Composite ethnography: Collective encounters with emergent objects in the anthropocene
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper introduces a methodological approach we call “composite ethnography,” a practice of lab-based qualitative research that focuses on collaboration, materiality and multiplicity. Drawing on a series of experiments running a collaborative project on urban waterways with graduate students, we argue that composite ethnography offers a way to think about the emergent research objects associated with what is increasingly referred to as the “Anthropocene,” while also addressing some longstanding problems of ethnographic method. Loosely based in the ontological openness of STS, the method offers an open-ended attunement to emergent objects, and invites the formation of new relations. By building methods around trust in one’s peers, we suggest that composite ethnography is a way to tackle four long-standing issues in ethnographic research around temporality, disqualification, collaboration and form.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".