Paparazzi Ethnography

On energy financial research (and its analysts)

1/20: The image above is a newly created product by Evaluate E., an energy information firm on fashion street in the White Chapel section of downtown London, not too far from Liverpool underground station. The office space for the firm is located inside a refurbished factory space, where it continues in its tradition of serving as a kind of sweatshop of the twenty-first century, with knowledge workers focused on computer screens in their role as caretakers of a massive data base on oil and gas corporate performance.

The image below is the actual location of most daily activity, a space of productive calm where the people in the photo are now familiar to me by name and to some extent by certain observable attitudes toward labor and knowledge.

I have been coming down to Evaluate E. daily, occupying that empty chair located in the above image on the left. It is not that simple what this firm does. I can tell you in a sentence that they apply accounting practices to energy corporate data, so that clients can measure the individual (or peer group) performance across the industry. When you actually look at the data (accessible through client login), however, it is really hard to understand how they compile it, how they assemble it, and how clients find value in it.
First off, the analysts compile a lot of data, on topics ranging from Mergers and Acquisitions to the actual names of individual production licenses or wells in various basins globally. Take a look at the image above, for example, which is the same as the first image of this post, but taking place at a more “granular level”.

Granularity is a topic of great concern here in this office, and a lot of time is spent managing and producing ways so that clients can gain access to its particular forms. For example, again referring to the top image, you can see a lot of black splotches, almost appearing like a Roarschach test image. At a more granular level, the image directly above, we see the splotches in the form of little round targets.

Looking at the “legend” below, you can see that targets have particular shape to indicate what type of oil/gas well they might be. And in the above image, if you click on a target, a data box opens providing information on the UWI (unique well indicator) and other types of data, that you can click on that will bring you back to various parts of the data base for examining performance of the well, its operators, owners, periods of operation and the like.

As a final example in this series, directly below is the window that indicates the specific kinds of information on each well, and that you may click on to find out more details. You will notice, for example, a little graph design on the very left of each item. Pressing on that little sign delivers a new window in the form of a graph, seen directly below, which in this case indicates performance of a particular well.

Preciousity

Access to such an office requires a magic wand. While small by comparison to other items in the big city, it appears here below like a blunt instrument in the context of the delicacy with which my new colleagues focus their lives.

While out in the street, life goes on pretty much as usual.