Crowdsourcing Memories: Mixed Methods Research by Cultural Insiders-Epistemological Outsiders
探讨两位主要作者利用个人关系，对1947年印巴分治历史创伤采用混合方法（口述历史收集与统计分析）进行研究，反思内外部视角、质性量化二分法及“知情客观性”神话，并指出其经验具有普遍适用性。
This paper examines the role that the two lead authors’ personal connections played in the research methodology and data collection for the Partition Stories project—a mixed-methods approach to revisiting the much-studied historical trauma of the Partition of British India in 1947. The Project collected survivors’ oral histories, a data type that is a mainstay of qualitative research, and subjected their narrative data to statistical analysis to detect aggregated trends. In this paper, the authors discuss the process of straddling the dichotomies of insider–outsider and qualitative–quantitative, and address the “myth of informed objectivity,” and the need for hybrid research structures with the intent to innovate in humanities projects such as this. In presenting key learnings from the project, this paper highlights the tensions that the authors faced between positivist and interpretivist methods of inquiry, between “insider” and “outsider” categories of positionality, and in the quantification of qualitative oral history data. The paper concludes with an illustrative example from one of the lead authors’ past research experiences to suggest that the tensions of this project are general in occurrence and global in applicability, beyond the specifics of the Partition case study explored here.