Ethnographic document analysis: A guide to dwelling with documents

In this article, we propose a method for ethnographic document analysis (EDA) and outline the key sensibilities and processes involved. Despite the ubiquity of document data within ethnographic research, there remains few practical, methodological and epistemologically grounded guides for ethnographic approaches to documents. EDA offers a guide for ensuring ethnographic principles underpin the entire research process, from question design to writing up. Moreover, EDA breaks down the process of document analysis and offers eight specific areas of focus for comprehensively analysing documents. These ensure researcher reflexivity and attention to the multiple and contradictory meanings within documents, as well as their implicit narratives, aesthetics, voice, tone and mood, silences, genealogies of language, and social lives. Given the importance of documents in most research fieldsites, EDA can be a powerful and adaptive method in the qualitative toolkit.