When anthropologist Cathy Small enrolled as an undergraduate in her own university ten years ago to do the fieldwork that resulted in My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student (2005), she knew that she wanted to protect the identities of her participants and institution by referring to them using pseudonyms. She called herself “Rebekah Nathan” (an excellent choice of pseudonym if you ask me) and Northern Arizona University “AnyU” (a play on its initials, NAU).

Small explained that she considered anonymity a standard anthropological practice and that she underestimated the interest her hidden identity would generate. Jacob Gershman, a reporter for the New York Sun, drew from the rich details she included in the book to unmask her and her university before it had even been published. Gershman wrote that, “whether by choice or accident, [she] also planted in her ethnographic study many clues about her identity[:] her university is located near Las Vegas, is surrounded by mountains, and has a hotel and restaurant management school.” The risk of my readers playing detective stuck in my mind as I started working through my own ethical commitments to my participants.

The organization where I did most of my fieldwork — a regional women’s weaving cooperative in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala that exports textiles to the U.S. and Europe — has a strong online presence: in addition to a website, it has accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. It has also hosted a large number of tourists, who have recorded their experiences in travel blogs, social media posts, and comments on travel review sites. These materials are typically available for public consumption (with the exception of social media sites that may permit varying degrees of access to their contents, like Facebook, which is an ethical discussion for another day) and present researchers with a tantalizingly rich source of self-presented commentary. However, this easy accessibility also makes it difficult to maintain pseudonyms for the organization and its leaders.

Why was it important for the cooperative federation to have its identity disguised? The board of directors had concerns on a few levels, the most prominent being concern about potential retaliation from members of the military for speaking out about the recent genocidal civil war in Guatemala (1960–1996), which is still highly contested. While the organization’s members spoke freely about their experiences in the war to visiting tourists, they wanted to control the audience and context of their testimonies.

The organization already makes its own decisions about how much information to share and withhold online, in negotiation with its international volunteers. US volunteer “Rosalyn” wanted to share some members’ personal stories of their suffering during the war on the website: “When I came in for a talk they were quite open about their own experiences. The one woman was telling us about how they burned her family alive in their house.” She interviewed the president of the cooperative, who spoke at length about the war and then said that she did not want that material to go on the Internet. Rosalyn discussed a couple of possibilities with the president, including focusing on the parts about her childhood and leaving the war out of the finished interview, or publishing the interview anonymously, without her name or town, and she opted for the former. In talking to tourists and allowing the volunteers to post certain stories and images, the organization is constantly weighing how much risk they are willing to take on, so I viewed my responsibility as mitigating any possible impacts of the stories I shared and using basic techniques to make it so that a casual reader would be less likely to be able to associate the name of the organization with my work.

Practically speaking, is there anything we can do to take advantage of the wealth of data available on blogs and websites without compromising our commitment to our participants? Asking a colleague about this issue, I realized that we had independently come to the same solution to incorporate some blog material without inviting the revelation of institutions’ actual names. We presented a few of the most enticing quotes from blogs, the ones we simply couldn’t let go, as interview material, to discourage readers from plugging the quotes into search engines and finding the original blogs. As a researcher, this is a somewhat unsatisfying compromise, because statements made in a blog, intended to be broadcast to an audience, have a different quality than statements solicited in an interview, and should be analyzed differently. However, our guiding principle has to be to restrict harm above all else.

At other times, I paraphrased what someone had said or deliberately cut out words to make it more difficult to search for the quote online. I also tried to use non-online sources such as flyers rather than web sources when talking about how the cooperative represents itself, and deliberately kept the web sources I used out of the final bibliography.

Once, when I was reading a dissertation about Quetzaltenango, I thought I recognized the organization where I was doing fieldwork, referred to with a pseudonym. The anthropologist cited a substantial amount of online material, and checking the bibliography revealed the organization’s actual name associated with its website! It seems likely that this researcher assigned pseudonyms as a matter of standard anthropological practice, counting on the relative obscurity of his research and site to limit the risk of discovery to the organization. This is the kind of pitfall I hope to avoid by using the strategies described above (and any other approaches you can suggest in the comments).

Scholars have pointed out that many groups and individuals may actually want to be identified by name, to gain recognition or aid in their struggles. However, we don’t always get to take the more straightforward approach of naming names. My goal here is to start a conversation about how to handle situations where our participants have explicitly asked to have their identities masked for reasons of reputation management, legal protection, or personal safety.

“This will be your office,” Dr. Bernson* says, unlocking the storage room near her office.

Tall wooden shelves frame rows of ethnography, gender studies, and area studies book, dog-eared dictionaries of minority languages, and obscure books she picked up in the field. A row of file cabinets faces the bookshelves, and in the back: two old computers for the graduate students.

One Tuesday, when work is slow, I unlock my office door and open the large file cabinet marked fieldnotes. Curious, I pull out slim tablets of lined paper, and discover the records of Dr. Bernson’s first fieldwork, some twenty years before: handwritten notes on conversations, dinners attended, interviews in halting tongue, new vocabulary, and reflections on her early research projects.

I flip through the tablets, and carefully put them back in the cabinet. Close the drawer. Lock the office.

For the next year, I work for Dr. Bernson to code her data, prepare a manuscript, translate online articles, and revise her existing publications. Yet I wonder what happened to the rest of her stories, the fieldnotes we take but never share. Will I someday inherit her notes? And what would I even do with them all?

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In this series, I’d like to talk about what it might take to safely archive and share Dr. Bernson’s—and your—field research. I’m sure this raises many questions/reflections, which you’re welcome to share in the comments.

The first, of course, is: why bother? Why even share fieldnotes?

I suggest we have an ethical responsibility to safeguard and protect our “data,” the stuff of our research—but also to preserve and share it at the appropriate time. Sometimes, we protect local communities by limiting access to information.

(Other times, we protect ourselves and our own reputations. I’ve heard from younger archaeologists that the practice of ‘hiding information’–and even withholding data for thirty years or more!–may help established scholars but may also limit the access of younger scholars to materials that might inform their research.)

There are many good reasons to secure our field data: the possibility that sharing could harm the people we work with or our own scholarly reputations, a lack of established guidelines, and a lack of time and expertise for us to archive both the content and context of our research.

Yet there are also many reasons to preserve and share our work: a desire to share stories from communities that may be ‘off the record,’ to memorialize people we have worked closely with, or to record communities, their constraints, and their ways of living in the world. We may want to help future researchers or those from outside our field to begin developing a broader view of current topics. And we may want to put photos, field documents, and stories back into the hands of those who first shared them with us.

In other words, archiving and sharing our field documents can at times be part of our responsibility to the people we work with, to fellow researchers and to the public. In this series, I’ll bring up some of the issues in securing, archiving, and sharing our fieldwork records–but also discuss why we would do that for ourselves and for future historians and social scientists.

Of course, these posts are only a primer. As an anthropologist-turned-librarian, I’ll remind you that you likely have a “liaison” librarian, archivist, repository manager, or data librarian at your institution. These folks could advise you on preserving and sharing field records. Getting connected with others, here or in person, is one of the best ways to begin thinking through how we can best care for our irreplaceable notes, images, interviews, and other field documents!