126 ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA
clear, it would be worth the effort for practitioners in such communities to make the tacit knowl-
edge of their practices as explicit as possible. This is what we hope the chapters in this section of
the book accomplish with respect to talking, observing, and reading.NOTES- These narratives are fairly common in accounts of anthropological fieldwork through the first half to
two-thirds of the twentieth century. For a relatively recent one, see Barley (1983). - The possibility of these sorts of informal exchanges has been curtailed by some Institutional Review
Board (IRB) policies in the United States. So-called cold calling has been prohibited by some university
IRBs, which now require that researchers send possible interviewees written notification informing them
about the study before approaching them either on the phone or in person. This renders all conversational
interviews “formal.” Where instituted, these prohibitions have been uniformly applied to individuals from
“vulnerable populations” (e.g., children or prisoners) as well as to professionals, such as university profes-
sors or administrators of nonprofit organizations. See Katz (2004) for a discussion of the impacts of local
implementation of IRB policies on field research, as well as the IRB-related essays in the special issue of
Qualitative Inquiry (Cannella and Lincoln 2004), especially Nelson (2004) and Lincoln and Tierney (2004). - For an interesting fictionalized account, see S. George’s (2002) historical novel, The Beekeeper’s
Pupil, which tells the story of Francis Huber’s curiosity, theorizing, and hours of observation that led to his
scientific treatise on bee behavior, published in French in 1792. - We do not mean by this a criticism of Hopf’s work, which we find very creative in its use of materials.
- When it comes to creativity and imagination about “data,” Webb et al.’s 1966 text, Unobtrusive
Measures, merits recognition. Yet it is not clear that scholars have much taken up their advice. That failure
may be due in part to the methodologically positivist underpinnings of their text—particularly evident in the
change in title in the 1981 edition to Nonreactive Measures—emphasizing a classically positivist concern
that the researcher may be a “contaminant.” Based on such presuppositions, numerical data are the best data,
and, indeed, transforming data into numbers is the “objectifying” process meant to protect against the prob-
lem of scholarly “bias.” Thus, although Webb et al. encouraged researchers to think about data more expan-
sively, an admonition to transform “data” into numbers may be implicit in the book, and this may have
precluded its use. In contrast, Weldes’s call in chapter 9 for consideration of a greater range of evidence is
supported by her interpretive ontological and epistemological presuppositions. Data of various genres can
be considered and used by the scholar; interpretive methods do not presuppose that word-data generated
through reading documents or novels or viewing portraits must be turned into numbers to constitute legiti-
mate evidence. - Such an approach characterizes Murray Edelman’s analyses of political language, categories, and
numbers (1964, 1977, 1988), especially in the context of their usage in public displays or “spectacles.” See
also Schram (1995a) on narrating welfare statistics or Gusfield (1981) on drunken driving accident statistics. - For an extended critique of the assumptions about human agency, communication, and language use
built into survey research, see Suchman and Jordan (1992). - The allusion is to Alfred North Whitehead’s (1932) “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” noting the
attribution of concreteness to numbers or other entities that are, in fact, abstracted from the more concrete
experience that they are used to represent.