ANALYZING DATA 209“READING” PHYSICAL ARTIFACTS
The final chapter in this section reiterates many of the themes discussed above as well as some
from part II. Like Pader (chapter 8) in her discussion of learning observational skills, Dvora
Yanow argues that researchers’ own knowledge of spatial relations is tacit and must be made more
explicit for research purposes. And this learning involves, as Shehata (chapter 13) also argues
about ethnographic analysis, recognition that “the self” is the primary instrument of data access
and generation, something that may be even more difficult for spatial analysis because of the
scholarly valuing of mind over body. Along with Maynard-Moody and Musheno (chapter 18) and
Ginger (chapter 19), Yanow emphasizes how power, particularly state power but also corporate
power, is manifest in built space, and yet, consistent with Jackson (chapter 14) and Bevir (chapter
15)—as well as Soss (chapter 6) in part II—there still remains the possibility of agency as humans
interact with built spaces, sometimes accepting and sometimes rejecting architectural visions.
Yanow’s analytic method involves “translating” bodily experience into words, many of them
from architectural and design languages but some also from theater and research on nonverbal
behavior. As with the labeling of sensory perceptions of color (Roberson 2005), she shows, with
numerous examples, that translation of spatial experience is culturally mediated. For example,
“up” (as in building height or office location) means higher social status in some cultures and
lower social status in others. And even in the same culture, the researcher cannot assume that his
or her individual experiences of space will be the same as those of others because those experi-
ences are constituted by the same complex of factors—gender, class, ethnicity, and so on—as are
operative in other arenas.
ADDITIONAL THEMES IN ANALYZING DATA INTERPRETIVELY
These chapters clearly demonstrate that “data analysis” need not be equated with or restricted to
quantitative techniques or equated with qualitative coding practices. Some of the chapters are
more hermeneutic—more concerned with texts and text analogues: Patrick Jackson’s analysis of
speech on the floor of the Bundestag, Mark Bevir’s narrative analysis of governance, Ronald
Schmidt’s of arguments made by proponents of “English only” in the United States, Clare Ginger’s
of the language usage in Environmental Impact Statement reports, and Dvora Yanow’s reading of
design elements in an agency’s buildings. Others are more phenomenological, focused instead on
lived experiences: Samer Shehata’s account of life on the shop floor in Alexandria is the central
example in this section of this focus on human life, with Ellen Pader’s discussion of the experi-
ence of housing densities in part II serving as another example. Steven Maynard-Moody and
Michael Musheno’s account is an interesting combination of hermeneutic and phenomenological
approaches: They use the stories told by cops, teachers, and vocational counselors concerning
their work with clients, students, and others as proxies for their actual lived experiences, drawing
on observational data to inform their understanding of these narratives.
The distinctions between these two categories are not exact. In treating texts as the physical or
material remainders of interpretive communities’ acts and their cognitive maps of these acts,
interpretive researchers combine text-oriented and act-oriented methods. In addition, the criti-
cism levied by critical theorists against phenomenology in particular—that it is overly blind to
questions of power—is not in evidence here. The one chapter that comes closest to an explicitly
critical theoretical position—Cecelia Lynch’s analysis of peace movements’ narratives—shares
with the others an orientation toward the indeterminacy of meaning, the need for reflexive analy-
sis of the ideas brought by the “knower” to the crafting of the research, and other elements. But it