Developing QualNotes: A collaborative and cross-disciplinary ethnography

Abstract

Rarely do academics reveal the ‘backend’ of their research; the hours of labour invested into question generation, ethics compliance, transcription, translation, and data analysis, and in our case, coding. Further, when working collaboratively, the conversations that occur between collaborators seldom appear in final publications either. The development of the mobile application QualNotes, provided a productive digital space for collaboration across disciplines. In this paper, we use three vignettes to explicate the ‘backend’ of the development of that mobile application. We chart howour collaborative cross-disciplinary ethnography revealed the generative potential of thinking-with the digital and across disciplinary divides. This paper's contribution is in revealing ‘how’ we work using our disciplinary expertise, but at the same time at the edges of those disciplines too, where we contest, argue, adapt, understand, and, where we learn.