On Evidence (archival-ish perspective)

A lot of people seem to be focusing on the problem of evidence from case studies, so I thought I'd comment on this too. Interestingly enough, I just had to do a presentation on evidence as an archival concept. There is a really good article by Brien Brothman called "Afterglow" that discusses evidence, and where it resides (and whether one can even use this sort of language when discussing evidence). Brothman's article is really long, but his main argument is that evidence is not something that is intrinsic to records, it is something that is negotiated after the fact by those who use the record. Therefore, the evidence that they find depends on what they are looking for. This actually makes perfect sense to me - in another class we're putting together a video about classification and subject headings, and as part of the video we interviewed an artist who looks through archival images of women and searches for evidence of suppressed lesbian identities (this is a really simplistic way of putting this, she articulates it much better). The point is that people can approach these images for different reasons and find different evidence in them based on what they are searching for.

So how does this apply to case studies? Well, I agree with a point that Mike made in his post where he says that it could be easier for researchers to find what they are looking for in a case study because their view is narrowed. On the other hand, couldn't we say this about any research method? Interviews and focus group sessions can similarly be conducted in a way that just proves what you're setting out to prove. The same thing goes for content analysis, and surveys... When we're dealing with such an amorphous field as social studies, it's really up to the researcher to ensure that they are not working with blinders on. And I guess it's up to the peers to critically review the work and poke holes in it, as unpleasant as it may be.