'Emerging Forms of Open Research in Social/Cultural Anthropology' -- Interviews with PECE, EMERGE, and xcol

***Description*** This dataset contains full/un-excerpted transcripts of three interviews, and of a group discussion/peer review session, conducted with members of three initiatives in the field of social/cultural anthropology: PECE, EMERGE, and xcol. In March 2025, the authors (TWE/ASH/ML) conducted an initial round of semi-structured interviews with contributors to the aforementioned initiatives. The aim of the three interviews was to understand how each respective project enacts a version of 'open research' rooted in the practices and epistemologies of social/cultural anthropology. Following this, the authors shared the interview transcripts back with each respective project for comment/clarification. Next, the authors edited/excerpted selections from the three interviews, wrote an introduction and discussion section of the article based on the insights gleaned during this initial round of interviews, and once again shared this back with members of the three projects. This was followed by a group discussion with members of all three projects in September 2025, hosted by an editor of the special issue in which the associated article has been published. The latter conversation was designed as an experimental peer review of the article, which consists of excerpted and edited versions of the three interviews, as well as introduction/discussion sections written by the three authors summarizing the insights into open research gleaned through the initial round of interviews. During the conversation, members of the three projects were able to engage with each others' work, and included additional questions which the authors posed to the project members. The outcomes of this conversation were further incorporated into the article's conclusion, and the updated draft was shared back once again with project members for comment. The paper was submitted for publication at the end of this process. Prior to archiving/publishing the full/un-excerpted transcripts of all three interviews and the group conversation, ASH did an initial check against the original audio recordings to verify completeness and accuracy of the materials. Additionally, wherever possible, the transcripts were then annotated with footnotes which provide references to the literature, events, projects which project members mentioned during the interviews. Final versions of the full/un-excerpted transcripts were once again shared back with project members for a final round of comments prior to curation and deposit to DataverseNL. Project members were informed early on, and throughout the process, of the intentions to openly publish the full interview transcripts and provided consent via email for the final deposit. ***Article abstract*** This article explores some current efforts to reconfigure research practices in the field of social/cultural anthropology, in ways that intersect with the open research
movement but cannot be reduced to its local implementation. We highlight three initiatives—the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE); Experimental Methods for Ethnographic Research, Gathering, and Exchange (EMERGE); and xcol: An Ethnographic Inventory—seeking to make knowledge practices that are presently tacit or invisible in published research outputs more explicit and available for critical reflection. Drawing on edited excerpts from unstructured interviews and a group discussion with participants from the three projects, we find that the primary driver for these efforts is a desire to increase the generativity of research materials, rather than regarding openness as a means to ensure reliability or reproducibility. While directed at different steps of the knowledge production process, all three initiatives invite researchers to engage with some version of “light structure” for documentation, which aims to enable comparison and iteration while respecting fidelity to the source material. These findings offer insight into a distinctively anthropological culture of openness that prioritizes the proliferation of interpretations over the corroboration of fact.