Aims and Questions

PECE is at the center of a research effort to understand how digital infrastructure can be designed to support and sustain further development of the empirical humanities. Recognition of diversity within the humanities and even the empirical humanities is foundational to the project. The specific focus of the PECE project is on the challenges associated with poststructural, postcolonial and feminist theories of language, knowledge and politics. The PECE project works to delineate the work flows and practices that reflect scholarship in this vein, and the ways digital infrastructure can support them. The PECE project also aspires to develop collaborative capacity among scholars, mobilizing poststructural understanding of the dynamics through which communication and knowledge are engendered.

The research questions that orient the PECE project include the following:

• What work flows, data types and analytic modes characterize experimental ethnography?

• What theories and assumptions about language, meaning, knowledge and sociality undergird experimental ethnography?

• What are the digital implications of the work flows, analytic modes and assumptions of experimental ethnography?

• How has experimental ethnography in different historical periods leveraged media technologies (photography, film, etc.), and what new possibilities are created by digital technologies?

• How do the digital implications of experimental ethnography align with conventional approaches to cyberinfrastructure development for research communities?

• How can experimental ethnography be extended (and possibly transformed) through new, digitally enabled modes of collaboration, analysis, and expression?

• How can experimental ethnography be configured so that its data and findings can be integrated with data and findings from other research fields (including the natural sciences, engineering and health)?

• What (conceptual, technical, etc.) advantages – and disadvantages – result from conceptualization of experimental ethnography data as “big data”?

• What digital structure and functions can support – and continually extend – experimental ethnography’s signature mode of knowledge production?