ABSTRACT
In the course of this chapter we consider two further kinds of data to which ethnographic researchers need to pay attention: documentary sources and material artefacts. Both are easily overlooked. In recent times, there has been so much emphasis, in some quarters, on the study of face-to-face interactions, on encounters and situations, that other key features of the social world could be forgotten. For example, many of the social settings we study are self-documenting, in the sense that that their members are engaged in the production and circulation of various kinds of written material. Government departments and many kinds of other organization generate and consume huge amounts of documentation. These include reports on ‘cases’, financial records, rule-books, organizational charts, timetables, memoranda, and so on. These may be on paper or in electronic form, or both. And, often, there are multiple sources of relevant documentation for any setting or group of people one might study. Given this, we need to think of contexts as involving documentary constructions of reality (Coffey and Atkinson 2004): documentary sources construct ‘facts’, ‘records’, ‘diagnoses’, ‘decisions’, and ‘rules’ that are crucially involved in social activities (see Prior 2003, 2004). Moreover, this is not just a matter of words: images can be involved in this process too, as Ball (2005) illustrates in relation to the practical work of the police and road users on public highways.
