Why We Like Pinterest for Fieldwork

by Phil Howard

Anyone tackling fieldwork these days can chose from a wide selection of digital tools to put in their methodological toolkit.  Among the best of these tools are platforms that let you archive, analyze, and disseminate at the same time.  It used to be that these were fairly distinct stages of research, especially for the most positivist among us. You came up with research questions, chose a field site, entered the field site, left the field site, analyzed your findings, got them published, and shared your research output with friends and colleagues.

But the post-positivist approach that many of us like involves adapting your research questions—reflexively and responsively—while doing fieldwork.  Entering and leaving your field site is not a cool, clean and complete process.  We analyze findings as we go, and involve our research subjects in the analysis.  We publish, but often in journals or books that can’t reproduce the myriad digital artifacts that are meaningful in network ethnography.  Actor network theory, activity theory, science and technology studies and several other modes of social and humanistic inquiry approach research as something that involves both people and devices. Moreover, the dissemination of work doesn’t have to be something that happens after publication or even at the end of a research plan.

Nikki’s work involves qualitative ethnographic work at field sites where research can last from five months to a brief week visit to a quick drop in day. She learned the hard way from her research for Making News at The New York Times that failing to find a good way to organize and capture images was a missed opportunity post-data collection. Since then, Nikki’s been using Pinterest for fieldwork image gathering quite a bit.  Phil’s work on The Managed Citizen was set back when he lost two weeks of field notes on the chaotic floor of the Republican National Convention in 2000 (security incinerates all the detritus left by convention goers).  He’s been digitizing field observations ever since. 

 Some people put together personal websites about their research journey.  Some share over Twitter.  And there are plenty of beta tools, open source or otherwise, that people play with.  We’ve both enjoyed using Pinterest for our research projects.  Here are some points on how we use it and why we like it.

 How To Use It

1. When you start, think of this as your research tool and your resource.   If you dedicate yourself to this as your primary archiving system for digital artifacts you are more likely to build it up over time.  If you think of this as a social media publicity gimmick for your research, you’ll eventually lose interest and it is less likely to be useful for anyone else.
2. Integrate it with your mobile phone because this amps up your capacity for portable, taggable, image data collection.
3. Link the board posts to Twitter or your other social media feeds.  Pinterest itself isn’t that lively a place for researchers yet.  The people who want to visit your Pinterest page are probably actively following your activities on other platforms so be sure to let content flow across platforms.
4. Pin lots of things, and lots of different kinds of things.  Include decent captions though be aware that if you are feeding Twitter you need to fit character limits.
5. Use it to collect images you have found online, images you’ve taken yourself during your fieldwork, and invite the communities you are working with to contribute.
6. Backup and export things once in a while for safe keeping.  There is no built-in export function, but there are a wide variety of hacks and workarounds for transporting your archive.

 What You Get

1. Pinterest makes it easy to track the progress of the image data you gather.  You may find yourself taking more photos in the field because they can be easily arranged, saved and categorized.
2. Using it regularly adds another level of data as photos and documents captured on phone and then added on Pinterest can be quickly field captioned and then re-catalogued, giving you a chance to review the visual and built environment of your field site and interrogate your observations afresh.
3. Visually-enhanced constant comparative methods: post-data collection, you can go beyond notes to images and captions that are easily scanned for patterns and points of divergence. This may be  going far beyond what Glaser and Strauss had imagined, of course.
4. Perhaps most important, when you forget what something looks like when you’re writing up your results, you’ve got an instant, easily searchable database of images and clues to refresh your memory.

Why We Like It

1. It’s great for spontaneous presentations.  Images are such an important part of presenting any research.  Having a quick publically accessible archive of content allows you to speak, on the fly, about what you are up to.  You can’t give a tour of your Pinterest page for a job talk.  But having the resource there means you can call on images quickly during a Q&A period, or quickly load something relevant on a phone or browser during a casual conversation about your work. 
2. It gives you a way to interact with subjects.  Having the Pinterest link allows you to show a potential research subject what you are up to and what you are interested in.  During interviews it allows you to engage people on their interpretation of things.  Having visual prompts handy can enrich and enliven any focus group or single subject interview.  These don’t only prompt further conversation, they can prompt subjects to give you even more links, images, videos and other digital artifacts.
3. It makes your research interests transparent. Having the images, videos and artifacts for anyone to see is a way for us to show what we are doing.  Anyone with interest in the project and the board link is privy to our research goals. Our Pinterest page may be far less complicated than many of our other efforts to explain our work to a general audience.
4. You can disseminate as you go.  If you get the content flow right, you can tell people about your research as you are doing it.  Letting people know about what you are working on is always a good career strategy.  Giving people images rather than article abstracts and draft chapters gives them something to visualize and improves the ambient contact with your research community
5. It makes digital artifacts more permanent. As long as you keep your Pinterest, what you have gathered can become a stable resource for anyone interested in your subjects. As sites and material artifacts change, what you have gathered offers a permanent and easily accessible snapshot of a particular moment of inquiry for posterity.

Pinterest Wish-list

One of us is a Windows Phone user (yes really) and it would be great if there was a real Pinterest app for the Windows Phone. One touch integration from the iPhone, much like Twitter, Facebook, and Flicker from the camera roll would be great (though there is an easy hack).

We wish it would be easier to have open, collaborative boards. Right now, the only person who can add to a board is you, at least at first.  You can invite other people to join a “group board” via email, but Pinterest does not have open boards that allow anyone with a board link to add content.

Here’s a look at our Pinboards: Phil Howard’s Tech + Politics board, and Nikki Usher’s boards on U.S. Newspapers.  We welcome your thoughts…and send us images!

Nikki Usher is an assistant professor at the George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs.  Her project is Post Industrial News Spaces and Places with Columbia’s Tow Center on Digital Journalism.  Phil Howard is a professor at the Central European University and the University of Washington.  His project is a book on Political Power and the Internet of Things for Yale University Press.