Practice theorists favor interviews and participant observations in their study. Using insights from anthropological works on bureaucratic texts, in this article we develop methodological tools to complement these interpretive methods of data collection. We suggest a way to trace practices by systematically looking through both the content of documents and their form. We probe this approach with an analysis of 408 diplomatic cables sent by the US Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 2005–2009 and subsequently released by Wikileaks. We draw on these documents to tell two related stories about diplomatic practices: the first about epistemic practices and how the cables privilege certain voices and types of knowledge over others, and the second about diplomatic culture, where the cables serve as evidence of the powerful socialization processes that diplomats are subject to. This contributes to International Relations (IR) with a new approach for systematically analyzing written documents to uncover international practices.

实践理论家倾向于在他们的研究中进行访谈和参与者观察。本文利用人类学对官僚主义著作的见解，在本文中，我们开发了方法论工具来补充这些数据收集的解释方法。我们建议一种通过系统地浏览文档内容及其形式来跟踪实践的方法。我们通过分析美国大使馆于2005-2009年间在坦桑尼亚达累斯萨拉姆发送的408条外交电报，随后由维基解密发布了408条外交电报，对这种方法进行了分析。我们利用这些文件来讲述两个与外交实践有关的故事：第一个关于认知实践，以及电缆如何使某些声音和知识类型相对于其他特权；第二个关于外交文化，电缆是外交官所要进行的强大社会化过程的证据。这为国际关系（IR）的发展提供了一种新方法，可以系统地分析书面文件以发现国际惯例。