Less a census, more a lesson. A critical examination of the Gra.fo Reloaded oral archive inquiry results
From Firenze University Press Journal: Oral Archives Journal
Duccio Piccardi, Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy
Given its intersubjective and experimental nature, Casellato and Lampe (2023) recently described oral history as a trial-and-error endeavour in which learning from mistakes constitutes a fundamental opportunity for disciplinary advancement. Of course, this implies a research community willing to disclose its mis-steps and put them on the table for public discussion. Curiously enough, providing an account of a conference held in this spirit, the authors noted that the topic of oral archives was by far the least apt to be tackled with this mindset, and hypothesised that potential contributors were held back by a feeling of embarrass-ment, which is supposedly specific to this line of research. In actual fact, oral archives do not have a special place in the academic discussion on error and failure. As biologist Stuart Fire-stein (2016, 39–47) nonchalantly noted, the fact that failure is always around the corner in any scientific activity is guaranteed by science itself, i.e., by the Second Law of Thermodynamics as a formal explanation of entropy. In recent times, scholars from disparate research areas have strived to normalise failure as a routinary component of scientific life (Parkes 2019), valuing failure as theoretically interesting (Barwich 2019), and envisioning outlets hosting academic discussion of failure ( Verbuyst and Galazka 2023). Despite this trend, and possibly in relation to current practices of academic acknowledgement, researchers tend to lump together sev-eral undesirable aspects of their work, such as mistakes, errors, and even negative results and inconclusive findings, under the common label of stigmatised failure (Schickore 2021). This attitude has several drawbacks. Indeed, the inadequacy of policies and reward systems for the dissemination of errors has its social costs (Shur-Ofry 2016): given the centrality of tentative-ness in the nature of science (Allchin 2012), errors should be systematically explored in order to become productive (Schickore 2005). Moreover, the stigmatisation of failure might be det-rimental to the well-being of researchers, as the constant demand for excellence is one of the most widely reported themes in studies discussing mental health issues among those working in academia (Nicholls et al. 2022). The current state of academic publishing reflects the issues described here. An influential study by Fanelli (2012) reported a robust increase in the number of papers containing posi-tive findings between 1990 and 2007, to the detriment of negative results. While some studies comment on cases in which negative result papers are blocked off during manuscript review processes (e.g., Isbell et al. 2022), others suggest that this so-called publication bias acts primarily among authors, who are not willing to invest time and effort in the submission of works without positive outcomes (Franco, Malhotra, and Simonovits 2014; Van Lent, Over-beke, and Out 2014; see Dickersin 2005 for an overview of early data). Be that as it may, a recent linguistic analysis by Wen and Lei (2022) suggests that this stigmatisation of negativity is even substantially altering the way papers are written, with a constant increase in positive words used to communicate findings. Of course, various countermeasures are being imple-mented across several research fields, such as the constitution of outlets (Pfeffer and Holsen 2002) and recurrent workshops (Rogers, Sedoc, and Rumshisky 2020, III) specifically dedi-cated to negative results, or the implementation of preregistration or registered reports in the pipeline of academic publishing (e.g., Roettger 2021). Coming back to fields concerned with human voice, researchers in linguistics also stressed the importance of negative result disclo-sure: for example, Eddington (2008, 10–11) stated more than fifteen years ago that the acriti-cal dismissal of negative results is a “common pitfall” in pseudoscience, while, more recently, Kortmann (2021, 1221–2) suggested that “the courage — both on the side of the authors and the journal editors — to publish ‘negative’ results” can save the field from developing symp-toms of a quantitative crisis. While Kortmann’s overall perspective is one of cautious opti-mism, the wording of this passage might reveal that the fight against the stigmatisation of failure is still ongoing. Ideally, reporting something so intrinsically pervasive in any kind of human endeavour (Firestein 2016) should not entail any form of bravery. What you have in your (digital) hands is the first volume of a journal stemming from vari-ous roots. As Silvia Calamai already narrated in her Editorial, some of them can be showcased with pride: indeed, OAr Journal results from years of fruitful collaborations between linguis-tics and oral history in the Italian Region of Tuscany, and from a cross-disciplinary work envi-ronment (the one leading to the Vademecum per il trattamento delle fonti orali, Tavolo permanente per le fonti orali 2023; henceforth Vademecum) open to the pondering of the solutions for the academic acknowledgement of oral archive constitution (Piccardi and Calamai Forth-coming). Another one is in comparison far less desirable. Recently, we embarked on a new census of the oral archives produced in Tuscany. Despite our efforts to build the form follow-ing reliable pre-test procedures, and our dissemination plan including hundreds of addressees, the census spectacularly failed to reach its primary goal, i.e., to provide an updated picture of the documents conserved in Tuscany, by paradoxically gathering together fewer respons-es than previous regional inquiries. This result represented some sort of tipping point, which strongly led us to conceptualise OAr Journal as an attempt to incentivise the curation of oral documents and turn a deafening silence into a plural research community. Mine is the task of leading you through this particular root of the journal, which is indeed a very dark one. The aim of this contribution is twofold. Firstly, I will look at the barely accessible sphere of Tuscan oral archives through the peephole offered by our respondents’ data. Of course, the field of view will be very limited and any generalisation highly implausible; nonetheless, our census outputs may serve as the basis of future confirm-atory inquiries to be conducted once the lock on the door starts to slacken. Secondly, I will try to make these less-than-desirable results productive by interpreting their patterns with the aim of advising forthcoming actions for the preservation of oral archives at the National level. This second aim will hopefully pave the way to frame OAr Journal as a place of discussion on the negative aspects of research and against their stigmatisation, whether caused by field-specific embarrassment (Casellato and Lampe 2023) or macroscopic changes in the academia as a whole. In the next paragraph, I will expound the census’ underlying project (§2.1), the phases of its drafting, and our dissemination strategy (§2.2). We have already talked in detail about these latter issues in Piccardi and Calamai (2023, Forthcoming), so that the informa-tion reported here is expedient just to provide context, while adding original further reflec-tions on specific aspects. The reader will find the whole census form in the Appendix. §3 will then delve into the actual results. Given the overall goals of this contribution, I decided (together with Silvia Calamai) to follow the presentation style of Cappelli and Rioda (2009), who gave priority to the analysis of individual census questions in order to provide aggregate estimates; this will also allow for a more focused discussion, which will be presented in §4. Lastly, conclusions will be drawn in §5.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/oar-3343
Read Full Text: https://riviste.fupress.net/index.php/oarj/article/view/3343
