A number of scholars weighed in on the costs and benefits of specific transparency practices pertaining to text-based sources in Stage I of the QTD process. I have included below links to some threads that are particularly relevant to the topics discussed in this thread:
Active citation versus the meaty footnote
Against "requirements"
What might qualitative data access look like?
Are qualitative researchers held to a higher standard?
Journal standards in practice
A brighter side to data dissemination
II.1. Text-based sources
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Nikhar Gaikwad
Yale University - Posts: 15
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Veronica Herrera
University of Connecticut - Posts: 13
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Re: Benefits and Costs of Increasing Transparency for Text and Non Text Based Sources
From Zehra Arat, UCONN:
I have considerable reservations about the QTD effort or what the qualitative researchers are trying to do lately. There seems to be too much push for certain kind of empiricism to make qualitative research as “respectable” and as “rigorous” as the quantitative one. Well, some of us turn to qualitative & interpretive methods because we find the quantitative method as inappropriate and inadequate to address the question in hand. By the same token, I do not think we can apply the same measure of transparency and rigor to very distinct methods.
I have considerable reservations about the QTD effort or what the qualitative researchers are trying to do lately. There seems to be too much push for certain kind of empiricism to make qualitative research as “respectable” and as “rigorous” as the quantitative one. Well, some of us turn to qualitative & interpretive methods because we find the quantitative method as inappropriate and inadequate to address the question in hand. By the same token, I do not think we can apply the same measure of transparency and rigor to very distinct methods.
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Guest
Re: Benefits and Costs of Increasing Transparency for Text and Non Text Based Sources
This has been a very thoughtful thread, and I'm sorry to be posting so late.
The following comment (originally posted by a guest on November 15) really resonated with me: "Leaving aside limitations of photocopies or scans, to require a researcher to post images of all of her documents places a huge burden on the researcher -- particularly if they are a junior scholar or graduate student...Instead, archival research would benefit from systematic and consistent footnoting practices that identify all of the pieces of information another researcher would need to find the documents him or herself."
The approach suggested by this commentator (that is, encouraging sufficiently informative footnoting) gets the general benefit-cost calculation right to my mind, especially in the case of archivally intensive research. I am inclined to think of it as the most sensible baseline. If a key claim hinges crucially on the text of a particular document, as is sometimes the case, then perhaps it makes sense to make the document available online in some manner. But this should be done selectively, or else the costs to individual researchers rapidly begin to outstrip the collective benefits to the scholarly community.
Or am I missing some obvious argument that a slight increase of the burden on individual researchers (beyond sufficiently informative footnoting) actually results in a much greater collective benefit in terms of transparency?
The following comment (originally posted by a guest on November 15) really resonated with me: "Leaving aside limitations of photocopies or scans, to require a researcher to post images of all of her documents places a huge burden on the researcher -- particularly if they are a junior scholar or graduate student...Instead, archival research would benefit from systematic and consistent footnoting practices that identify all of the pieces of information another researcher would need to find the documents him or herself."
The approach suggested by this commentator (that is, encouraging sufficiently informative footnoting) gets the general benefit-cost calculation right to my mind, especially in the case of archivally intensive research. I am inclined to think of it as the most sensible baseline. If a key claim hinges crucially on the text of a particular document, as is sometimes the case, then perhaps it makes sense to make the document available online in some manner. But this should be done selectively, or else the costs to individual researchers rapidly begin to outstrip the collective benefits to the scholarly community.
Or am I missing some obvious argument that a slight increase of the burden on individual researchers (beyond sufficiently informative footnoting) actually results in a much greater collective benefit in terms of transparency?
Post Reply