122 ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA
that were widely read at the time. Restricting documentary evidence to written materials alone
can also be limiting.^4 Political, social, organizational, and cultural identities and values are em-
bedded also in films, both fictional and documentary; in state-issued postage stamps; in folk
songs, especially the genres of labor, military (marching), revolutionary, and women’s songs
(e.g., Fernandes 2003); in architectural design (e.g., of corporate or governmental buildings; see,
e.g., Goodsell 1988; Lasswell 1979; Mosse 1975; Yanow 1993, 1998, and chapter 20 in this
volume); in museum exhibits (see, e.g., Luke 2002); and in political cartoons (see Gamson and
Lasch 1983). Social scientific research in ethnic studies, urban studies, cultural studies, and other
fields that explore films and other aspects of non-textual culture and that treat a broad range of
textual materials as repositories and communicators of meaning have expanded the scope of
written artifacts that are useful in interpretive empirical research. In historical research, such a
reach is not uncommon, although no less innovative. Drawing on such textual materials as travel-
ers’ accounts describing world exhibitions, T. Mitchell (1991) uses them to read the layout of
streets, the design of schools and the structure of schooling, and other non-textual activities in
analyzing the everyday manifestations of colonial power in Egypt and the successful imposition
of order. In his subsequent volume, Mitchell (2002), reaches even more broadly for sources of
evidence, encompassing the anopheles mosquito, the Nile, the Aswan Dam, and the land (or
patterns of land ownership) as nonhuman actors in Egyptian history. Similarly, Darnton uses cats
and false teeth as evidence, respectively, in his histories of revolutionary France (1984) and revo-
lutionary America (2003).
The unnecessarily narrow treatment of material culture may emerge from the language of
“documents,” which is how most methods textbooks treat the residual category after acts ob-
served and individuals interviewed. In political science, this orientation may come from the cus-
tomary and comfortable practices developed out of its deeply entrenched, long-standing history
of treating ancient texts (Plato, Aristotle) and “government documents,” ranging from constitu-
tions to statutes to executive edicts—all the accoutrements of governing. More than other social
sciences (except, perhaps, legal studies), political science retains a very strong textual hermeneu-
tic orientation, as in its emphasis on constitutional analysis. Yet all social science practices devote
time and energy to reading and writing, and so the narrow focus on literal texts may derive quite
simply from occupational habits, or even from a failure of imagination. As many well-regarded
scholars have broken free from these constraints, however, we are inclined to regard this
straitjacketing of inquiry as less “genetic” than learned. And if the latter, it can be unlearned, as
imagination is unleashed.
Jutta Weldes’s discussion of “high” versus “low” data (chapter 9) expands the range of docu-
mentary materials that could yield insights into social, political, and other meanings to include
such things as science fiction, film, advertisements, architecture, music, and war memorials, among
others. What her chapter makes especially clear is that it is no accident that these data possibilities
have been ignored. Conceptions of theory produce conceptions of “appropriate” data; and the
state-centric nature of mainstream international relations theory, in her case, as well as the self-
conceptions of social scientists as serious people who tackle serious topics, have combined to
limit the kinds of questions and associated data admitted to the mainstream. Weldes asked a
research question that transgressed these confines, and that question led her to consider the “low
data” of popular culture as essential sources for revealing the partial character of elites’ under-
standings of globalization, a limited understanding that, simultaneously, is made possible and
plausible by these broader discourses.
In short, her chapter enacts the broadest understanding of “methodology”—revealing the com-
plex ways in which both the framing of research questions depends upon prior theoretical under-