ANALYZING DATA 205historical analysis can illuminate the ways in which both disciplinary and professional practices
produce knowledge claims.
One might challenge, for instance, our decision to include history as an empirical social sci-
ence in this volume. In a sense, we are contending with the same taxonomic distinctions and
categorical inclusions/exclusions as university and college administrative units: Is history an
empirical social science, or is it part of the humanities? There is no bright line here, any more than
there is in designing other sorts of taxonomies with their categories; and, in fact, interpretive
social science—given its awareness of the crafting of language as itself both a way of world
making and a method of analyzing—comes close in most, if not all, of its manifestations to
blurring the imputed boundary between the two domains. At the very least, interpretive methods
bring elements of “the humanities”—historical analysis, linguistics, storytelling, and narrative—
to the study of social science “problems.” Given our orientation toward the political dimensions
of human life, historical analyses of this sort belong in this volume.^3
The methodological implications of conceptions of history are made wonderfully clear in
Ido Oren’s chapter 11. One conception of history dovetails with methodological positivism—
history as a repository of “facts” available for the testing of theoretical propositions in the
pursuit of universal laws of human conduct. Here, the researcher is characteristically “outside”
or “above” history—what feminist theorists have termed the “god trick” or the “God’s eye
view” (Haraway 1988; Harding 1993). But once the researcher is understood as inevitably “in”
history, a different methodological understanding follows—what Oren terms a “reflexive his-
tory” in which researchers contextualize and historicize their own research efforts. Oren’s chapter
tells his own research story, the steps he took to uncover the “intellectual unconscious” of past
researchers embedded in the contemporary political science operational definitions of the con-
cept of “democracy.” Read in tandem with Dean McHenry’s chapter 10 (part II) on the Banks
data set, Oren’s analysis offers yet another reason to be skeptical of the value of decontextualized
and de-historicized databanks.
Pamela Brandwein’s (chapter 12) approach to the production of knowledge brings together
two analytic methods, frame analysis and science studies, for the purpose of studying the con-
struction and reception of legal scholars’ truth claims. Frame analysis builds on the fundamental
interpretive insight that “meaning” is not self-evident but, instead, a complex interaction of sen-
sory stimuli and meaning making by human actors. In Brandwein’s application of this method in
public law, legal scholars’ baseline assumptions are seen as shaping “where they looked for evi-
dence of framers’ intent, when in history they began looking, and how they knew when they had
found it” (p. 236). Science studies open the door to seeing academic, including legal, research as
“work”—a social activity characterized by habits of thought, professional networks, and indi-
vidual and institutional competition. Combining these two approaches allows Brandwein to dem-
onstrate the ways in which particular interpretations made by legal scholars do not depend on the
merit of the argument alone, but rely also on connections to scholarly communities and their
associated resources.
Placing Samer Shehata’s (chapter 13) discussion of his ethnographic research in Egyptian
factories in this section highlights the ways in which ethnography is as much an analytic method
as it is a method for accessing sources and generating data. His chapter could equally as well have
been included in part II, showcasing as it does the evident “facts” (once ignored in the classic
anthropological literature) that researchers bring their identities to the field and that those mul-
tiple, complex identities affect what data possibilities can and cannot be accessed. His chapter has
affinities, as well, to Soss’s discussion there (chapter 6) of the emotional entanglements charac-
terizing conversational interviewing.