Configurational Validity: A Proposal for Analyzing Ethnographic Multimedia Narratives

Multimedia ethnographic researchers along with those persons they study have an opportunity to become a virtual culture of inquiry when using emerging computational tools for data analysis. As partners, this community can build narratives which convey messages to and with their readers. As readers contribute their own interpretations, the original story changes. Layers build; stories change; patterns emerge; and inquiry becomes a reflexive practice. The question to be asked in this emerging world of telecommunications collaborative inquiry is: What is the story and whose story is it? This article will present a theory of validity for building more robust analyses of multimedia stories that can be built by distributed communities of inquiry. I propose that stories of multiple “authors” can be layered in clusters, or “constellations,” in such a way that larger, more robust theories emerge. I term this approach a platform for multiloguing. To explain the theoretical basis of this approach and a software application that has been designed to support this approach, I first explain the need for a theory of configurational validity. Then, I describe a tool called Constellations that has been designed to address how robust configurations could be used to build more valid accounts.