Day Sixteen: Rituals of Data Collection

SDS 237: Data Ethnography

Lindsay Poirier
Statistical & Data Sciences, Smith College

Spring 2023

Think about a data collection activity you engage. What is something you try to always do when collecting that data?

What did we learn about in the last lecture regarding the why’s and how’s of participant observation?

Rituals Activity

Discussion

  • What did our ethnographers notice about the data collection? What questions did our data collectors have about how to measure the height of a student?

  • What were our shared goals and beliefs about what would make “good data”?

  • How did the rituals we designed shape the data? How did we organize ourselves to create pathways for the data to be comparable?

North American Bird Breeding Survey

  • Introduced by Chan Robbins in 1966 as a result of rising concerns about the effects of DDT on bird populations
  • Aims to measure trends in bird populations over time
  • Not a total population count
  • Results in a longitudinal dataset of bird species counts at different stops along standardized routes

Diego Delso

Take-aways

  • Shared aims of making data comparable, clean, and well-cared for are held by data collectors
  • Environmental forces constantly threaten these aims
  • Data collectors organize their social worlds towards these aims (e.g. establishing rituals)
  • This shapes the context of recorded data