Developing QualNotes: A collaborative and cross-disciplinary ethnography

Rarely do academics reveal the 'backend' of their research; the hours of labour invested into question generation, ethics compliance, transcription, translation, and data analysis, and in our case coding. Further, when we are working collaboratively, the conversations that occur between collaborators seldom appear in final publications either. In this paper, we use three vignettes to explicate the 'backend' of the development of a mobile application, to chart how this collaborative cross-disciplinary ethnography reveals how thinking-with the digital and across disciplinary divides has generative potential. The development of the mobile application QualNotes provided a productive digital space for collaboration across disciplines. This paper's contribution is in revealing 'how' we work using our disciplinary expertise, but at the same time at the edges of that discipline too, where we contest, argue, adapt, understand, and, where we learn.