3 thoughts on “Ethnographic Field Data 3: Preserving and Sharing Ethnographic Data

  1. Celia, thank you for this. Lots of great advice here. May I ask a specific, personal question? Notes from my dissertation fieldwork in 1969 were manually typed on very thin paper. The notes are faded and the paper is fragile. Do you know of services that could scan the pages and recover the text?

  2. Hi John! It’s a great question. My first thought is that if your notes are unbound, you could gently scan them on a flatbed scanner and then use OCR text recognition software (plus image editing software, depending on how faded the pages are) to recover the text. I’d also ask if you’re eventually hoping to archive your physical papers anywhere, or if you foresee using just the digital scans going forward. I don’t know of specific services offhand, but will ask my colleagues for advice & get back to you. Feel free to send me an email if you have more questions!

  3. A special word of thanks to Celia—and to Savage Minds. Celia and I have had a very fruitful exchange via email, adding details like the possibility of scans that produce 400-600 dpi TIFFs that can be converted to grayscale before heightening contrast in Photoshop. Wouldn’t have happened without Savage Minds.

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