seeking interest in a panel for AAA

[Judy Pine]

Realizing that it is quite late, I am hoping to fill a panel which at this point remains only partial.  Our focus is on media as data, and I would be able to do some adaptation of the panel description depending on the final content, so feel free to submit abstracts which stretch the topic a bit.

Here is the abstract as it currently stands:

Legible Traces: media as multivocal data

Ethnographic work inevitably results in the collection of materials which are not precisely data.  As Blommaert and Jie point out, we are “notorious for collecting rubbish” (2010:58), and for linguists much of this "rubbish" takes the form of recorded speech and other digital data.  Often among this rubbish we, or perhaps someone else, may discover unexpected treasure.  Returning to early data with newer theory, or even with the insights of greater experience, has been a rewarding experience for many of us, supporting our “rubbish” collecting habits.  As it becomes easier to collect via a wide variety of media, more and more of the “rubbish” we collect takes the form of digital files.  The media themselves have increasingly become an object of interest as well, as evident in the range of ethnographic work focused on media represented in the most recent number of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology featuring Gershon’s (2010) concept of “media ideologies” as an analytical strategy.

The introduction of “media ideologies” as an analytical tool is an excellent example of the issue at hand in this panel, which addresses the problem of collecting, in our ethnographic “rubbish”, sufficiently legible traces of data available for use through a lens other than that used to collect them.  As Ottenberg noted in his essay “Thirty Years of Fieldnotes” (1990), that which may be seen as “colonialist notes with their old-fashioned theory” (155) need not be set aside in favor of newer materials, but may instead be reexamined for new insights.  While a folk understanding of digital media may erase the frame of the recording, we are all too aware of what may be left outside that frame shaped by our own media ideology and therefore unrecognized, now invisible and unrecoverable.  This is particularly painful when the material includes data we do not fully understand as data.  Is it possible for a linguistic anthropologist to collect material which will prove meaningful to an ethnomusicologist?  How might ethnographers film dance in order to make the semiotics of movement accessible to an ethnochoreologist?  How can locally produced media be made accessible for analysis involving local people?

The possibilities of digital media, and the desire to challenge boundaries of discipline, space and time lead us to an urgent understanding of the material we collect as a resource to which we, and others, may return, and to the idea that data collection might look more comprehensively and intentionally toward these future uses.  Papers in this panel will examine ways we might shape and mould our own media ideologies as we use media in the pursuit of traditional ethnographic and linguistic goals, as well as in cases in which media are our object of study.  

Judith M.S. Pine
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
Western Washington University
Bellingham, WA 98225-9083
 
360.650.4783

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