This timeline of research activities gives an account of the study in an episodic way, while also weaving together analysis across the activities through my use of coding and other commentary. For each of my early event-based engagements, I have constructed this narrative by lightly editing my field notes; by including artifacts such as field recordings, photographs, and preparatory or follow-up email exchanges; and by exploring my memories and ongoing interpretations.
These activities influenced my early thinking but are not meant here to be “officially” representative of the project’s formal analysis and write-up. I conceived these representations and analytic-documentary methods at an early and somewhat naive stage of the project with respect to my understanding of the time and effort necessary to produce the documentary proper (see below).
In addition to adding codes and commentary, I have removed identifying information from this data and my engagement with it. These techniques of protecting identity and respecting privacy and personhood include substituting participant, location, and organizational pseudonyms; excluding or editing photos that show youth participants’ faces; and sometimes removing excerpts and details that, in my judgment, either inappropriately reveal private information and experiences or do not add significantly to my understanding of Tapestry and the questions I brought to my inquiry.
As I reached the period of time for which I had consent to make field recordings with participants (October 17, 2019, and following, depending on the type of event and who was participating), this act of public analysis and documentation proved too time-consuming to pursue comprehensively. Transcripts and audio files of “outing”- rather than “memo”-length are much more time-consuming to de-identify and prepare for publication. At this stage, the Becoming Tapestry podcast—particularly Episodes 3 and Episode 4—must accomplish alone the work of “accounting” (Latour, 2005) for the project.