Leinaweaver Jessaca, Forrester Milagros Caroline
Anthropology, Brown University, Providence RI, USA.
Independent Scholar, London, UK.
Tapuya. 2022;5(1). doi: 10.1080/25729861.2022.2123635. Epub 2022 Oct 24.
This article analyzes the citizen-scientific work conducted by a Peruvian adoptee, co-author Milagros Caroline Forrester, who is collecting, archiving, coding, and analyzing the birth records of Peruvian adoptees she encounters through her ongoing review of FamilySearch, a depository of genealogical data run by the Mormon Church. Forrester's project resembles the personal birthparent searches conducted by many adopted people, but at another scale: becoming "citizen science" through an enlargement of the sample size to hundreds of cases, an analytic approach to the form of each document and what meta-communicative data the form provides, and a determination of the implications and significance of the synthesized results. In her research with birth registries, Forrester was inspired by scientific methodologies in the social sciences, including database creation, management, and analysis, and open coding of textual artifacts. This article shows that the nuance that laypeople bring to personally implicated citizen science can lead to engaged and meaningful findings that reach communities not often heard from in scholarly research. Forrester's study is grounded in an awareness of her fellow adoptees' challenges in finding information about their origins, and ambivalence about the significance of those findings.
本文分析了秘鲁裔被收养者、共同作者米拉格罗斯·卡罗琳·福雷斯特所开展的公民科学工作。她正在收集、存档、编码并分析她在持续查阅由摩门教会运营的族谱数据存放处“家庭搜索”时遇到的秘鲁裔被收养者的出生记录。福雷斯特的项目类似于许多被收养者进行的寻找亲生父母的个人行为，但规模更大：通过将样本量扩大到数百个案例、对每份文件的形式及其提供的元交际数据采用分析方法，以及确定综合结果的影响和意义，从而成为“公民科学”。在她对出生登记处的研究中，福雷斯特受到社会科学领域科学方法的启发，包括数据库创建、管理和分析，以及对文本工件的开放式编码。本文表明，外行人给与个人相关的公民科学带来的细微差别能够产生有参与度且有意义的研究结果，这些结果能够触及学术研究中不常被听到声音的群体。福雷斯特的研究基于她对其他被收养者在寻找其身世信息时所面临挑战的认识，以及对这些发现的重要性的矛盾态度。
