Methodology

The Remote Access Archive is a community archive. That means it was made by a group of disabled people who use and care about remote access. Most of the people who have worked on the Remote Access Archive over the years have never met in person. We don't need to.

Our goal for the archive is to offer the "tip of the iceberg" of remote access. The vast digital world means that there are too many types of remote access in different places and historical periods to include them all here. But we hope that this limited collection will spark your curiosity and give you some ideas to explore.

We designed the Remote Access Archive to be very broad on purpose. We decided that we wanted to understand how disabled people have used technology for remote participation, both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This meant that we did not put limitations on time period or geography. This is one reason that this archive is different from a standard academic or library archive.

We used "crowdsourcing" for this project. This means that we put out a broad call for submissions. We advertised the project on social media and via email in our networks. We had many one-on-one conversations with people about what we were doing. We also reached out to people we did not know. But not everyone responded or had something to share. Thus, even though our call was very broad, there are limitations to the languages and people represented in the archive. We rarely excluded anything that someone sent to the archive, unless it was really not about remote access. 

We also adopted a broad definition of "technology." Technologies are tools that people use to help them do things. Technologies can be digital or analog. They can also be unconventional. A radio can be a technology. A set of directions written in a document can be a technology. A piece of media can be a technology. A group of people can be a technology. The things that people do when they get together can also be technologies.

The Remote Access Archive team does not endorse the ideas that are contained within the archive as objective facts. This archive contains "archival data." Archival data is a representation of someone's perspective or experience. Data is information, but it is not necessarily the same thing as a "fact." Archival data can include opinions, memories, or representations. These are necessarily subjective. If you are doing research and want to verify whether archival data is factual, you can look for additional sources that confirm its validity.

Types of Data

There are three types of data in the Remote Access Archive:

1. Oral histories: Aimi Hamraie and Kelsie Acton recorded oral history interviews in order to document people's memories of remote access.‍
2. Self-submitted narratives: Some people sent us typed stories of remote access. The majority of the self-submitted narratives are one or two pages long and document a specific experience of remote access.
3. Documents: The largest and most diverse category of data in the Remote Access Archive. This category includes videos, art work, photographs, websites and written documents. Some of these documents are directly held by the Remote Access Archive. Some of these we link out to.

We also conducted a literature review, with a particular focus on remote access outside Europe and North America.

How we Collected Data

Our first step was to put out a call for materials on the Critical Design Lab website, Twitter, and Instagram. We also emailed people. Here's our original call for content (includes ASL). Our call was very broad. We provided lists of the types of things we were hoping to find. We set a deadline for submissions and decided that we would include in the archive whatever we had collected by that period of time. This meant that the archive would be necessarily limited, and we acknowledge that limitation as built into the structure of how we did this research.

After we sent out the broad call, we also put together lists of people in the disability community who we thought would have interesting stories to tell about remote access and we reached out to them. Our list included people we knew personally, as well as others with whom we were communicating for the first time. We were intentional about making sure that our list included people with a large range of disability, race, and gender identities. From there, we used "snowball sampling." This means that when someone would send something to the archive, we would ask them if they knew other people we should talk to about remote access. Over the course of the data collection phase, the project team reviewed our materials for representativeness within the disability community and adjusted the outreach strategy accordingly.

How we Sorted the Data

Sorting the data was an iterative and collaborative process. When materials would come in, the team would document and sort them. All items were documented in a spreadsheet. The research team then read each interview or item carefully to assign keywords. The hope was that the keywords would help people identify sources more quickly. The researchers also hoped that the keywords would help make connections across the materials.

After the first round of assigning keywords, the team read over all of the keywords and thought about their meaning. Sometimes similar words or phrases mean the same thing, or have multiple meanings. Some keywords were grouped together or taken out. New keywords were added for clarity.

Because the research team was made up of people who identify as part of disability culture, their keywords at first assumed familiarity with disability. But then, the team thought about what keywords would be most useful to people who would use the archive, including nondisabled people or people who are not part of disability communities.

Carmen Cutler, supported by Amery Wyn Sanders, took charge of the huge task of tracking keywords and ensuring that our use of keywords was standardized across the archive. She also documented many of the questions that we encountered around keywords, and identified several more. Theses questions are documented in Keywords in the Remote Access Archive: a Small List of Big Questions.

Data Not Included in the Public Archive

There are many sources of data that we collected, but are not including on this website. This includes interviews that were embargoed and certain sources that were collected for the future, but are still currently available online. For example, there was a period of time when we thought that the website, Twitter, may disappear, and take a host of disability hashtags off of the internet. We downloaded thousands of pages associated with these hashtags. But for now, you can read them on X.

Workflows

Oral Histories Workflow

Document Workflow