Annual Open Research Lecture 2023: Dr Matthew Hanchard, Qualitative research: Towards a new socio-technical imaginary of open research

<p><br></p><p dir="ltr">The deposit contains two files - a recording of the talk (MP4 file) and a copy of the presentation slides (PDF file).</p><p dir="ltr">The lecture took place on 6th December 2023 at the University of Sheffield. Details of the lecture are as follows:</p><h2>Dr Matthew Hanchard</h2><h4>Research Associate, Department of Sociological Studies and iHuman institute</h4><h2>Qualitative research: Towards a new socio-technical imaginary of open research</h2><p dir="ltr">From the 1665 publication of <i>Philosophical Transactions</i> onwards, there has been a clear sociotechnical imaginary - or collective vision of what science ought to be - centring on openness, sharing, and transparency. This openness enables claims to be disproved (or not), which lies in conflict with any closing-down of knowledge-sharing for commercial reasons. These contradictory forces of openness and commercially-motivated closedness led to developments like the internet and Web drawing on reconfigured imaginaries which include some elements of both. As a closed military defence project opened to a small academic community, and then the wider public, the development of the Web was steeped in a free and open-source ethos, albeit with private ventures reaping rewards of collective endeavours. In doing so, it followed a post-World War II configuration of pure science being state-funded or citizen-led, with applied derivatives left to a free market. Operating within this environment, and amidst a turn to neoliberalism, scientific research and publication met monopoly capitalism in the early 2000s, raising concerns over the future accessibility and openness of both pure and applied science.</p><p dir="ltr">By the early 2010s, the US Office of the President, European Commission, UNESCO and several funding bodies mandated that the research they fund must be published open access - a move to reassert accessibility, openness, and transparency, for non-applied science at least. This has recently been extended to data, posing challenges for qualitative research - often steeped in interpretivism, which makes data hard to verify. Building on the notion of 'renderability' to articulate claims to transparency from non-STEM research, in place of concepts of reproducibility or replicability, this lecture examines existing examples of open qualitative research to theorise the contours of a new landscape emerging around open qualitative research.</p><p><br></p>