collaborative research...questions

I have now been to many squat events at which food was relevant, and my notebooks are lavishly filled with ink of multiple colors. But taking a step back and making sense of all of these notes feels to me like stuffing the comforter thing into the comforter case when it's all knotted up after being in the dryer and you're not sure which corner goes where and it's too big to spread out anywhere so you just have to grab each corner and hope you've got the alignment right, and somehow you end up with the case over your head and the comforter is all packed into one side but still manages to spill out partway and then you realize most of the case is on the floor and now you should probably go wash it again and start over.
Maybe this isn't so relevant to collaborative work, but the first question I need to deal with, I think, is how to actually organize my data and start to look at it through my framework. Maybe I should have started doing this earlier, but I was ambivalent because I was worried that my framework would unfairly influence or bias my observation. Still.
In terms of collaboration, then, say I come up with some characterization of how squatting culture is reflected through the ways that squatters relate to food. And say that both Cassie and Fiona also have some comparable sorts of characterizations in the terms of their own frameworks. But each of our frameworks is very different. Maybe we can couch our results in the terms of our common definition of culture. Even so, they might not have anything to say to each other; their conclusions might still be unconnected. Can we then just put these three characterizations next to each other and call it a research project?
I'm afraid there are so many conditions that it might still be too early to know whether these questions will be important or necessary. Maybe figuring out how to solve my first problem will make it clearer what kinds of questions will be relevant for the second problem.

public scholarship

Domke argues that scholars have an obligation to make their ideas and findings accessible to the public. I completely agree with this idea, and not just because many universities are funded by taxes. Thinking about this way too abstractly, if ideas and information travel from the World to the University, but not back again, then, for one thing, there's no immediate reason that the integrity of the University's reflection of the World matters. The implication of this is two systems that need not have anything in common, where all of the ideas or laws in one are completely irrelevant in the other. Consider a city and a university in a world where such a scenario exists. The city has long ago stopped sending people to the university or funding it, and the citizens live as though the university doesn't exist; in the university, the dominant theory holds that the city is a fiction created by philosophers who had nothing else to study. Both places can exist autonomously, which is fine, but I am going to make a value judgment and say this situation is bad. Don't contradict me.

Both Domke and Ellison speak about hope. This is directly associated with caring--with being invested in an outcome. Impartiality is traditionally considered the most objective, scientific stance. As we've been talking about in class, however, the scholar is never without bias, so perhaps the most objective position is one of open, authentic subjectivity. This is what I think these authors mean by hope.

In terms of my group's research project, this reading has provided great arguments for why it is important for us to make our results available outside of academia. I am also inclined to be more transparent about my own opinions about all this--still being careful not to let this become an excuse not to do authentic research. That is--and maybe I should really have emphasized this above--it's important to acknowledge one's subjectivity while still striving toward impartial research methods!