and paradigms; at times these concepts have collided and resulted in a seeming antagonism between ideas like original order and random access, historical contingency and abstract principle, finding aid and dynamic query. But there have been similarities too: how the tension between record and representation mirrors that of inscription and screen; and how the component nature of digital objects resembles the component purpose of traditional archival description. To entrench methods of arrangement and description borne of the qualities of physical collections is to disregard the potential expansion of context that digital information can support. In recognizing how historically and socially contingent traditional practices (and the theories spawning those practices) were, we better recognize their potential dysfunction in a time of born-digital records. This is not to say that we should discard the idea of the fonds or the utility of original order, but perhaps it is time to revoke their privileged place in archival discourse and revisit the true goals of arrangement and description in light of the capabilities of digital records. Maybe then we can begin to understand what is possible when we think of collections as mutually contextual and interrelated instead of cloistered and static. And perhaps then other bonds, other parallels, other contexts, meanings, and interpretations can receive the same amount of respect that we have, for too long now, granted the fonds.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nWikipedia articles created as part of this work:\r\n\r\nRespect des fonds: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect_des_fonds\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect_des_fonds</a>\r\n\r\nOriginal Order: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_order\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_order</a>\r\n\r\nArchival Bond: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_bond\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_bond</a>','Disrespect des Fonds: Rethinking Arrangement and Description in Born-Digital Archives','','publish','open','open','','disrespect-des-fonds-rethinking-arrangement-and-description-in-born-digital-archives','','http://historying.org/martha-ballards-diary/\nhttp://vimeo.com/6694353\nhttp://dev.archivejournal.net/issue/1/archives-remixed/disciplinarity-and-disorder/','2013-07-12 02:34:05','2013-07-12 02:34:05','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?p=4722',0,'post','',0),(4723,3,'2013-06-18 00:48:01','2013-06-18 00:48:01','','Jefferson Bailey','','publish','closed','closed','','cap-jefferson','','','2013-07-08 16:32:27','2013-07-08 16:32:27','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?post_type=guest-author&#038;p=4723',0,'guest-author','',0),(4724,3,'2013-06-18 00:46:15','2013-06-18 00:46:15','','bailey_archivejournal_image1','Figure 1. Storming of the Bastille and arrest of the Governor M. de Launay, July 14, 1789. Those are probably archival records burning in the background.  Public domain Image via Wikimedia Commons. Artist unknown.','inherit','open','open','','bailey_archivejournal_image1','','','2013-06-18 00:46:15','2013-06-18 00:46:15','',4723,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(4726,3,'2013-06-18 00:47:12','2013-06-18 00:47:12','','bailey_archivejournal_image3','Figure 3. Front page of the proceedings of the 1910 Congres de Bruxelles, the First International Congress of Archivists and Librarians. The full proceedings are available online at http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/menu.html. Google Translate does a passable job of translating.','inherit','open','open','','bailey_archivejournal_image3','','','2013-06-18 00:47:12','2013-06-18 00:47:12','',4723,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image3.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(4727,3,'2013-06-18 00:47:25','2013-06-18 00:47:25','','bailey_archivejournal_image10','Figure 10. Network analysis of Robert Creeley email archive. Image by Elijah Meeks, captured from https://dhs.stanford.edu/visualization/robert-creeley-e-mail-correspodence-network/.','inherit','open','open','','bailey_archivejournal_image10','','','2013-06-18 00:47:25','2013-06-18 00:47:25','',4723,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image10.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(4728,3,'2013-06-18 00:47:26','2013-06-18 00:47:26','','bailey_archivejournal_image5','Figure 5. Chris Hurly\'s diagram of parallel provenance, \"The Little Truck.\" The little truck is a metaphor for archival description. From Hurley, \"Parallel Provenance: (1) What if Anything is Archival Description?”','inherit','open','open','','bailey_archivejournal_image5','','','2013-06-18 00:47:26','2013-06-18 00:47:26','',4723,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image5.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(4729,3,'2013-06-18 00:47:28','2013-06-18 00:47:28','','bailey_archivejournal_image6','Figure 6. Close-up of a disk drive at the Computer History Museum, showing arms and a read/write head.\nProcessing Born-Digital Materials Using AccessData FTK at Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, 2011.','inherit','open','open','','bailey_archivejournal_image6','','','2013-06-18 00:47:28','2013-06-18 00:47:28','',4723,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image6.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(4928,3,'2013-06-28 19:06:57','2013-06-28 19:06:57','','bailey_archivejournal_image7','Image from \"Data Mining with Criminal Intent\" presentation by Briquet et al. at Digging into Data Challenge, Washington D.C., 2009. Slides available at http://criminalintent.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/criminal_intent_digging_into_data_meeting_10jun2011.pdf.','inherit','open','open','','bailey_archivejournal_image7','','','2013-06-28 19:06:57','2013-06-28 19:06:57','',4722,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image7.gif',0,'attachment','image/gif',0),(4731,3,'2013-06-18 00:47:30','2013-06-18 00:47:30','','bailey_archivejournal_image8','Figure 8. Screenshot from \"Mining the Dispatch\" website, http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/Topics/view/27.','inherit','open','open','','bailey_archivejournal_image8','','','2013-06-18 00:47:30','2013-06-18 00:47:30','',4723,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image8.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(4732,3,'2013-06-18 00:47:31','2013-06-18 00:47:31','','bailey_archivejournal_image9','Figure 9. Image from \"Historic Social Networks\" presentation by Brian Tingle at SAA 2012 Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA. Slides available at http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/images/NAAC-dc-2012_SAA2012_Tingle.pdf.','inherit','open','open','','bailey_archivejournal_image9','','','2013-06-18 00:47:31','2013-06-18 00:47:31','',4723,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image9.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(4894,3,'2013-06-27 20:52:21','2013-06-27 20:52:21','','bailey_webphoto','','inherit','open','open','','bailey_webphoto','','','2013-06-27 20:52:21','2013-06-27 20:52:21','',4723,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_webphoto.gif',0,'attachment','image/gif',0),(4740,3,'2013-06-18 01:20:28','2013-06-18 01:20:28','<b>Introduction</b>\r\n\r\nIn her article, “Disciplinarity and Disorder,” in Issue 1 of this journal, Gabrielle Dean opens her essay with a detailed and expressive “fantasy” describing the “primal scene of archival research [that] takes place in a dreary reading room,” featuring an archivist, a researcher, a cart, dusty gray boxes, and a “numbered file folder.” As her fantasy takes flight, with the researcher scribbling away and papers swirling and new collections sprouting up organically, she crafts an evocative metaphor for the life cycle of preservation and regeneration that archivists aim to enable through access to primary sources. Dean cogently deconstructs the origins and implications of this “primal scene” over the course of her essay. But what also merits highlighting in her opening metaphor are the accoutrements that populate it—the cart, the box, the file folder—familiar players on the stage of the archival encounter. These objects and symbols are evocative of that idealized moment of archaeological discovery that characterizes the use of the archive. They are objects and symbols of history, certainly, but relics, alas, of an analog age.\r\n\r\nA similar fantasy, one potentially more fraught with anxiety and dread, must darken the reveries of archivists as they attempt to provide access to more contemporary materials. A daydream involving the researcher of tomorrow may instead feature dreadful moments of “file cannot be opened” error messages, of FTP transfers gone awry, of decaying media orphaned from long-lost playback devices. Our imaginary researcher will not be awaiting archival discovery sitting in a dreary reading room, but instead exist in some networked who-knows-where, furiously emailing an endless stream of access and transfer request and constantly griping about obsolete formats and buggy interfaces. At the same time, our imaginary archivist will not be pushing carts or shelving boxes, but creating user accounts for virtual reading rooms, running pattern-recognition text-mining queries, uploading disk images, or helping users with emulation software. Like the content of our archives themselves, the props and symbols of our archival fantasies increasingly will be associated with born-digital materials.\r\n\r\nHow will traditional principles of archival arrangement and description be challenged or modified to account for born-digital materials? Arrangement and description have long been the primary method of facilitating the use of archives, and their methodologies have been dependent upon the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i>. The articulation of this theory in 1841 has been held as the “starting point” or beginning of the modern era of archival theory, a “watershed” event establishing the “basic principle” and “very core” of the archival endeavor. Superlatives abound. <i>Respect des fonds</i>, “more than any other principle, has come to provide the archival profession with a unique identity.” ((Nancy Bartlett, “The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance,” in <i>Bibliographical Foundations of French Historical Studies</i> (New York: Haworth Press, 1992), 108.))\r\n\r\nBut <i>respect des fonds</i> was born of a particular historic moment, for a particular type of archival document, and was conceived to address the practical needs of specific social circumstances. Even as <i>respect des fonds</i> has mutated and evolved over the decades, subject to revisions, contestations, and reaffirmations, its methodologies have largely been a product of the nature of the archival record as a physical document to be sorted, grouped, and described after receipt from a single donating entity. In an era defined by digital materials and their affordances and limitations, one in which narrative linearity often seems replaced by data-driven relationalism, the meaning of <i>respect des fonds</i> is ever more slippery.\r\n\r\nBroadly stated, <i>respect des fonds</i> is the principle of grouping records by the administration, organization, individual, or creating body in which they originated. <i>Respect des fonds</i> mandates that the records of the creating entity not be mixed with those of a different entity. It prioritizes the “organic” nature of archival records, identifying the locus of their generation, and the evidence their consolidation provides about that originating body, as essential to preserving and maintaining context. Comprised of the related “principle of original order” and “the principle of provenance,” <i>respect des fonds</i> displaced prior methods of archival arrangement that were predicated upon classifications by subject, function, topic, legal utility, chronology, and other categories. Though often referenced as a core component of archival identity, as a theoretical concept, <i>respect des fonds</i> is, as one writer says, “elusive and oft-misunderstood.” ((Dan Zelenyj, “Linchpin Imperilled: The Functional Interpretation of Series and the Principle of Respect des Fonds,” <i>Archivaria</i> 42 (1996): 126.))\r\n\r\nThe introduction of born-digital records into the archives offers an opportunity to examine how the practical methodologies of arrangement and description are shifting and how those changing practices lead to a reconsideration of <i>respect des fonds</i>. Much as digital records’ technological dependencies, ease of duplication, and subordination to features of systems and storage have led to a reassessment of the existing precepts of archival appraisal and selection, they also prompt a similar analysis of arrangement and description. One of those axioms due reassessment is the theory of <i>respect des fonds</i>.\r\n\r\nThis essay details the social and material conditions of the emergence of <i>respect des fonds</i>, the theory’s complex practical implementations and contested assumption, the emergence of alternate models, and how born-digital materials illuminate the theory’s analog origins and limitations. I will also explain the specific qualities of digital objects, including the nature of inscription and its impact on notions of original order and authenticity, as well as how nonlinear retrieval supplants the narrative logic of <i>respect des fonds</i> with a broader notion of context and discoverability. I will then consider recent interpretive methods, such as data visualization and text mining, as potential harbingers of new modes of representing and creating interfaces to digital collections—representations that better capitalize on the possibilities of digital materials. Finally, I will argue that the affordances of born-digital archives—such as their potential for parallel representation, machine-enabled interpretation, and expansive contextual and intellectual availability—provoke a reconsideration of the place of privilege of <i>respect des fonds </i>in archival arrangement and description.\r\n\r\n<b>The Old Regime</b>\r\n\r\nBefore <i>respect des</i> <i>fonds</i> can be respected, disrespected, or neglected, a better understanding of its origins is warranted, along with an examination of how the principle has (or has not) been applied and its periodic contestation. The seductive purity of the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i> often overshadows the concept’s decidedly complex origins. <i>Respect des fonds</i> as a guiding method of archival control was never as ennobled an idea as its contemporary evocation often implies. Its original articulation was mired in professional infighting, reductive practicalities, and the tumult and disorganization of political change.\r\n\r\nWhile we can find records grouped according to creator in some earlier instances, ((Luciana Duranti, “Origin and Development of Archival Description,” <i>Archivaria</i> 35 (1993): 50.)) the formal articulation of the concept of <i>respect des fonds</i> was, like much of modernity, a by-product of the French Revolution. The Revolution featured a simultaneous destruction and reconstruction of the archive, an attempt to both erase and recast the historical record. Most famously, when revolutionaries stormed the Bastille they destroyed its documentary contents—records that instantiated the subjugation and exploitation of the despised monarchy. [IMAGE1]\r\n\r\nYet the revolutionaries’ also scrupulously preserved the record of their own activities. The <i>Archives Nationales</i> was established in 1790, with a head archivist, hours designated for the general public, and a centralized administration tasked both with preserving the legacy of the new government and managing select records of the Old Regime. Those tasks, however, were segregated in ways that impacted how each class of documents was handled. Records of the National Assembly were to be scrupulously maintained, while feudal titles were widely destroyed. As one Minster put it, “all the old documents with gothic script are … only legal titles of feudalism, of the subjection of the feeble to the strong.” ((As cited in Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development since the French Revolution,” <i>The American Archivist</i> 3, no. 3 (1940): 162.))\r\n\r\nThe management of archives during this time was chaotic. Property records were sent to one administrative body within the <i>Archives Nationales</i>, legal records to another, and documents of historical interest went to the <i>Bibliotheque Nationales</i>. At the same time, archivists were tasked with maintaining a distinction between records documenting pre- and post-Revolutionary activities. In addition, the first two administrative heads of the <i>Archives Nationales</i>, Armand-Gaston Camus and Pierre Daunou, were both trained as librarians and had, by the early 1800s, established twenty-four “groupings” of records into which future accessions were to be integrated. Within these groups, additional classifications and intellectual methods of ordering existed. The archives, then, were “arranged in accordance with an arbitrarily devised ‘methodical’ scheme that was derived from library experience.” ((T. R Schellenberg, <i>Modern Archive : Principles and Techniques</i> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 169.)) As well, political tumult and instability of governance continued to have an impact on the arrangement of the archives, and “decisions about preservation, classification, inventory, and access were therefore the result not just of practical considerations or the opinions of individual archivists and librarians, but also of key shifts in national politics.” ((Lara Moore, <i>Restoring Order: The Ecole Des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870</i> (Duluth, Minnesota: Litwin Books, 2008), 17.))\r\n\r\n<b>The Origins of <i>Respect des Fonds</i></b>\r\n\r\nWhile the true extent of records destruction during the post-Revolutionary years is disputed, ((Carl Lokke, “Archives and the French Revolution,” <i>The American Archivist</i> 31, no. 1 (January 1968): 30-31.)) as Judith Panitch notes, “this chaotic episode of archival history reveals much about archives themselves, suggesting specifically their fundamental fragility and malleability.” ((Judith Panitch, “Liberty, equality, posterity? Some Archival Lessons from the Case of the French Revolution,” <i>The American Archivist</i> 59, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 33.)) That malleability is evident in the conflicting approaches to archival arrangement and description that characterized this era, practices that lead up to the declaration of the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i>. Records of the time were arranged primarily by sometimes-quixotic methods of classification, by schema idiosyncratic in origin and inconsistent in application. ((Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development,” 167.))\r\n\r\nA number of developments in the next few decades pushed this lack of uniformity to its breaking point and helped impel the conceptualization of <i>respect des fonds</i> as an archival principle, if, as I will show, less of an actual practice. The establishment of the <i>Ecole des Chartes</i> in 1821 created a formal institution to train archivists to staff both the <i>Archives Nationales</i> and the over 2500 provincial archives across France. Laws passed in the 1830s also drastically expanded the number of archivists mandated to work both in the <i>Archives Nationales</i> and in the provincial archives. Formal training and new positions, however, when combined with lax oversight and inconsistent guidance on practices, led, predictably, to a near-comic proliferation of methods of classification and arrangement. [IMAGE2] Due to the proliferation of classification systems and schema, change was inevitable.\r\n\r\nThat change came in the form of the infamous “Circular no. 14,” released in 1841 by Natalis de Wailly, Administrative Head of the <i>Archives Nationales</i>. This document is recognized as the first articulation of the fonds as the fundamental method of archival arrangement, the purpose of which was “to form a collection of all the documents which originate from a body, an organization, a family or an individual, and to arrange the different fonds according to a certain order.” ((As quoted in Nancy Bartlett, “The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance,” 107.)) <i>Respect des fonds</i> made creatorship the organizing principle of archival records and espoused the formation of collections according to the organization, entity, family, or individual responsible for their creation. Such an arrangement would ensure, as one writer later put it, the essential need “to know where it [the archival document] was created, in the framework of what process, to what end, for whom, when and how it was received by the addressee, and how it came into our hands.” ((Michael Duchein, “Theoretical Principles and Practical Problems of Respect des fonds in Archival Science,” <i>Archivaria</i> 16 (Summer 1983): 67.))\r\n\r\nHowever, as Nancy Bartlett has explicated, this “watershed” moment was less momentous than contemporary evocations suggest. For one, de Wailly’s circular dictated “that <i>respect des fonds</i> was prescribed only for archival records created prior to 1789.” More contemporary fonds were to continue to be arranged categorically. In addition, minutes from subsequent meetings of the commission overseeing the work of archivists—a commission on which de Wailly served—reveal that “<i>respect des fonds</i> was if nothing more a preliminary standard for archival arrangement and description in departmental archives, a means of insuring that beginning archivists without the benefit of direct supervision might not cause too much intellectual damage to vulnerable records in their care.” ((Bartlett, “The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance,” 111.))\r\n\r\nThe principle was, in fact, a practical exigency, a method to simplify archival arrangement seen as more easily implemented by novice archivists than the more rigorous arrangement by classification. Bartlett also notes that <i>respect des fonds</i> remained absent from both the curriculum of the <i>Ecole des Chartes</i> as well as the publications of the professional society of its graduates. Lastly, the principle was, at the time, not applied to accessions into the <i>Archive Nationales</i> itself, as it operated under a different administrative department than de Wailly’s Interior Ministry.\r\n\r\n<i>Respect des fonds</i>, then, was never a perfectly realized theory. Its formation was a contingency of a unique historical moment; its conception depended upon practical necessities and its implementation was inconsistent and disputed. What today seems near dogma—that archives be arranged by fonds—was at the time novel and simplistic, more the product of utility and political manipulation than a grand inspiration regarding the functional authenticity of fonds or evidential purity towards their arrangement.\r\n\r\n<b>The Original Original Order</b>\r\n\r\nThough implemented inconsistently in its home country, the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i> gained a wide acceptance across Europe. In Prussia, the theory (known as <i>Provenienzprinzip,</i> the principle of provenance) mandated that “official papers are to be maintained in the order and with the designations which they received in the course of the official activity of the agency concerned.” ((Schellenberg, <i>Modern Archives</i>, 175.)) <i>Respect des fonds</i> received its most elaborate and sustained justification, and expansion, however, in the Netherlands, where the Dutch archivists Muller, Feith, and Fruin produced their famous <i>Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives</i> in 1898. Often referred to colloquially as the “Dutch Manual” and seen as the “starting point of archival theory and methodology,” ((Peter Horsman, Eric Ketelaar, and Theo Thomassen, “New Respect for the Old Order: The Context of the Dutch Manual,” <i>The American Archivist </i>66, no. 2 (2003): 249.)) the work provided a detailed set of guidelines for the arrangement of records. The principle of <i>respect des fonds</i> gained even wider acceptance and popularity after its ratification at the First International Congress of Archivists meeting in Brussels in 1910. ((Lawrence D. Geller, “Joseph Cuvelier, Belgian Archival Education, and the First International Congress of Archivists, Brussels, 1910,” <i>Archivaria</i> 16 (Summer 1983): 16. Proceedings from the 1910 meeting can be found online at <a href=\"http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/\">http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/</a>.)) [IMAGE3]\r\n\r\nThe Dutch Manual, and the methodologies implemented in its wake, not only forbid the intermingling of the fonds of one agency with those of another—in keeping with the French conception of <i>respect des fonds</i>—but also expanded the theory to apply to the records within each fond—the internal arrangement of the archival collection. Or as the Dutch Manual put it, “the system of arrangement must be based on the original organization of the archival collection.” ((Samuel Muller, Johan Adriaan Feith, and Robert Fruin, <i>Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives</i> (H.W. Wilson Co., 1968), 52.)) This concept has come to be known as the “principle of original order,” an intra-fonds corollary to the external means of arrangement associated with the principle of provenance; <i>respect des fonds</i> encompasses both principles.\r\n\r\nA closer examination of the Dutch Manual, however, reveals certain methodological impracticalities that even its authors admit. First, they claim that the original order within a fonds may be modified or “restored” to account for multiple transfers from an agency, not all of which may truly represent the idealized “original order.” As well, records may be reorganized to account for “inconsequential irregularities attributable to record-keeping officials.” The authors also note that reconstituting the original order may be avoided when “the trouble which would have to be taken in order to reconstruct the old organization is out of proportion to the result to be obtained.” ((Muller et al., <i>Manual</i>, 83.)) Needless to say, the simple idea of “restoring original order” seems itself problematic, fraught with subjective decision-making likely far removed from whatever idealized “organic” origin archivists may discover within fonds. The complicated approach to “restoration” and “reconstruction” that the Dutch Manual advises often borders on, as one writer put it, “abandoning entirely their carefully developed ethic of conservation.” ((Frank Boles, “Disrespecting Original Order,” <i>The American Archivist </i>45, no. 1 (1982): 28.))\r\n\r\n<b>Critique des Fonds</b>\r\n\r\nThe widespread adoption <i>of respect des fonds</i> did not proceed unquestioned, however. As early as the 1930s, some archivists were taking issue with the methodology of arranging collections according to original order. In his survey of the development of archival theory, Ernst Posner points to the German Max Bar and two Swedish archivists who demonstrated “that slavish preservation of the original arrangement of a fonds is often insufficient,” the principle of provenance “is subject to certain restrictions” that make blanket adoption impractical, and adherence to <i>respect des fonds</i> often impedes use of archival materials. ((Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development,” 169.))\r\n\r\nSome Australian and American archivists in the 1960s, primarily Peter Scott and Mario Fenyo, challenged the definition of fonds even further. The problems with the traditional concept of the fonds were manifold. Defining fonds as the records of a “transferring or controlling agency” was problematic since the agent of transfer was not always the creating agency. Fonds could also be mixed or “broken” into multiple transfers to an archive, making reconstitution difficult. Fonds could also be the result of “a succession of agencies,” blurring true creatorship. Ordering series within fonds was difficult since future accessions may need to be inserted at different places in the existing organizational system, leading to physical disorder or the constant revision of finding aids or inventories. After reviewing minutes of early NARA meetings in an attempt to define what, exactly, constitutes a fonds, Fenyo succinctly pointed out, “no one knows what the word fonds means, not even the French who invented it.” ((Mario D. Fenyo, “The Record Group Concept: A Critique,” <i>The American Archivist </i>29, no. 2 (April 1966): 230.)) For Scott, his belief that “the very arbitrariness of the concept [of the fonds] is sufficient to make one question its usefulness,” ((Peter Scott, “The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment,” <i>The American Archivist </i>29, no. 4 (October 1966): 497.)) led him to develop the “series system” [IMAGE4] which sought to orient arrangement and description according to function and use instead of agent or material type—a theory that, Terry Cook noted, “shifted the entire archival description enterprise from a static cataloging mode to a dynamic system of multiple interrelationships.” ((Terry Cook, “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” <i>Archivaria</i> 43 (1999): 38.))\r\n\r\nThe principle of original order underwent a similar critique. A lack of clarity on the custodianship of records prior to their delivery to an archive, the problem of multiple and ongoing accessions, and the potential for incoherent or unknown methods of ordering or classification by creating bodies all led Fenyo to proclaim, “archivists generally believe that the arrangement of series within a record group reflects to some extent the organization and even history of the agency that created those records.… But the records in the National Archives reflect no such thing.” ((Fenyo, \"The Record Group Concept,\" 236.)) For archives consisting of personal papers, original order is seen as particularly problematic, since a chronological arrangement seemingly provides the greatest meaning and value to the records of an individual, but is unlikely to be the order of records upon accession. Restoration of original order also risks destroying the contextual information accrued by collections that have passed through multiple states of custodianship prior to their acceptance into the archive. ((Debra Barr, “Protecting Provenance: Response to the Report of the Working Group on Description at the Fonds Level,” <i>Archivaria</i> 28 (Summer 1989): 141-145. See also Robert Edwards, “‘With Respect to Original Order’: Changing Values in Archival Arrangement,” <i>Archives Association of British Columbia</i> 11, no. 1 (Winter 2001).)) Lastly, the principle of original order prioritizes filing systems of unknown or dubious legitimacy over the principle of use or accessibility. As Frank Boles states, “usability acknowledges the evidential superiority of documents over filing systems by placing primary emphasis on access to documents.” ((Boles, “Disrespecting Original Order,” 31.)) In this critique, usability and original order are often in conflict.\r\n\r\n<b>Of Bonds and Parallels</b>\r\n\r\nOther conceptual models besides the series system have attempted to address these critiques by forming new ideas about how order or grouping can evidence archival authenticity, identity, and meaning. One theory to articulate the interrelations of individual records can be found in Luciana Duranti’s notion of the archival bond, which she defines as the “network of relations that each record has with the records belonging in the same aggregation.” ((Luciana Duranti, “The Archival Bond,” <i>Archives and Museum Informatics</i> 11 (1997): 213-18.)) Not to be confused with context, which exists outside the record, the archival bond, for Duranti, is core to the identity of the record. As she states, “documents that are expressions of a transaction are not records until they are put into relation with other records.” ((Ibid., 216.)) Emerging from research into the authenticity of electronic records (including the InterPARES project), the archival bond identifies a web of documentary co-dependencies that presumes an inheritance and relationship between records based on functional proximity. ((“The InterPARES Project,” accessed October 2012, <a href=\"http://www.interpares.org\">www.interpares.org</a>.))\r\n\r\nPerhaps the most exhaustive attempt to deal with many difficulties that exist within the gulf between <i>respect des fonds</i> as principle and practice was undertaken by Michel Duchein in 1983. ((Duchein, \"Theoretical Principles and Practical Problems,\" 64–82.)) While Duchein proposes solutions to the many problems of the fonds concept, the reader cannot help but be overwhelmed by the fact that his cataloging of the “theoretical problems” and “practical difficulties” far outnumber, and begin to drown out, his proposed solutions. For Duchein, within fonds there can be all sorts of nebulous, arbitrary, and forgotten methods of classification “from which all imaginable disorders flow.” He calls these, in a poetic moment, “brutal manipulations.” ((Ibid., 77.)) But after this disquisition, on the last page of his article Duchein mentions one idea that seems if not prescient, then at least transitive in the way it conceives of context: the <i>parallelismus membrorum</i>, “the similarity of parallel files.” <i>Parallelismus membrorum</i> is a rhetorical term referring to the patterns within a text formed by the utilization of repeated grammatical structures. (“I came. I saw. I conquered,” is a brief example). Duchein here employs the motif to refer to the contextual relations that exist between records of different fonds, the network of meanings that stretch across the archive.\r\n\r\nChris Hurley explored an idea similar to <i>parallelismus membrorum</i> in his delineation of “parallel provenance” a concept built around “composing different things from the same particles—combining things in different ways to produce a variety of views of what they look like in the aggregate … not so much about identifying a different creator as recognizing manifold context.” ((Chris Hurley, “Parallel Provenance: (1) What if Anything is Archival Description?,” <i>Archives and Manuscripts</i> 33, no. 1 (2005): 126.)) [IMAGE5] Other contemporary writers, such as Laura Millar and Geoffrey Yeo, have sought to stretch the meaning of the fonds even further, arguing it exists purely at the conceptual level. ((Geoffrey Yeo, “The Conceptual Fonds and the Physical Collection,” <i>Archivaria</i> 73 (Spring 2012): 43-91; Laura Millar, “The Death of the Fonds and the Resurrection of Provenance: Archival Context in Space and Time,” <i>Archivaria</i> 53 (Spring 2002): 1-15.)) But as the definition of the fonds becomes more distant, more abstract, its privileging as a form of aggregation seems less certain, especially in a digital environment in which creatorship is but one of many means of grouping records.\r\n\r\nThe archival bond, the series system, <i>parallelismus membrorum, </i>and parallel provenance all mark attempts to theorize relationships between records and collections in ways that can elide the practical problems of <i>respect des fonds</i>. Equally, these ideas represent a continued expansion of context beyond the limitations of grouping by creatorship or creator-derived order. In each case, similarities and dependencies emerge out of cross-collection networks or semantically derived principles. As the models gain distance from the vagaries of the individual records, one starts to recognize a familiar pattern of removal—not a disjunction, exactly, but a subtle passage from the material trace to the abstract representation. The familiarity is borne of the similar movement from item to representation that characterizes electronic records and their attendant phenomenological tension between the physical inscription on a drive and the symbolic interface on a screen.\r\n\r\n<b>Bit Level Processing</b>\r\n\r\nBut enough of models. Consider instead the bit, the binary, the magnetic flux reversal of the spinning disk that is the origin of the digital object. Material inscription offers a good point to segue into an examination of digital records and how they both complicate or even circumvent historical notions of <i>respect des fonds </i> while at the same time enabling realization of a more expansive notion of context and interrelation.\r\n\r\nStarting at the bit level, the characteristics of inscription (how digital information is written onto storage media) call into question the idea of original order. When data is written to a storage device, it has a material, physical trace, but that trace is far from the legibility or interpretability we associate with analog documents. As Matt Kirschenbaum has noted in his study of new media and digital forensics, “we write <i>on</i> paper, but we write <i>to</i> a magnetic disk (or tape)”; the semantic difference signifies that the act of inscription is “logically distinct” from the act of creation and intellectual manipulation. ((Matt Kirschenbaum, <i>Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination</i> (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 87. Emphasis in original.)) [IMAGE 6] In addition, a key component of storage media is that it is random access; that means the bits composing a record are inscribed to available clusters across the platter of a drive depending on which tracks and sectors are available for inscription. That is, the component bits of a digital object are non-sequential in their material physical arrangement. Aggregated, they can create an interpretable object, but their component location is nonlinear. Here, even at the bit level of a single item, there is no original order. Furthermore, each time these bits are reconstructed, each time the file is accessed and translated into an interpretable, editable representation, the file will be altered in minute ways (for instance, a file’s “last opened” date) and thus be composed of a new order as new bits are assigned to other available areas of the disk. As Kirschenbaum notes, quoting a dictum of forensic science, “every contact leaves a trace.” The act of interpreting a digital object, thus, continually alters its material order.\r\n\r\nMoving beyond the non-sequential arrangement of bits of individual records, but remaining at the forensic level, other features of the digital environment challenge long-standing presumptions of authenticity and uniqueness that are dependent upon physical arrangement or description. Temporary files, such as those stored by auto-save or recovery programs, mean that a drive can contain multiple versions of identical files, many of them beyond the management (or even awareness) of their creator. This “ambient data” is matched by other features of data dispersal throughout a storage system, such as “swap space” (disk space sometimes allocated for use by RAM) and “disk slack” (which accounts for the difference between the actual file size and the disk space used for storage) that themselves complicate ideas of order and linearity. Storage becomes a hidden, dynamic world in which physical arrangement on a spinning drive consists of the equivalent of dispersed crevices, hidey-holes, and secret areas where data proliferates. Kirschenbaum asserts, “there is, in short, no simple way to know how many instances of a single file are residing in how many states, in how many different locations, at any given moment in the operating system.” <strong></strong>((Ibid., 52.)) As well, digital objects themselves have the potential to contain trace data that, while possibly not achieving the singular identity of a record, can have evidential value or help establish provenance.\r\n\r\nTake, for instance, Kirschenbaum’s exploration of a floppy disk image, in which he finds evidence of how the storage media was used over time and what its hidden and partially deleted data can manifest about its user: “[W]e discover on the original diskette the incompletely overwritten remains of previous software … a piece of 1980s software culture frozen in allographic amber.” ((Ibid., 140.)) Discovering this legacy information reveals multiple levels of creatorship and a trail of ownership and social and cultural meaning that extend beyond the object, the creator, or the fonds. In this case, the unintentionally preserved (by the user, at least) data provides a testament to its origins that is not visible in the individual files themselves. Here provenance is not a result of aggregation or description but a characteristic of how digital information is created and transmitted. Context is not just relational, implied, or conceptualized, but can be a part of the very media itself, like secret, half-formed barnacles clinging to the vessel of the digital record. Incomplete but decipherable. Fragmentary but meaningful. Allographic amber.\r\n\r\n<b>Fonds Essentialism</b>\r\n\r\nNeedless to say, most people do not interact with digital information at the forensic level. In Kenneth Thibodeau’s useful model, digital objects are compounds, composed of a physical, logical, and conceptual object. Respectively, those adjectives refer to the physical inscription on storage media; the logical suite of translational software and processes that access and “read” that inscription; and the conceptual object the user interacts with, such as the text, image, or interface on a screen. ((Kenneth Thibodeau, “Overview of Technological Approaches to Digital Preservation and Challenges in Coming Years,” in <i>The State of Digital Preservation: An International Perspective</i> (Washington D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2002).)) The conceptual object—the representational environment of the screen as experienced in the word processing program, the image editor, the social media app—inculcates its own affordances and logic on the creation or use of records. In fact, given the hidden, inscrutable nature of storage and inscription, the formal representation of digital objects on a screen can have an outsized influence on their creation, management, and perception—an interpretive tendency that Nick Montford calls “screen essentialism.” Considering the extensive influence that the theory of <i>respect des fonds</i> has had, historically, on how archival collections are arranged and described, a similar predilection may characterize the archival enterprise—call it <i>fonds essentialism</i>.\r\n\r\nThe conceptual object—the screen—presents its own challenges to the implied narrative of current modes of archival description. The way that a user interacts with an aggregation of digital materials is fundamentally different from how a user would interact with a set of document boxes or a finding aid. The screen imposes its own logic, its own “formal regimen,” in Kirschenbaum’s terms, on how digital objects are interpreted or accessed, but also how they are described. Traditional archival representation for analog materials emerges from a narrative: a story about what a collection is, what it holds, and the order and location of its contents. It moves through a descriptive summary of contextual detail and administrative information and on to a hierarchy of series and subseries often arranged by type, function, chronology, or other broad categories. Papers, folders, boxes, and series must be arranged in physical space, after all, and that comes to shape how they are arranged in the intellectual space of description. A finding aid is a narrative to be read and its intellectual availability is largely linear and structural. The conceptual object of the digital record and the interface to an aggregation of digital records offer quite a different type of interaction.\r\n\r\nText mining and hyperlinks are simple examples of ways to navigate large groups of materials absent a singular narrative sequence. Lev Manovich, in theorizing new media, has noted that the database (or, the database logic) has supplanted narrative as the method of interacting with digital information. In new media, “narrative becomes just one method of accessing data among others,” and digital information assumes “the projection of the ontology of a computer onto culture itself.” ((Lev Manovich, “Database as a Genre of New Media,” <i>Journal of A&amp;I Society</i> 14, no. 2 (May 2000): 176-77.)) In a database, objects are related but not ordered. The database logic is nonlinear and there is no original order because order is dependent upon query. Search and navigation become algorithm-dependent and not predetermined by a creator, an archivist, or a static finding aid—though all of those organizations are themselves available. Digital objects will have an identifier, yes, but where they “rest” in intellectual space is contingent, mutable. The key point is that, even at the level of representation, arrangement is dynamic: access and representation need not depend on the fonds. Description becomes relational as well and can extend beyond individual aggregations of records. The logic of physical space no longer drives retrieval or predominates in description. Original order and provenance are not lost or obviated in this model, but they are not the exclusive means of access, either.\r\n\r\n<b>Recent Practices</b>\r\n\r\nCase studies from projects handling significant amounts of born-digital records provide insight into the theoretical and practical problems of <i>respect des fonds</i>. As the Emory University project asked of the born-digital content in its Salmon Rushdie acquisition, “Would we treat the born-digital files the same as print material? Would we impose any sort of arrangement on the materials? How much added description could we provide? As the following discussion will reveal, the application of archival theory and principles may shift to accommodate the differences between paper and born-digital archives.” ((Laura Carroll et al., “A Comprehensive Approach to Born-Digital Archives,” <i>Archivaria</i> 72 (Fall 2011): 72.)) Or, as the large-scale, born-digital Vancouver Olympics project team put it, “core archival activities may diverge from long-established practices when moving into the digital environment.” ((Courtney C. Mumma, Glenn Dingwall, and Sue Bigelow, “A First Look at the Acquisition and Appraisal of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Fonds: Or, SELECT * FROM VANOC_Records AS Archives WHERE Value=‘true’;,” <i>Archivaria</i> 72 (Fall 2011): 93.)) Along with the multi-institutional AIMS project and the PARADIGM (Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media) project in the UK, these case studies detail the practical issues involved in rethinking arrangement and description in born-digital archives. ((AIMS Work Group, “AIMS Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship,” 2012, <a href=\"http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/\">http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/</a>; Paradigm project, “Workbook on Digital Private Papers,” The Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media (Paradigm) Project, accessed October 2012,  <a href=\"http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/workbook/index.html\">http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/workbook/index.html</a>.))\r\n\r\nTaken together, the projects provide an overview of how arrangement may look in entirely born-digital collections. All note the difficulty in parsing user-generated description and the often quixotic or meaningless nature of directory structures and naming. The projects largely employed filtering, text mining, and other cross-record queries to determine the content of most files. The sheer volume of files contained in accessions precluded any item-level content review or hierarchical rearrangement; yet, at the same time, “the creation of file and item descriptions and inventories is not only easier and faster, it yields much richer information.… What takes hours or days to perform in the paper environment takes mere seconds to accomplish in the digital environment, and is done to a greater level of detail.” ((Mumma et al., \"A First Look,\" 115-16.))\r\n\r\nThough the many technical processes necessary for format validation, emulation, automated metadata extraction, and other methods of processing born-digital archives are too complex to be fully recounted here, these case studies point to their key characteristics. [VIDEO 1] Arrangement, as we think of it, is no longer a process of imposing intellectualized hierarchies or physical relocation; instead, it becomes largely automated, algorithmic, and batch processed. At the same time, archival representation will build upon the affordances of the digital objects themselves to extract and compile metadata that can then be repurposed to bridge and augment a wealth of contextual relations far beyond the order of their creation and their agency of origin.\r\n\r\n<b>Visual Descriptions</b>\r\n\r\nAs the “logical associations of records extend beyond the records themselves and embrace relations with other entities in the wider world,” as Geoffrey Yeo puts it, archivists will be tasked with building interfaces that draw upon these aforementioned possibilities and linking them to the online interfaces through which records will be made available. ((Yeo, “The Conceptual Fonds,” 71.)) The interface thus becomes the “critical element in the interaction between documentary evidence and its consumers.” ((Margaret Hedstrom, “Archives, Memory, and Interfaces with the Past,” <i>Archival Science</i> 2, no. 1-2 (2002): 24.))\r\n\r\nSince few archives are accessioning entirely born-digital collections, it is difficult to find archival examples of a description for such a collection. Born-digital content that is currently being processed is usually a small portion of a larger physical collection and, as such, is integrated in a hybrid fashion into traditional finding aids; see, for instance, \"<a href=\"http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt9p3038mq/\">Series 8: Born digital files</a>,\" \"<a href=\"http://findingaids.library.emory.edu/documents/rushdie1000/\">Series 11: Computers and related devices</a>,\" or \"<a href=\"http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/creeley.html\">Series 13: Computer files</a>.\"\r\n\r\nThere are, however, some archival projects, as well as work in the digital humanities, that offer a window into how researchers and scholars are making using of large sets of digital data. While the data sets and digital records being utilized are not necessarily archival collections, the tools, methods of inquiry, and cross-collection, multi-institutional repositories that emerge from these projects presage both how entirely born-digital archives may come to be used and what digital archival collection interfaces may look like in the future.\r\n\r\nTwo projects taking an innovative, insightful approach to exploring archival collections through the mining of large archival corpora are The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online and Cameron Blevins’s work text mining and topic modeling Martha Ballard’s diary. ((The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online can be found at <a href=\"http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/\">http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/</a>, and the associated Criminal Intent project can be found at <a href=\"http://criminalintent.org/category/old-bailey-online/\">http://criminalintent.org/category/old-bailey-online/</a>. Cameron Blevin’s work with Martha Ballard’s diary can be found online at <a href=\"http://historying.org/martha-ballards-diary/\">http://historying.org/martha-ballards-diary/</a> and at <a href=\"http://dh2011abstracts.stanford.edu/xtf/view?docId=tei/ab-173.xml\">http://dh2011abstracts.stanford.edu/xtf/view?docId=tei/ab-173.xml</a>.)) The Old Bailey Proceedings provides access to nearly 200,000 digitized trial records from London’s criminal courts, spans almost 250 years, allows full text searching, and has an API through which users can query the archive. The With Criminal Intent project has built a suite of related tools that can help perform data-mining projects using this archive. [IMAGE7] This project measures and visualizes trends over time as a means of revealing historical themes, building and revealing new narratives, and providing insights into the past through data-driven analysis.\r\n\r\nBlevins’s work with Martha Ballard’s diary features a different collection, a single diary by an eighteenth-century housewife composed of almost 10,000 entries from 1785 to 1812. This project aspires to a similar goal of revealing novel insights into, and interpretations of, historical material through the ability of digital tools to mine vast sets of information. Blevins uses topic modeling—an algorithmic method that searches word patterns and groupings throughout large collections of texts (for Ballard’s diary, each entry was treated as a different “text”)—to chart and track thematic trends across the diary. A similar approach has been taken by the Mining the Dispatch project, which examines changing sentiments toward the Civil War over the course of six years (over 112,000 items) in the Richmond, Virginia <i>Daily Dispatch</i> newspaper. ((“Mining the Dispatch,” accessed October 2012, <a href=\"http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/\">http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/</a>.)) [IMAGE8]\r\n\r\nThese projects may fall under the broader rubric of the digital humanities, and the collections they are working with may not be archival collections in the traditional sense, but they offer a glimpse of the discovery, navigation, exploration, and analytic tools that foreshadow uses of digital archival collections. Other initiatives have sought to build upon the network of social relations that influence records creation. The SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context) Project “provides access to the socio-historical contexts ([including] people, families, and corporate bodies) in which the records were created” through the use of the EAC-CPF standard that describes corporate bodies, persons, and families. ((“SNAC: The Social Networks and Archival Context Project,” accessed October 2012, <a href=\"http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/\">http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/</a>.)) Early results show a promising method for using social context for discovery and interpretation. [IMAGE9] The archivists at Stanford University who are managing the Robert Creeley collection, which contains a significant quantity of born-digital content, especially emails, have used the custom-built MUSE tool for exploring semantic patterns in email archives. ((The Robert Creeley collection can be found at <a href=\"http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/creeley.html\">http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/creeley.html</a>. For more information on the MUSE tool visit <a href=\"http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/muse/\">http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/muse/</a>.)) [IMAGE10] Similarly, other projects have explored building unique visual interfaces to archival collections that extend contextual relations across collections, archives, and disciplines. [VIDEO 2]\r\n\r\nWhat distinguishes these projects from archival representations of old is that context and meaning are not exclusively provided through descriptive, narrative details that precede an arrangement and location list, but instead through networks, inter-linkages, modeling, and content analysis. Users can move dynamically within a collection and laterally across collections. Search, query, and tools like topic modeling also allow the user to build their own patterns and hierarchies for discovery. In this view, archival description still plays a crucial role in providing information on what something is or how it came to be created, but no longer is the fonds or idea of original order the sole determinant of representation.\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusion</b>\r\n\r\nAs Luciana Duranti has noted, archival description “has been carried out or not carried out depending on specific needs and conditions, attitudes and requirements, and its products have consistently reflected the conceptions about archives held by the society of the time.” ((Duranti, “Origin and Development,” 53.)) In the physical world of items, folders, boxes, and shelves, the archive must be sorted, ordered, and stored sequentially in space. Those properties, along with social, cultural, and political attitudes have driven how archival arrangement and description are theorized and practiced. Indeed, description itself has always had to serve multiple purposes: to provide historical or biographical information, scope and content detail, physical location for retrieval, administrative information for ongoing management, and restrictions and material types governing use. In a sense, description itself is a compound object, tugged between the needs of physical arrangement, intellectual representation, and user expectation. The properties of digital records allow archivists to revisit that negotiation. At the same time, other qualities of digital information, like the forensic disk image, have the potential to preserve both a mechanical version of “order” as well as provenancial and contextual information that formerly were provided through description. File fixity, forensic imaging, directory manifests, and auto-generated metadata may all come to play a larger role in defining provenance.\r\n\r\nWe disrespect des fonds, then, not as an act of elimination or insubordination, but in order to bring other contextual relations to its same level of privilege. Consider it less a disrespect, perhaps, than a humbling; or, instead, consider it a reaffirmation that the multiplicity of meanings possible with digital records can be better realized through an ongoing interrogation of archival traditions of arrangement and description. In rethinking <i>respect des fonds</i>, we gain a better awareness of the extent to which the material affordances of paper records have had an undue influence on how we conceptualize and practice grouping and describing collections. Bits, however, are fundamentally different at the material and symbolic levels. The use of digital objects is different as well, influenced by computational processing, algorithmic query, automation, and dynamism, not to mention social conditions, user expectations, technology dependencies, storage requirements, and a host of other characteristics of how we create and use technology.\r\n\r\nParallels and bonds, series and topics, models and paradigms; at times these concepts have collided and resulted in a seeming antagonism between ideas like original order and random access, historical contingency and abstract principle, finding aid and dynamic query. But there have been similarities too: how the tension between record and representation mirrors that of inscription and screen; and how the component nature of digital objects resembles the component purpose of traditional archival description. To entrench methods of arrangement and description borne of the qualities of physical collections is to disregard the potential expansion of context that digital information can support. In recognizing how historically and socially contingent traditional practices (and the theories spawning those practices) were, we better recognize their potential dysfunction in a time of born-digital records. This is not to say that we should discard the idea of the fonds or the utility of original order, but perhaps it is time to revoke their privileged place in archival discourse and revisit the true goals of arrangement and description in light of the capabilities of digital records. Maybe then we can begin to understand what is possible when we think of collections as mutually contextual and interrelated instead of cloistered and static. And perhaps then other bonds, other parallels, other contexts, meanings, and interpretations can receive the same amount of respect that we have, for too long now, granted the fonds.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nWikipedia articles created as part of this work:\r\n\r\nRespect des fonds: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect_des_fonds\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect_des_fonds</a>\r\n\r\nOriginal Order: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_order\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_order</a>\r\n\r\nArchival Bond: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_bond\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_bond</a>','Disrespect des Fonds: Rethinking Arrangement and Description in Born-Digital Archives','','inherit','open','open','','4722-revision-7','','','2013-06-18 01:20:28','2013-06-18 01:20:28','',4722,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4722-revision-7/',0,'revision','',0),