PECE User's Guide
User Accounts and Profiles
Read more about how to create an account and update a user profile in PECE.
Artifacts
The primary way to contribute data to the PECE archive is by creating an artifact. Artifacts contributed to the site can include documents, images, audio, videos, text, and web sites. Each artifact is embellished with metadata. For instructions on how to add artifacts to PECE, read here.
Groups
Groups are workspaces where designated site users can contribute content, share a field diary, write collaboratively, and publish essays. By creating groups in PECE, you can control which users on the platform have access to view and edit content. For instructions on how to create and administer groups, read here.
Annotations
Annotating an artifact involves responding to a set of shared and evolving questions that are designed to elicit various viewpoints about the artifact. In PECE, you can contribute sets of questions for annotating artifacts. We refer to these questions as structured analytics. For instructions on how to annotate artifacts and create structured analytics, read here
Essays
Artifacts and annotations in PECE can be curated into different types of essays. A photo essay curates image artifacts into a slideshow with narrative text. A timeline essay curates artifacts into a timeline, allowing users to visualize content temporally. A PECE essay is a collection of artifacts, memos, and essays, organized into a collage, with text added for context. For instructions on how to create and edit essays, read here.
Permissions
PECE has a several layers of permissions that can be applied to content archived in the platform. When a user selects a permission for content on the platform, it limits who can view, edit, and delete that content, depending on user roles assigned. Permissions can be set at a content level (which sets the content visibility site-wide) and at a group level (which sets the content visibility amongst group members). Read more about user roles and permissions in PECE.
Licensing
Users have the option to license content created in PECE with a variety of Creative Commons licenses. This communicates to other users how and under what conditions the content may be used, disseminated, and/or modified. Read more about licensing content in PECE.
Tagging
Users can tag content in PECE with any terms in order to characterize the content and to network the content with other content tagged with the same term on the platform. For suggestions on how to effectively tag content in PECE, read here.
Projects
A project designates a research project that the platform is being used to scaffold. You can use this content type to describe when a project starts and ends, its institutional affiliation, and its funding source. By creating a fieldsite in PECE, users can designate certain content as deriving from a particular geographic location. For instructions on how to add projects and fieldsites to PECE, read here.
Logics
Substantive logics document the rationale for running a particular instance of PECE or for conducting a particular research project. Design logics document critical directives that have guided the architecture and design of PECE itself. Read more about Design Logics and Substantive Logics here.
Discovery
PECE is in part an experiment with alternative forms of knowledge organization. Because of this, the organization of the platform might, for some users, feel non-intuitive. For more information about how to find content on PECE, read here.
Zotero
Zotero
Zotero (https://www.zotero.org/) is an excellent and long-standing free and open-source scholarly tool; the PECE Design Group and many PECE users continue to use it as academics on a daily basis for reference management. When first designing PECE, we wanted to fully integrate Zotero into PECE, but at that time there was only a broken Drupal module connecting Zotero to Drupal’s Biblio module. We contracted to develop a fix that imports Zotero libraries and updates into PECE via the Biblio module. Even though we limited Zotero’s functionalities in several ways (most importantly, not to import PDFs stored in Zotero, creating artifacts that might be subject to copyright restrictions) the import feature has worked well enough. However, the Zotero integration with PECE has encountered several challenges as we have continued to use it within PECE, most notably the multiplication of copies of each reference, a bug we have been unable to locate and fix. Significant development work is required to more satisfactorily integrate Zotero with PECE, and so for the time being we are not providing support for the integration. We will be revisiting this issue after we successfully deploy the Drupal 9 update in Spring 2022. In the meantime, adopters of PECE may want to turn off the Zotero feed if it is on, or simply do not connect PECE to any Zotero libraries you might use in your research.
Why PECE?
Helpful Resources
A Note on PECE
PECE itself is a software distribution that you can download and install to support an ethnographic research project. You may hear us refer to this as the PECE distribution, or PECE distro. When researchers download this distribution onto their server, they run an instance of PECE. STS Infrastructures, The Asthma Files and the Disaster-STS-Network are instances of the PECE distro. Whenever new code is packaged into the distro, existing instances of PECE need to be updated in order for the new code to be integrated.