In lieu of a typical preface that sets the scene for the story the reader is about to encounter, I will leave that information for the first chapter, and use this space to make some comments about decisions I made regarding the presentation of data in this book. My preface might be better titled, in fact, How to Read this Book. I have chosen to include this information up front because it contains some commentaries on the nature of knowledge production and the many, seemingly minute, but ever difficult, painstaking and consequential decisions that we make in presenting and interpreting our data.

Data Excerpts, Interpretive Authority and Subjectivity

Many data excerpts are long in this book and this is purposeful. While I am a firm believer in the importance of interpretation – after all, if we just assembled documents and put them side by side we would be assemblers rather than interpreters of data and producers of knowledge – there is an argument to be made for providing lengthy excerpts in order to let the data, and thus the people who provide them, speak for themselves (see Naples, 2003, for a discussion of ‘interpretive authority’; also Lather & Smithies, 1997). My approach to presenting data requires that each individual story and the data that it contains condition the way in which the data appear and condition the researcher’s decisions about how to present them. In some instances, it is only necessary to show three lines from a transcript or to provide paraphrased fieldnotes as evidence for a phenomenon; however, I have found that many instances necessitate the presentation of much more data in order to understand what is being said and how the context conditions it, or how it fits into the larger argument being made or story being told. Ethnography is largely about people's and institutions' 'stories', after all. For these reasons, the reader will frequently see long data passages in this book.