This presentation will share the history, purpose and projects of the Platform for Experimental, Collaborative Ethnography (PECE, pronounced “peace”), open source software designed with STS perspective. While originally designed to provide digital workspace for the Asthma Files (a cluster of projects to understand the cultural dimensions of environmental health), PECE is now available to other research groups as a Drupal distro on GitHub (freely installable anywhere). The PECE Design Group now supports multiple instances of PECE (DisasterSTS Network, STS Infrastructures and for the Center for Ethnography, among others), using side-by-side development to orient further technical development. Each instance of PECE is a triptych, providing space for archiving, collaborative analysis and publication. PECE allows for creative research data management, new forms of peer review, and new forms of scholarly communication. PECE’s design is both theoretically inflected and ethnographically grounded: platform design has been oriented by “design logics' ' drawn from critical theories of language, sociality and politics. PECE is also a research project in itself: an exploration of the kinds of knowledge infrastructure needed in STS and kindred fields.
Kim Fortun - University of California Irvine, Mike Fortun - University of California Irvine, Tim Schuetz - University of California Irvine, James Adams - University of California Irvine, Lindsay Poirier - University of California Davis, Alison Kenner - Drexel University, Angela Okune - University of California Irvine and Aalok Khandekar - Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, "Platforms For Experimental Collaborative Ethnography And STS", contributed by Lina Franken, STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 28 May 2020, accessed 20 April 2024. https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/platforms-experimental-collaborative-ethnography-and-sts
Critical Commentary
This is an abstract for the EASST/4S 2020 open panel "Digital Experiments in the Making: Methods, Tools, and Platforms in the Infrastructuring of STS".