Operationalizing a QLR project on social change and whiteness in South Africa, 1770s – 1970s

Liz Stanley, University of Edinburgh, UK

Abstract: How best can the complex processes of social change be analytically comes to term with? The short answer, explored here in relation to research concerned with South Africa and its changing racial order, is to avoid presentist and cross-sectional ways of working and instead pursue analysis using longitudinal data of a kind that is as uninterruptedly joined up as possible. This article discusses a methodological approach in which, rather than a thematic (variable analysis) route into analysing content in a QLR project, a ‘formal analysis’ approach to selecting material for close analysis is adopted. The project is ‘Whites Writing Whiteness’ (www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk), which is concerned with an extensive time-period and large amount of data, and the focus is on how best to put into practice its intention to combine ‘big numbers’ (working on some very large family archive collections, each having many thousands of composing items) with close textual analysis of particular epistolary documents. Letters from the very large Findlay Family collection with thousands of documents, a group of some 190 letters and related documents by Elizabeth Price, and a small set of around 18 letters by Gottlob Schreiner, are discussed in teasing out the components of this methodological approach. The aim is that helpful pointers can be provided for other projects grappling with the issues occasioned by the very large amount of data that QLR projects typically generate.

Last updated: 20 December 2014