Making Data in Qualitative Research: Engagements, Ethics, and Entanglements 9780367178871, 9780367178888, 9780429058240

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‘In this essential new volume, Ellingson and Sotirin ask: What do data actually do? The authors land on multiple pragmatic potentials for what data can mean, and they present multiple possibilities for the utility of qualitative inquiry. I cannot wait to use this book in my qualitative analysis seminar.’ Jimmie Manning, Ph.D., Chair and Professor, Communication Studies, School of Social Justice & Research Studies, University of Nevada ‘Ellingson and Sotorin offer a conceptually rich and action-oriented model of data engagement, a must-read for qualitative researchers in a wide variety of research areas. The authors present a bold understanding of data as made and assembled illustrated with engaging examples, practical advice, and useful strategies. Much more than a “how to” methods text, Making Data in Qualitative Research is a reader-friendly resource that advances qualitative research in creative and critical ways.’ Lynn M. Harter, Ph.D., Professor and Co-Director, Barbara Geralds Institute for Storytelling and Social Impact ‘In this compelling and thought-provoking book, Ellingson and Sotirin invite us to stand within and alongside data, recognizing its agency and power to become something new every time we engage with it. Instead of asking “What are data?” the authors ask “What do data do?” Unimagined configurations take shape when we discover that fieldnotes have lively careers, recordings remain in flux, enlivened by new meanings across time and space, transcripts are never innocent, alive with political, cultural, and reflexive possibilities, and digital data circulates and transmutates through and across borders. Every chapter offers vivid exemplars of published studies that reveal “data on the move”, helping readers to engage with and imagine possibilities for their own research. By dis­ rupting traditional representations of data, this book challenges each of us to become entangled, embodied, and vulnerable in our engagement with data and the imagination and playfulness it evokes.’ Dr. Patricia Geist-Martin, San Diego State University

Making Data in Qualitative Research

Making Data in Qualitative Research offers a generative alternative to outdated approaches to data collection. By reimagining methods through a model of data engagement, qualitative researchers consider what is at stake—ethically, methodologically, and theoretically—when we co-create data and imagine possibilities for doing data differently. Ellingson and Sotirin draw on critical, intersectional perspectives, including feminist, poststructuralist, new materialist, and postqualitative theorizing, to refigure methodological practices of data collection for the contemporary moment. Ellingson and Sotirin’s data engagement model offers a vibrant frame­ work through which data are made rather than found; assembled rather than collected or gathered; and becoming or dynamic rather than static. Further, pragmatism, compassion, and joy form a compelling ethical foundation for engaging with qualitative data reflecting the full range of critical, postpositivist, interpretivist, and arts-based research methods. Chapters illuminate creative possibilities for engaging fieldnotes, audio/video recordings and photographs, transcription, digital/online data, participatory data, and self-as-data. Making Data in Qualitative Research is a great resource for researchers who want to move past simplistic approaches to qualitative data collection and embrace provocative possibilities for engaging with data. Bridging abstract theorizing and pragmatic strategies for making a wide variety of data, this book will appeal to graduate (and advanced undergraduate) qualitative methods stu­ dents and early career researchers, as well as to advanced scholars looking to update and expand the scope of their methods.

Laura L. Ellingson is the Patrick A. Donohoe, S.J. Professor of Commu­ nication and Women’s and Gender Studies at Santa Clara University, USA. She is the author of Engaging Crystallization in Qualitative Research (2009, SAGE) and Embodiment in Qualitative Research (2017, Routledge). Patty Sotirin is Professor of Communication at Michigan Technological University, USA. She is co-author (with Laura Ellingson) of Aunting: Cultural Practices That Sustain Family and Community Life (2010, Baylor University Press) and Where the Aunts Are: Family, Feminism, and Kinship in Popular Culture (2013, Baylor University Press).

Making Data in Qualitative Research Engagements, Ethics, and Entanglements

Laura L. Ellingson and Patty Sotirin

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Laura L. Ellingson and Patty Sotirin to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-17887-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-17888-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-05824-0 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

Laura, For Glenn Patty, For my parents

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgments

x

xi

1

Doing data engagement

1

2

Engaging fieldnotes

15

3

Engaging recordings

33

4

Engaging transcripts

53

5

Engaging digital data

72

6

Engaging participatory data

87

7

Engaging self-as-data

Postscript: Inviting data possibilities References Index

108

124

126

155

Figures

1.1 2.1 3.1 4.1 5.1 6.1 7.1 8.1

Data engagement model Data joy and the errancy of fieldnotes Composing lively video data Reanimating data joy Composing lively digital data Composing lively participatory data Composing the monitored self-as-data Inviting data joy

8

32

40

64

78

91

116

125

Acknowledgments

We could not have written this book without the support of our academic community. Parts of this project were presented in the Ethnography Division of the National Communication Association and at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry; we appreciate the constructive feedback and encour­ agement we received from our colleagues. We further appreciate the support and enthusiasm we received for our initial model of data engagement, which was first published in Qualitative Inquiry. We modified the essay, added a figure and overview, and it has become the introduction that frames this volume. We further acknowledge and thank Chloe Coppola for her assistance with com­ piling references, Chloe along with Tavis Sotirin-Miller for their graphic design work on the figures that grace this book, Elwood Mills for his technical assis­ tance and Hannah Shakespeare, our editor. We want to thank Melanie, Shirley, Bob, Nick, Bill, and Lainey for the Ethnogs & FemNogs and the Annual Panel, through which we have developed not only our scholarship but also our keen sense of academic playfulness. We also wish to thank the members of the Organization for the Study of Com­ munication, Language, and Gender (OSCLG), who have supported this work since its inception and have shared their energy, scholarship, and friendship with us for more than two decades. Both of us wish to thank those who encouraged our scholarship and supported us personally through this project. We extend heartfelt thanks to colleague-friends working at the intersection of communication and gender studies who learn and laugh with us, especially Patrice, Carolyn, Lynn, Anita, MJ, Helen, Paaige, Jimmie, Patricia, Jennifer, Nicole, Jay, Maggie, and so many others. Patty: I wish to honor the memory of my parents and give loving thanks to my family including dogs, kids, siblings, grandkids, and stepmother. Fond thanks to Vicky and Diane who are my feminist sisters in our long-standing Gender Writing Group and to Jennifer, whose friendship is sustaining. My appreciation to my ACM partner Sonia and the ADVANCE NSF team. Thanks as well to colleagues, friends, and my graduate students in the Huma­ nities Department at Michigan Tech and to the well-wishing colleagues across campus who have been so supportive especially during my year as Interim Chair while this book was in process.

xii Acknowledgments Laura: I extend my deepest thanks to my colleagues in the Communication Department and the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Santa Clara University. My gratitude goes also to the SCU President’s Office, Provost’s Office, and the College of Arts & Sciences Dean’s Office for their generous financial support of my research. I thank my Department Goddesses Helen and Joni for their kindness and patience in reminding me so nicely every time I forget to do something. To my friends, with whom I am blessed beyond measure: Matt and Mary, Lisa, Connie, Mike, Kim, Elizabeth C., G’linda, Leslie, Eileen, Linda and Diane, Genni, MJ, Matt, and everyone in the amazing Wednesday morning coffee group and our Dining for Women chapter, espe­ cially Pauline, Sarah, Gail, Jeanine, Nicole, Deborah, Judy, Sheri, and of course, Barb and Pat, the ultimate hostesses. To my family, for their love and support: my parents Jane and Larry, Jim, Brigitte, Zac and Anná, Jamie and Katie, Mark and Diane, Miette, Eric and Elizabeth, Sam, Nina, Dennis and Becca, Aunt Joan and Uncle Alan, and Aunt Janice and Uncle Paul. Most of all, I could not write about data or anything else without the love and support of my life partner, Glenn. He makes me laugh and think, co-parents our fur babies Westley and Buttercup, and loves me in good times and bad, in a lot of sickness and in health, with a generosity that humbles me. We also thank each other for friendship, collaboration, and co-mentoring ever since we met in bed, when Patrice accidentally promised us the same pull­ out couch at OSCLG. We have practiced compassion, pragmatism, and joy with each other ever since.

1

Doing data engagement

The language of “data collection” is perpetuated by disciplinary and professional standards and practices, as well as a certain pedagogical motivation to make data collection practices teachable to each new generation of qualita­ tive researchers. Unwilling to reject standard data practices entirely, the two of us—like other interpretive and critical qualitative researchers—generally bracket metatheoretical discussion of what we really do when we “collect” data, side-step­ ping these epistemological complexities when reporting study results. At the same time, we remain keenly aware that researchers bring data into being—construct, build, craft, formulate, compose, fashion, concoct, produce—in short, we make them (Ellingson & Sotirin, 2019). Awareness among qualitative researchers that data are not objective, impartial, or transparent accounts of reality is not new, of course. In fact, most qualitative textbooks address the constructed nature of data. Geertz (1973) famously stated that “data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to … we are already explicating: and worse, explicating explications” (p. 9). Given this hermeneutic conundrum, critical and interpretive scholars have long resisted objectifying research “subjects” from whom expert researchers purportedly “extract” data and understand data as co-constructed between researchers and participants (Charmaz, 2006). Yet even these efforts fail to radically rethink data. Contemporary postqualitative researchers take a different tack and problematize “data” as an assemblage of human and nonhuman objects, and some reject conventional data analysis as inherently positivist (St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014). We engage this controversy over data by shifting the questions from “What are data?” and “How can qualitative researchers best collect data?” to the more contemporary, theoretically and materially framed questions, “What do data do?” and “What are the possibilities for ‘making’ data?” As a generative alternative to the postqualitative abandonment of the concept of data and the social constructionist bracketing of important epistemological and ontological issues while doing (and teaching) data collection, we promote a process of data engagement. Drawing on critical, intersectional perspectives, including feminist, poststructuralist, social constructionist, new materialist, and postqualitative theorizing, we refigure methodological practices focused on data. Our goal is to parse the differing concerns of contemporary perspectives both to sensitize

2

Doing data engagement

researchers to why these issues matter and to provide a basis for workable choices. Moreover, we contend that data engagement entails ethical commitments to pragmatism, compassion, and joy.

What have data been doing? We quickly sketch data’s (re)configuration within several different approaches that make up the interdisciplinary field of qualitative inquiry. Striving neither to distort nor essentialize any one approach, we nonetheless gloss significant differences both within and between approaches in order to describe metho­ dological traditions through which data persist (or not). (Post)positivist proof In conventional parlance, data are materials and artifacts that form the basis for qualitative analysis and support for knowledge claims. Data may include interview recordings and transcripts, open-ended survey responses, ethnographic fieldnotes, and discursive/material objects such as drawings, clothing, photos, or organiza­ tional memoranda. Traditionally, supposedly detached qualitative researchers collected data through processes believed to extract little truth-nuggets from “subjects,” generally through interviewing, open-ended surveys, and ethnographic observation (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2019). As long as the data nuggets were collected properly (i.e., standards for validity were met), then scientific claims about defined populations could be made, without contamination by researchers’ subjectivity. The term “data” continues to bear this constraining positivist legacy that connotes the discovery of “some thing that one gathers, hence is a priori and collectable” and that “foster[s] a self–perpetuating sensibility that it is incontrovertible, something to question the meaning of, or the veracity of, but not the existence of” (Markham, 2013b, n.p.). Thus data have been framed as a point of embarkation for researchers’ quest to know. At first glance data are apparently before the fact: they are the starting point for what we know, who we are, and how we communicate. This shared sense of starting with data often leads to an unnoticed assumption that data are transparent, that information is self-evident, the fundamental stuff of truth itself. (Gitelman & Jackson, 2013, p. 2) Over the latter half of the 20th century, the objectivity-obsessed, positivist qualitative researcher became a popular straw person for ritualized censure, despite widespread awareness that few postpositivist researchers truly pledge their allegiance to pure positivism but rather embrace objectivity and generalizability as regulatory ideals (Miller, 2000). Of course, other qualitative researchers reject postpositivism as too wedded to those ideals over other priorities, and they have turned to interpretive approaches to qualitative data collection.

Doing data engagement

3

Partial and partisan: the social and critical construction of data Critical and interpretive scholars have long resisted objectifying research sub­ jects from whom expert researchers purportedly extract data. Instead, data are understood from these perspectives as co-constructed between embodied researchers and participants at specific sociohistorical moments, in particular cultural contexts and places (Creswell, 2017). Co-constructed data are acknowledged to be less well ordered, indeed more unruly and messy, than (post)positivist data (Law, 2004). Further, interpretive data are situated and partial (Haraway, 1988), reflecting the circumstances of their begetting as much as any truth(s) about the research topic, and entangled in relations of power (Foucault, 1980). These aspects of data are framed less as detracting from the value of qualitative data and more as descriptive of its nature. Moreover, interpretivists value these data as providing insights into partici­ pants’ sense-making about their identities and experiences, facilitating the recognition of commonalities—of language, values, choices, beliefs, cultural resources, narrative forms—across participants, and constituting valid evidence to support knowledge claims about a topic (Lindlof & Taylor, 2017). Inter­ pretive data thus form suitable bases for developing theory; making useful suggestions for professional practices, policies, or organizational structures or processes; and generating meaningful knowledge about a topic or group (even as limitations to the data—generally the small number and relative homogeneity of participants—are acknowledged) (Manning & Kunkel, 2014). Some researchers embrace multiple interpretive possibilities for their data, crystallizing their results into both research reports directed to specialized disciplinary audiences and translational or artistic renderings aimed at public audiences (Ellingson, 2009). Interpretivist qualitative research approaches to data overlap with those informed by critical theory traditions, including feminist, postcolonial, critical race, queer, and crip/disability. Critical theory informs how researchers understand data as reflecting particular intersections of power/ resistance, identities, and specific sociocultural arrangements and locations (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2000). Commitment to critical theory prompts some critical-interpretive researchers to seek out particular forms of data, including those believed to foster or amplify voices of marginalized people (Madison, 2005). Participatory approaches are adopted by researchers for whom sharing power (more) equitably with participants is a primary con­ sideration in data collection and often use arts-based research practices (Lennie, Hatcher, & Morgan, 2003). Participatory action research (PAR) in particular is intended to facilitate positive change and describe/evaluate outcomes of interventions into organizations or communities to promote social justice. Still other qualitative researchers reject data as impossible to reclaim or productively repurpose from their positivist legacy, prompting their declaration of a postqualitative moment.

4

Doing data engagement

Postmortem: personal narrative and postqualitative perspectives “The word data should be outlawed … Data are dead,” declared Denzin (2013, p. 355) with grave finality. Two intertwining branches of methodol­ ogy—postqualitative and narrative/performative—provide somewhat differing justifications for their rejection of data as a sustainable concept for con­ temporary qualitative inquiry. A general distrust of data (and data analysis) as inescapably modernist, formulaic, naïve, and pointless permeates postqualitative inquiry. For example, St. Pierre and Jackson (2014) contend that understanding data (e.g., interview transcripts and fieldnotes) as data can mean only conceiving of them “as brute data waiting to be coded with other brute words … [within] a Cartesian ontological realism that assumes data exist somewhere out in the real world to be found, collected, and coded” (p. 715). In such a framing, researchers “provoke discontinuation of data as we have come to know of it through postpositivism, empiricism, text books, research training, and other grand narratives … [and suggest] (un)knowing and (un)doing data” (Koro-Ljungberg & MacLure, 2013, p. 219). They argue instead for immer­ sion in and close readings of data assemblages through theoretical lenses. Heavily influenced by postmodern, poststructuralist, and posthumanist theorizing, this perspective urges that qualitative researchers abandon the concept of data essentially because it cannot be disentangled from its positivist roots (Denzin, 2012). Other qualitative researchers embrace personal narrative and performance as scholarship (Holman Jones, Adams, & Ellis, 2013). They offer similar critiques of data as those we noted above for interpretivists, although they resist not just data as objects to be found and collected, but traditional types of analysis and forms of representation as well. These scholars offer compelling justification for the value of narrative and performative epistemologies, methodologies, and ethics (Ellis & Bochner, 2000). They favor the term “empirical materials” (Denzin, 2012) that form the basis for autoethnography (Boylorn & Orbe, 2016), performance (Defenbaugh, 2011), and other personal narrative scholarship (Desnoyers-Colas, 2017; Paxton, 2018). These advocates typically do not refer to data per se; instead they talk about their lived experiences, memories, journals and diaries, letters, emails, recorded dialogues, and so on. Of course the boundaries among these approaches remain blurry. Some qualitative researchers do practice autoethnography as one part of larger qualitative (ethnographic and/or interview) studies of organizations or communities, and within such projects, data and personal narrative co-exist peacefully and productively (Johnson & Quinlan, 2017; Tullis, 2013). Both narrative/performance scholars and postqualitative researchers express unease with the notion of data because of its baggage. And yet at the same time, practitioners within these movements necessarily sneak data back into their projects under the guise of empirical materials. We contend that this renaming is both a meaningful choice and insufficient to disentangle the enterprise from the practices of observing, writing notes, conducting inter­ views, focus groups, and dialogues, producing recordings and transcriptions,

Doing data engagement

5

collecting participants’ poems, photos, and sketches, and so on. Refraining from calling the practices data collection does not stop us from collecting and curating both discursive and material artifacts from our own and others’ lives and making sense of them. We sympathize with those who point out the problematic nature of data, but we do not declare data dead. Instead, we concur with Koro-Ljungberg, Löytönen, and Tesar (2017) that “[t]he linguistic problematics and discursive inaccuracies associated with the label data do not stop data. Data continue” and serve innumerable practical and discursive functions (p. 5), even in postqualitative and posthumanist projects that critique the very foundations of data. We propose to “tangle with modernist data-zombies and post-qualitative data-liveliness and whatever lives between the two” (Duhn, 2017, p. 11; emphasis added). We suggest that what lives between the two can be understood as data engagement.

Doing data engagement Data engagement enables qualitative researchers to focus on what is at stake— theoretically, ethically, and methodologically—when researchers do (and are done by) data (see Figure 1.1). We acknowledge but move beyond commentary and critique to offer a viable framework for how to do data differently while navigat­ ing contradictory and paradoxical premises. The first three elements of our model argue that data are made rather than found; assembled rather than collected or gathered; and dynamic rather than complete or static. Following that, we describe three commitments that form an ethical foundation for data engagement: pragmatism, compassion, and joy. Making data Researchers bring data into being; we make them. Making data involves invent­ ing, imagining, encountering, and embracing lived experience and material documentation as methodological praxis. Making requires resourcefulness and participation: “[d]ata need to be imagined as data to exist and function as such … Data require our participation. Data need us” (Gitelman & Jackson, 2013, pp. 3, 6; emphasis in original). Data may become data simply by labeling and curating them as such. That is, data do not pre-exist researchers’ interpretive engagement. One way to conceive of the interpretive work of making data is through the practice of borrowing. Markham (2013b) invokes the concept of remix, which not only alludes to Millennial generational musical sensibilities, but also the critical notion of sampling. A remix conceptualization of inquiry emphasizes that any articulation of knowledge is a process of finding, borrowing, and sampling from any number of relevant sources, creatively reimagining how these elements might be put together, and then creating an assemblage that one hopes has significance, salience, and meaning for those people who experience it. (sect. 4.2, n.p.)

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Doing data engagement

Sampling in music refers to incorporating bits of others’ songs into one’s new song, where the sampled bit both retains the legacy of its origins and adds to the meaning of the new composition. In research, participants provide access (purposefully or unwittingly) to bits and pieces of their lives, and researchers sample these, hopefully with great care, leaving participants better, or at least no worse, than before. For example, Thorp (2006) borrowed from a school’s curriculum, time, and land to co-produce a garden with underserved children (and teachers). Thorp sampled their experiences through drawings, photos, journals, and enjoyment of the garden’s bounty. While acknowledging that participants’ experiences were affirming, Thorp’s project by no means resolved the many challenges facing this school and community. Another dimension of making data is its embodied, material processes. We make data in and through the materiality of participants’ and researchers’ bodies and material technologies (Ellingson, 2017). Qualitative researchers often conceptualize data as reflecting language and cultural meanings, yet even such seemingly immaterial “data ironically require material expression. The retention and manipulation of abstractions require stuff, material things” (Gitelman & Jackson, 2013, p. 6). Materiality plays out through the affordances of notebooks and pens, digital recorders and microphones, cameras and computers, as well as the capacities of the human bodies that intra-act with them. These technologies become entangled in processes of making data. Choices among material tech­ nologies are always already constitutive of data’s dimensions and possibilities, with often unforeseeable (positive or negative) consequences. For example, Wilin´ska and Bülow (2017) worried that a video camera might intimidate participants. They were surprised to find that their video camera (when used to record meetings) was neither intimidating nor irrelevant, but a material resource that participants commented on, responded to, configured their bodies in relation to, and appropriated to spark humor. Further, the camera was invoked to negotiate power relations among participants and researchers. “Video recording,” conclude Wilin´ska and Bülow, “does not need to be viewed as a potential threat but could be an invitation to tell your story or engage in meaningful production” (p. 349). Finally, making data releases researchers from the rigid, artificial constraints of postpositivist data practices. We celebrate a plethora of innovative and revisioned modes of making data that invite researchers to depart from convention. Data can be “wondered, eaten, walked, loved, listened to, written, enacted, versed, produced, pictured, charted, drawn, and lived” (Koro-Ljungberg & MacLure, 2013, p. 221), rather than merely found or collected. Like the larger “maker” movement that has influenced innovation in families, schools, and communities (Bajarin, 2014), making data may involve a combination of art and technology, creativity and skill building, hands-on work and reflexive practices. For example, soundscape recordings, soundwalks, and sonic maps (Jeon, Hong, & Lee, 2013); multimedia transcripts with photos and audio/visual clips embedded (Nordstrom, 2015); photovoice (Balomenou & Garrod, 2014); sketching and drawing (Literat, 2013); collaging (Vacchelli, 2018); expressive

Doing data engagement

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craft projects (Willer, 2019); timelining (Sheridan, Chamberlain, & Dupuis, 2011); and participant journals or diaries (Beckers, van der Voordt, & Dewulf, 2016) in video (Bates, 2013), audio (Bernays, Rhodes, & Terzic, 2014), or email format (Jones & Woolley, 2015). Ultimately, rich possibilities of making data emerge regardless of where research falls along the art/science epistemological continuum or within which metatheoretical camp it is situated. Assembling data “Data set” is the common, postpositivist term used to refer to material and virtual collections of data. Data set sounds tidy, orderly, and fixed (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013) and obscures the far messier reality of piles of fieldnotes, transcripts, photos and maps, memos and reflections, computer files, paper files, sticky notes with questions jotted on them, journal article PDFs, books, and all the other vital information and ideas that form cascading piles on our desks and computer desktop folders. We find it more generative to conceptualize data not as sets, but as assemblages that include researchers as integral aspects rather than owners (Denshire & Lee, 2013). We proffer the idea of assembling data. Researchers engage in the ongoing process of assembling data through the intra-action (mutual constitution) of researchers, participants, material objects, and cultural discourses within particular places and times. At the same time, assembling data is agential, such that it engages in intra-actions of assembling beyond our control. Assembling data configures “the bodies, things and abstractions that get caught up in social inquiry, including the events that are studied, the tools, models and precepts of research, and the researcher” (Fox & Alldred, 2015b, p. 400). Assembling data is characterized by rhizomatic configurations, generative messi­ ness, and entanglement. First, assembling data is not rigidly organized but rhizomatic, with contingent associations among data that exist in creative tension. To function rhizomatically is to act via relay, circuit, multiple openings … Rather than a linear progress, rhizomatics is a journey among intersections, nodes, and regionalizations through a multi-centered complexity. As a metaphor, rhizomes work against the constraints of authority, regularity, and commonsense, and open thought up to creative constructions. (Lather, 1993, p. 680) Organization within data assemblages is thus nonlinear and intersectional, retaining complexities within the generative rhizome. Nordstrom (2013) illus­ trates this rhizomatic complexity in her data from family historians in which material objects such as documents, photographs, and family heirlooms entan­ gle with participants’ bodies, stories, emotions, and sense-making. She calls the rhizomatic organization of subject–object connections and temporalities the “ensemble of life” and explains that this “is a provisional group of objects that defies linearity and suggests that a person’s life is open to new and different

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Doing data engagement

Figure 1.1 Data engagement model

reinventions and connections—a life” (p. 252; emphasis in original). Hence, Nordstrom does not “collect” and “interpret” the data of family history but intraacts with the ongoing (re)assembling of a vital and self-configuring “ensemble.” Nordstrom’s mode of engagement illustrates the vitalities of assembling data. Second, assembling data includes generative messiness. Rejection of the messy details of research is a legacy of positivism: “Let’s repress the mess: that is the policy. Let’s Other it” insist the (post)positivists (Law, 2007, p. 602). To construct well-ordered and compelling findings, researchers tend to deny all the messy stuff and impurities. Still the dust of the world cannot be shaken off nor the ragged edges trimmed—“data itself can never be clean and proper” (Shil­ drick et al., 2018, p. 49). Yet the messiness should not be taken as indicative of data as natural or raw; “data are always already ‘cooked’” (Gitelman & Jackson, 2013, p. 2). Messiness includes “an ethics of messiness and multiplicity; the messiness of bodies, the messiness of emotions, and the messiness of human experiences of movement” (Avner et al., 2014, p. 61). Messiness is honored explicitly by indigenous methods which may not assume individualism, linear time, or cause and effect in the same way that mainstream methods do (Smith, 2013). In an interdisciplinary study of heart transplant recipients, biomedical, social scientific, and artistic work evoked a messy assemblage focused on the embodied experience of living with a heart transplant from patients’ stories in creative tension with biomedical perspectives, as expressed in artwork, qualita­ tive research reports, critical/theoretical essays, and other forms (Shildrick et al., 2018). The generative messiness of assembling heterogeneities as data illuminated the pandemonium of heart transplants—the conditions that necessitate them, the

Doing data engagement

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tragedies that result in available hearts, the skillful, bloody surgical practices that invade and alter a body in order to sustain it, the mixed emotions entangled with the loss of an organ and commencement of a life on immuno-suppression medica­ tions, to mention just a few of the myriad complexities. Third, assembling data involves the co-constitutive entanglement of researcher and data. Experienced qualitative researchers can readily identify specific ways that doing qualitative research profoundly impacted their identities, physical wellbeing, and mental health (Kumar & Cavallaro, 2018). The line between researcher and data dissolves: “Data are (within, through, by, over, alongside, a part of) us: scho­ lars, researchers, teachers, mothers, fathers, friends, bodies, minds, particles, and different yet interacting and intra-acting bodies and materia. We work with data in various ways, ‘data’r’us’” (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2017, p. 5). Data can exhaust and exhilarate us, bore or enchant us (often at the same time), but they do not leave researchers untouched. Holmes (2014) offers an evocative example: In the playground on that day, watching this group of excited children, I recall a frisson caused by uncomfortable feelings in the pit of my stomach, tingling and numbness in my arms, sweating, a heavy sensation in my legs … . The data enter my body. It seeps in through my skin, my pores, my mouth, my lungs, my muscles, my stomach, my nose, and my fingertips. (p. 784) The intimate intertwining of data and researcher offers many generative possibilities for research. When we understand assembling data as assembling us, qualitative researchers acknowledge the agentic entanglements of bodies and actants in cultural context. Becoming data Data are less like pebbles researchers gather on a beach and more like the beach itself—constantly shifting sands subject to an ever-changing landscape of rolling waves, sun, wind, and human and nonhuman activity. Data engagement situates all data as dynamic, as always already becoming, and this dynamic state both reflects and produces agentic data. Data remain always in motion and in relation; they brim with possibilities for ongoing engagement (Daza & Huckaby, 2014). Data intra-act with the world in a continual state of flux; data do not passively wait but persist in an ongoing data becoming (Childers, 2014). Moreover, the data are inherently fluid and remain fantastically unstable: “Data will always exceed itself and evolve and trans­ form as it intra-acts with other data and research assemblages” (Ringrose & Renold, 2014, p. 778). For example, each time researchers listen to recordings or reread fieldnotes or interact with their sketches and maps and participant-generated art­ work, they encounter data within a different sociohistorical moment, in a variety of settings (e.g., office, coffee shop, home), with or without students or colleagues present, and in particular cognitive, emotional, and physical relations (Nordstrom, 2015). While the recording or transcript has not changed materially, its meaning(s) inevitably will have altered, whether in subtle or more dramatic ways.

10 Doing data engagement Reencountering data as researchers inhabit unique moments means that “through foldings, redoubling and reductions, data pasts projec[t] ahead to the data future. Fluid, dissolving, and multiple data could be a reprocess—actualized by being differentiated and differentiating themselves” (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2017, p. 3). Faulkner’s (2018) Real Women Run: Running as Feminist Embodiment vividly illustrates this point. Faulkner wrote about her own and other women’s experiences of running as feminist practice, self-care, exercise, competition, obsession, and much more. Folding and unfolding data in autoethnography, qualitative analysis of a website for women runners, interviews, and poetic representations, the running data run throughout Faulkner’s life, work, rela­ tionships, identity, and values, resisting rigid mind–body and emotion–ration­ ality dichotomies. By assembling and reassembling dynamic data relations, Faulkner evokes a compelling and multiplicitous engagement with the embo­ died vitality of running. Second, dynamic data are agential—“data have become much more than containable and controllable objects of research, acquiring a kind of agency … materiality [that] promotes liveliness of data and data’s spontaneity and ecology” (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2017, pp. 5, 7), an “undeniable affec­ tivity, or an undeniable force in shaping inquiry” (Childers, 2013, p. 602). Researchers do not imbue data with agency; rather, data weave their lively way in the world in and through and alongside us. This notion that data exert dynamic force challenges traditional conceptualizations not only of data as objects that researchers find or gather but also of data as existing primarily as a product of researchers’ agency. Paradoxically, despite commonplace use of terms that connote finding or gathering a priori data-objects, researchers simultaneously have held (at least implicitly) that data exist as data only because we have created surveys, experiments, interviews, recordings, fieldnotes, or some other mechanism through which we form data out of the unintelligible stew of daily living. Conventionally, data have been constituted through speech acts—researchers’ naming of data made it data. Alternatively, if data are dynamic and agential, then a posthumanist perspective renders data no longer bound to the labels researchers impose. Data may emerge as data within a dynamic assemblage of actions, technologies, discourses, and econo­ mies. Consider the phenomenon of global poker. Farnsworth and Austrin (2010) decenter humans in the complex web of the playing, viewing, and discourse surrounding this form of gambling in its online and face-to-face card games and tournaments. The technologies of social media, television, mobile devices, and the Internet construct the humans as much as the humans construct and utilize the technology. Discourses of gambling, card playing, professional and amateur poker competition, online gaming, mascu­ linities, and global capitalism (among others) are woven throughout the people and technologies of global poker. “The interaction of these technol­ ogies and their human participants constantly changes how the game is reported, played or watched” (p. 1121), as well as how elements of global poker are constituted as data, by whom, and for what purposes.

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Third, we attend to the radical specificity (Sotirin, 2010) of data’s becoming. Qualitative researchers often try to tame or domesticate the dynamism of data in order to make connections to and offer transcendent accounts of experience drawn on our analytic insights. But in doing so, we disavow the radical specificity of the data and our entanglement. Radical specificity attests to the irreplicability and provisionality of each generative entanglement with data. The specificity of such encounters defies the research mandate to generalize beyond the specific encounter or to evoke shared recognition of experiences or meaningfulness. Data engagement in this sense is not merely about re-present­ ing a given reality or experience “grounded in the data”; instead, our engage­ ments can animate new ways of thinking and relating by affirming heretofore unimagined configurations. Researchers can then be sensitive to those generalizations and resonances that we use, knowing that they always exceed the specificity of our entanglements. Sotirin cautions that the radical specificity of data is inherently incommunicable. She illustrates by pointing to two autoethnographic accounts of miscarriage. Both women narrate dreams of their lost fetus as data representing this experience. Yet these intimate dreams enact “an intensity of grief, pain, and desire that is not generalizable but that constitutes the intimate specificity of each experience and offers a different way of think­ ing about miscarriage” (n.p.). In other words, intensities and desires are the data of incommunicability that attest to the radical specificity of intimate encounters with what is not and yet to come. Committing to data Data are never neutral but always already imbued with discourses of power within local, national, and global contexts that perpetuate massive and tenacious social, economic, and political inequities. For these reasons, data engagement must entail ethical choices in the context of research trajectories. We advocate three commitments, or underlying ethical sensibilities, to infuse the making, assembling, and becoming of data: pragmatism, compassion, and joy. Our advocacy of these commitments is admittedly idiosyncratic and reflects our individual interests, professional and personal relationship as long-term co­ authors and friends, and disciplinary socialization. Further, these commitments should be understood to form a foundational or minimum ethical standard. We do not intend to foreclose the possibility of other generative commitments that enhance qualitative researchers’ capacities for ethical data engagement. Pragmatism One of the strengths of qualitative methodology is its flexibility and practicality; projects grow and change over time, analyses are iterative, participants depart and others arrive, grant money ebbs and flows. Pragmatism focuses on data’s possibilities for humans and agential objects, toward which research practices are “organized in reference to a future state of affairs … It is the possibility of these future ordered

12 Doing data engagement states that gives regular form to the phenomena” under investigation (Rosiek, 2017, p. 41). Thus an imagined future state actively shapes the objects and contexts being studied as well as researchers and their research activities. Making qualitative data embodies the pragmatic goal of balancing imagination with practicality, i.e., getting the job done (Saldaña, 2014). Researchers and participants make data in the confluence of opportunities, interests, availabilities, needs, and desires. We advocate framing pragmatism’s multiple and intersecting imagined futures as “democratic social reform” or social justice for marginalized and underserved individuals and communities (Charmaz, 2017, p. 34). West’s (1989) concept of prophetic prag­ matism makes explicit the material and contingent nature of research ethics and the need for responsive practices and processes of research. Ethics … would involve the negotiation of shared purposes [with humans and nonhuman actants] … . It involves listening, compromise, and imaginative reconstruction of our desires and identity in relation to the needs of others … . [T]his intra-action is far more than linguistic; it is tactile, tacit, enabled, and constrained by the material traces of past history, and dependent on a network of relations with others (p. 42) … . This is not simply a voluntary process. In some cases, the materiality of this world coerces, compels, or seduces us into compliance with its ordering activity. (Rosiek, 2017, pp. 42, 43) Shared purposes are not only a matter of abstract or internalized intentions but also of materiality and mutually constitutive humans and objects. Prophetic pragmatism has profound ethical implications for making data in ways that promote more just, humane, and sustainable relations. For example, a PAR study with middle school students utilized photovoice techniques to illuminate discourses of bullying (Schlehofer, Parnell, & Ross, 2018). A public showing of the students’ photos offered glimpses into the common locations of bullying, types of bullying, victims’ feelings, and possible bystander interventions. One particularly moving photo “specifically described ‘packing,’ a situation in which a student is harassed while sitting at their desk by neighboring classmates” (p. 11). This photo and accompanying metaphorical language evokes a pack of wolves circling their prey, aptly illustrating the behavior. These data provide a pragmatic embodiment of mundane cruelty, making evident that a future state of social justice starts in the data, rather than in research outcomes. Compassion We further advocate compassion as integral to data engagement. Compassion comes from the Latin com (together with) and pati (to suffer), and embodies a sense of feeling together with others’ emotions and experiences. Compassion involves specific decisions about how to treat participants, such that “[e]ach interaction should be fundamentally relational and visibly be an ethical moment of care” (Glass & Ogle, 2012, p. 71). This commitment goes beyond obeying Institutional Review Board (IRB) mandates to embracing a feminist ethic of

Doing data engagement

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care and managing a dialectical tension between caring for self and others (Preissle, 2007) through compassionate communication. Way and Tracy (2012) articulate compassionate communication as involving three elements: recog­ nizing (witnessing), relating (connecting with), and (re)acting (acting kindly) to others. An excellent example of embodied compassion in practice is compas­ sionate interviewing with Holocaust survivors, a particularly vulnerable yet resilient group of people (Ellis & Patti, 2014). Ellis and Patti present compassion as a holistic mind-body-spirit practice of caring for self and other that involves listening deeply, giving undivided attention, and authentic caring about another person as participants and researchers make data together. Researchers normally reserve compassion as an aspect of ethical obligations or generosity to people and communities. Way and Tracy’s (2012) compassio­ nate communication is valuable but privileges human participants. Our com­ mitment to compassion decenters the human and adds an ethical dimension to making data. Recast in a feminist materialist mode (Grosz, 2018), compassion is not limited to how we relate to other people but is an affective force entangled in human engagement with the material world. For example, an art–science collaborative study of the Shoalhaven River in southeastern Australia recog­ nized the centrality of belonging as an engagement among the human, organic, and inorganic worlds: “Embodied affective encounters and artworks invite us to be aware of the more-than-human others with whom we share the world … and reflect upon how we might more ethically co-exist” (Gibbs, 2014, p. 219). Making data with compassion fosters research attuned to complexities of material co-existence. Joy Finally, we propose joy as an ethos of data engagement. We do not advocate joy naively as a kind of research “high,” even though data encounters can sometimes inspire such experiences. Instead, we propose joy as a sensuous intra-action rendering data engagement a creative, ethical, risky, yet enticing practice. We distinguish the emotional designation of feeling joy from joy as an affirmation and intensification of a body’s vitalities in the context of becomings (Zournazi, 2003, p. 15). In a posthumanist mode, joy is an affirmation of the vitalities of life itself encountered in the becomings of data engagement; to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari, this is an ethics committed to “the enhancement of life” by enabling “some modes of life’s intensification and self-ordering” (Grosz, 2018, p. 149). While such an affirmation can be exhilarating, it can also be disruptive, over­ whelming, even unbearable and painful (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010). In addition, the perception of joy implicitly registers something “unassimilable” that escapes even the exhilarating rhythms of its emotional expression. This perception of affective escape is “nothing less than the perception of one’s own vitality, one’s sense of aliveness, of changeability” (Massumi, 1995, p. 97; emphasis in original). Hence, through joy, engagements among data, researcher, and event are thresholds that can initiate new thoughts, novel actions, and ways of being that were heretofore

14 Doing data engagement unknown or unavailable, bringing “a sense of vitality or vivacity, a sense of being more alive” (Zournazi, 2003, p. 4). Losing control of the narrative, becoming immersed in a rhizomatic flow of data, encountering insights into the awesome or awful chaos of life itself are risks inherent to the joy of data engagement. For example, Bridges-Rhoads and Van Cleave (2013) script a theoretical conversation as aporetic data. The data are their own comments about theoretical treatises (by Derrida, Deleuze, Haraway, and others) in an extended moment of aporia (a moment of impasse when deciding what is most just is imminent yet knowing what is just is most undecidable). Their conversation moves “in and out of paralysis, of confusion” and “it’s disorienting” (p. 269). Their disorientation becomes despair: “who gives a shit about doing justice to data?” (p. 270). Yet their despair is coupled with hope: “We call upon one another to keep data in motion by truncating, diverting, or extending aporias rather than treating data as passive objects” (p. 271). The joy of data engagement is in despair and elation, in data that resist capture and inspire thinking, and in research encounters with data that cross new thresholds.

Invitation Data live on. As situated in the data engagement process presented herein, data are made not found, assembled rather than collected, and ever dynamic. Moreover, commitments to pragmatism, compassion, and joy infuse data engagement with an ethical underpinning. Researchers can do data engagement in concert with any of the approaches within critical and qualitative inquiry or as a bridge that spans them. We invite colleagues across the methodological continuum to join us, particularly those who are intrigued by contemporary theory and still long to cavort with data. The following chapters offer jumping-off points for serious play with qualitative data. We present provocative concepts and exemplars that illuminate possibilities for open-ended and dynamic data engagements. To organize the chapters, we divided the data landscape based on the materiality of data and its associated technologies. Chapters Two through Seven illuminate the possibilities of data engagements with fieldnotes, audio/visual recordings and photographs, transcripts, digital data, participatory data, and self­ as-data respectively. Admittedly, the dividing lines we drew among forms of qualitative data blurred and shifted continuously, as data exceeded our cate­ gorizations in vibrant and generative ways. The distinction between digital data and the rest is particularly slippery, since most scholars do all, or nearly all, their research work using a computer, tablet, (devices with) digital audio and video recorders, and other digital technologies. Moreover, those data that are not digitized—e.g., arts-based research data such as sculpture, collage, or other paper crafts—are routinely documented using digital photography to create and store images of them. So nearly all data are digital in some way; yet we reserved the digital designation for data generated primarily or exclusively on the Inter­ net, social media, streaming services, and other cyberspaces. We close the book with a brief postscript.

2

Engaging fieldnotes

Tangling with fieldnotes What counts as “data” in ethnographic studies? The answer has become quite complex and changes depending on whose account is advanced: what counts as data now includes not only lived experiences of human actors but the material objects of life and the life of such objects, the intra-actions of human and nonhu­ man actants, the nonmaterial significances and their representations that animate collective trajectories, the sensory environs of a life, all aspects of the world that escape/resist representation, and the imbrication of the digital into all and sundry aspects of existence. What counts as data has proliferated along with the everexpanding variants of ethnographically informed research: multisited ethnography (Marcus, 1995), critical ethnography (Madison, 2005), feminist ethnography (Davis & Craven, 2016; Pillow & Mayo, 2012), queer ethnography (Browne & Nash, 2016), sensory ethnography (Pink, 2015), decolonizing ethnography (Smith, 2013), multimodal ethnography (Dicks, Soyinka, & Coffey, 2006), embodied ethnography (Ellingson, 2017; Thanem & Knights, 2019), affective ethnography (Gherardi, 2019), digital ethnography (Hine, 2015; Markham, 2018), diffractive ethnography (Gullion, 2018), new materialist ethnography (Fox & All­ dred, 2015a), non-representational ethnography (Vannini, 2015). Across diverse theoretical perspectives, we find that ethnographic fieldnotes continue to perform as data although what they do is both under scrutiny and open to diverse and divergent possibilities from situating the everyday (Pink, 2012) to provoking wonder (MacLure, 2013c). In this chapter, we distinguish between what researchers attend to in the field—experiences, events, materialities, presences/absences—and the fieldnotes that articulate and record them. While the former provides the embodied/ experiential/empirical basis of our research, it is the latter that count as data (Denzin, 2017). In this, we remain indebted to a fundamental insight made in the landmark collection Writing Culture (Clifford & Marcus, 1986): what counts as data are not bald experiences, intra-actions, the play of significances, or life itself, but the inscriptions made of researchers’ encounters and experiences. This is to say that we focus on fieldnotes because such notes serve as the data of fieldwork; these notes are the material traces, evidence, points of capture that

16 Engaging fieldnotes are then interpreted, coded, recoded, reflexively reinterpreted, reproduced in articles and reports as supporting evidence, and subjected to scrutiny. So in this chapter, we focus on fieldnotes although we admit a variety of inscription modes: textual, sensate, temporal, digital, affective, or multimodal. We raise the possibility that fieldnotes do not fix the data of fieldwork but are active, agential, and affective; in short, fieldnotes engage making, assembling, and becoming. Fieldnotes are the crux of observational fieldwork and provoke considerable angst among qualitative researchers—they have been decried as undisciplined, queried as the site of cultural reproduction, systematized in textbooks and manuals, and denounced in postqualitative screeds. We are not willing to abandon the practice of fieldnotes but at the same time, we scrutinize the expectations and work of these notes. As the data of fieldwork, fieldnotes are extractions, distractions, and infractions; they draw on and draw out what is happening, composing a partial version of lived experiences and cultural events. Further, fieldnotes are rematerializations, creating alternative forms of materialdiscursive entanglements. They are interpretive fictions that create cultural worlds anew, not as mirror representations but as crafted constructions. Finally, fieldnotes are not limited to notebooks, writing, or text per se. We frame fieldnotes pragmatically, as a flexible and playful form of data engagement marked by compassion and joy. At the same time, we keep our attention focused on fieldnotes as data rather than experiential, analytic, or theoretical moments in qualitative research. Twists and turns: the career of fieldnotes The career trajectory of fieldnotes in the ethnographic tradition has involved a series of disruptions, derailments, and reinstatements: from their origins in travel journals and colonialist diaries to their systematization by Malinowski and the early Chicago School sociologists to their deconstruction in the cultural turn of the 1980s to their resurgence in manuals like Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw (2011), and now their established presence in textbooks (Lindlof & Taylor, 2017; Tracy, 2019; Warren & Karner, 2014). What fieldnotes do has had a correspondingly varied epistemological status: from journaling and travel reports to writing “objective” documentation to mirroring events in the world to recreating observed ways of life to reflexively inscribing experienced scenes to performa­ tively “making things up” and becoming entangled with the nonhuman. The conventions of fieldnotes draw on postpositivist assumptions and a neoliberal emphasis on “evidence-based” research—a rhetoric and economics of accountability that advocates scientistic rigor, methodological checks and balances (triangulation, member checks, measurability), and expiration dates on data or shared data archives. Warren and Karner (2014) unwittingly underline this postpositivist affiliation: “Fieldnotes are the qualitative research equivalent to quantitative researchers’ ‘raw data’” (p. 109). This is reinforced, disciplined, and institutionalized in IRB requirements for fieldnotes—how are they stored, accessed, and destroyed? How do they protect confidentiality and anonymity?

Engaging fieldnotes

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In what ways do they minimize harm and emphasize larger benefits of the project? As these questions suggest, the regulations assume a postpositive model of research and data. The moralistic grounding of IRB strictures contribute to objectifying and regulating fieldnotes (Chin, 2014). The IRB imposes universalistic ethical principles of respect for participants (decisional autonomy and protection from manipulation), beneficence (maximize benefits, minimize harm), and justice (fair distribution and equal treatment). We do not suggest that these are not of value; yet they are morally rigid, cast historical values in a universalistic frame, and locate responsibility and authority in the researcher over participants. Chin contends, “IRBs present yet another manifestation of neoliberalism in the academy whose primary purpose is no longer to ensure ethical treatment of human subjects but rather to shrink the vistas of legitimate research to those forms that support the tenets of neoliberalism itself: the positivist, the quanti­ tative, the experimental” (p. 201). Patel (2016) and Sabati (2019) argue that IRB statutes are complicit in colonialist violence and extend “colonial unknowing” about research risks. Both call for an anticolonial research ethics of “answerability” that does not satisfy itself with consent forms and anonymity but demands responsiveness within and to colonialist histories, situated knowl­ edges, and alternative ways of learning. In this light, fieldnotes are not merely descriptive records but a mode of entanglement that involves ethics-in-practice (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004). For example, drawing lessons from their ethnography on refugee Burundians resettling in U.S. Appalachia, Lester and Anders (2018) suggest that ethics-in-practice complicate the form and practice of fieldnotes. They urge experimental and performative writing in order to defer closure, seek complexly contextualized representations, and continually scrutinize the limits and complicities of ethical decisions in the field. Fieldnotes are thus actively engaged in enacting/subverting ethical relations. This brings us to the question of what fieldnotes do. What do fieldnotes do? Conventionally, “data” are the objects of fieldwork: the point is to collect data by “writing it down,” holding bias at bay, and recording as much about the immediate experience and setting as possible. While the objective observer has been dethroned, most conventional introductions to fieldwork emphasize techniques for treating fieldnotes as data that are identifiable, collectable, and ultimately containable, controllable, and codable. The assumption is that rigorous procedures can assure data’s reliability, validity, and authority. The material and “quasi-methodical” processes of writing fieldnotes can create “a precious, precarious feeling of control” by mobilizing strategies of rhetorical authority to establish the central epistemological claim “I know because I was there” (Clifford, 1990, p. 63). Thus, what conven­ tional fieldnotes do is ground claims both to the fieldworker’s authority and to the veracity of the fieldwork account.

18 Engaging fieldnotes Clifford (1990) argued that there are three moments in the production of fieldnotes: inscription (a quick break in the flow of action and discourse to jot a note for future recall), transcription (writing down what they say), and description (a database for future analysis). Waxing culinary, Clifford observes, “Fieldnotes [are] less focused or ‘cooked’ than published ethnographies … inscription (notes, not raw but slightly cooked or chopped prior to cooking), description (notes sautéed, ready for the later addition of theoretical sauces), and transcription (reheated leftovers?)” (p. 58). All three moments—inscription, transcription, and description—are clearly abstracted, reductive, partial, and distanced practices, even the celebrated “thick” descriptions. The practice of “writing” culture into being entails retreating to a space apart from the scene to retrieve from memory and jotted notes a reconstruction of experience” (Emerson et al., 2011). In this, fieldnotes are awarded an epistemological integrity of their own: researchers are taught to respect the integrity of fieldnote data and avoid contaminating them with biases, sentiments, or personal perspectives, assumptions, and expectations. Yet even conventional researchers admit that the integrity of fieldnotes is a revered illusion. Conventional approaches advise fieldworkers to distinguish their own subjective feelings, hunches, and evaluations from the notes that accurately and in detail record their observations. At the same time, conventional wisdom advises “[e]xpanding and refining fieldnotes … is best done within twenty-four hours. The short-term memory is fresh; details can be recovered. After a day or so memory fades” (Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce, & Taylor, 2012, p. 83). The idiosyncrasies of sense perceptions, memory, biography, and chance are part and parcel of fieldnote production (Coffey, 1999, pp. 111–112): “The observer may mishear, misinterpret, or misremember … slippage is clearly inevitable” (Warren & Karner, 2014, p. 108). Thus, “Fieldnote descriptions of even the ‘same event,’ let alone the same kind of event, will differ, depending upon the choices, positioning, personal sensitivities, and interactional concerns of the observers” (Emerson et al., 2011, p. 9). Importantly, in their slippages, embodied errors, irrelevant details, unrepre­ sentable precepts, misremembered facts, and narrative over-reach, fieldnotes are epistemic agents, actualizing vitalities beyond what can be inscribed, categorized, or recognized. In the postqualitative moment, we are invited to think fieldnotes anew: not as repositories of data but as material and virtual affective encounters in themselves that affect resonances across bodies and boundaries (MacLure, 2013b). Our point is that what fieldnotes do as epistemic agents in themselves is not adequately addressed in conventional research protocols. Instead, analysis takes priority over what fieldnotes do as lively data. Finally, we hold that fieldnotes enact disciplinary power relations and research ethics. First, the seemingly trite observation that our final accounts look much more coherent and convincing than our fieldnotes or preliminary drafts attests to the discipline of research conventions, professional protocols, and publishing requirements (Tracy, 2012). Fieldnotes may seem idiosyncratic and personal but they are not; fieldnotes have professional, legal, as well as

Engaging fieldnotes

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interpretive, credentials. Second, fieldnotes inscribe power relationships that impact all aspects of the research process. The privileged perspective of the researcher is inscribed in fieldnotes just as much as the rich descriptions of researched others, places, and events (Lather, 2007). The charge that fieldnotes colonize the meanings, lives, and worlds of others remains potent and inadequately addressed (Patel, 2016; Sabati, 2019; Smith, 2013). The requisite claim to reflexivity in contemporary research acknowledges the possibilities for exploiting, misrepresenting, and damaging those we study; it is also a recognition of the reciprocal vulnerabilities and risks experienced by the researcher. Yet while it is common to confess standpoints and mea­ sures taken to minimize harm, these acknowledgements often fail to engage the power differentials that riddle self-reflexive stances. Pillow (2003) argues that most self-reflexive practices “are dependent on a modernist subject—a subject that is singular, knowable, and fixable” (p. 180) requiring the researcher to “know thyself”—or at least how the research self is framed—in order to witness/recognize/reciprocally co-construct the other. The promise of self-reflexivity is that confronting/confessing personal sins and foibles will alleviate the “tension, voyeurism, ethnocentrism” inherent to researching others’ lives (p. 186). She advocates instead “messy” texts and discomforting reflexivities that interrupt the reassurances of (self)recognition, witnessing, and truth-seeking with an ongoing critique that resists “the innocence” of narrative resolution (p. 192) even in seemingly vulnerable self-confessional and impressionistic admissions of failure. Reflexivity thus can engage with rather than discipline the messy liveliness of fieldnotes. Informed by these considerations, we frame fieldnotes pragmatically, as a flexible and playful form of data engagement that can accommodate a wide range of creative practices. We do not intend to dismiss fieldnotes as useful data but to call attention to what is at stake by considering what else is possible when we attend to what data do. In the following sections, we offer examples of making data as fieldnotes; assembling data in the encounter with materialism and the agency of things; and becoming data in affective practices. Our discussions are meant as provocations to engage with what fieldnotes do.

Making fieldnotes We begin by recognizing that we are always making and remaking data through the research journey, but beyond this fairly mundane observation, we add that fieldnotes as data are always “on the make,” that is, morphing into alternative configurations, shifting allegiances from our preferred insights toward something unforeseen, and inviting articulations and affects that take our rich descriptions off into new directions. As Markham (2013b) astutely observes, what counts as data morphs through the process of fieldwork. Data may serve as background information, what we need to know in order to understand what is going on. What counts as data may be emergent based on what/how we focus attention. Further, the data we inscribe or describe in

20 Engaging fieldnotes jottings or fieldnotes are recognizably only fragments of social life—and act themselves to fragment social life. Finally, in our reports and presentations, fieldnotes serve as supporting evidence. Textualization We contend that fieldnotes are always about making and not about documenting or reporting. According to Emerson et al. (2011): “The ethno­ grapher does not simply put happenings into words. Rather, such writing is a creative process … the primordial textualization that creates a world on the page …” (p. 20; emphasis added). Practices of writing, then, are critical. Nonetheless, “writing fieldnotes is something of a black art” (Boellstorff et al., 2012, p. 82). The epistemic morphing of data during the research process is marked by various forms of fieldnote writing: cursory scratch notes and headnotes in early stages; descriptive writing “rich” with unedited details included for their potential (often unactualized) insights; diaries, post-it notes, and scribblings to capture musings and speculations; diagrams, sketches, maps, timelines; drafts of accounts in conversation with theories and research literatures; revisions, startovers; descriptions from later fieldwork to corroborate patterns, redundancies, and understandings. Emerson et al. (2011) grant a special status to unedited, immediately inscribed fieldnotes: Writing recalls details of an experienced setting or event and preserves their idiosyncratic, contingent character in the face of the homogenizing tendencies of retrospective recall. In immediately written fieldnotes, distinctive qualities and features are sharply drawn and will elicit vivid memories and luminous images … . [T]he distinctive and unique features of such fieldnotes … create texture and variation, avoiding the flatness that comes from generality. (p. 17) The point here is that we too readily assume that writing constitutes and inquires into data; at the same time, data often escape the textualizations of writing, moving just out of reach of capture onto a page, requiring drafts and drafts and drafts. In this, writing and/as data create rampant connections, affective energies, and thresholds into becoming otherwise. So while fieldnotes materialize and textualize lived experiences and knowledges, data can escape and exceed two-dimensional, written accounts. Tanglements Even though fieldnotes are the dominant form of field data, there are sources of data that are not always amenable to the written record. Some researchers argue that the body too inscribes lived experiences in numerous ways: rhythms and mobilities, proximities and distances, constraints and freedoms, embodied recall and vacancies as well as sensory perceptions, capacities, and dispositions. Pink

Engaging fieldnotes

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(2015) takes the body’s affordances and intra-actions as the agencies of inscription in a sensory ethnographic approach. She argues for emplaced and participatory sensory learning as data—including biological processes/changes—as a counter to the dominance of cognitive/thinking skills. A sensory approach also counters the dominance of the visual—eschewing the seen for the sonorous, the proprioceptive, or the tactile environs as a way of “resensualizing” the claim to “being there” (Ingold, 2000; Pink, 2015; Stoller, 1989, 2010; Stoller, 2015). In this sense, the “professional apprenticeship” of traditional ethnography is embo­ died learning; Pink argues that embodied, emplaced apprenticeship links theory, practice, and sensory experience (2015, p. 107). While this is an important corrective to the epistemic hegemony of writing and the visual, it remains necessary that at some point even sensual ethnographers must “write it down” in order to “write up” their experiences. Nonetheless, the argument for sensory and embodied learning makes the case for what fieldnotes do: in their representational limitations and the inade­ quacies of even rich descriptions, fieldnotes as data call attention to what can be felt or sensed but exceeds the limits of language. Commensality offers an example: “Commensality as ethnographic practice entails attention and learning: sharing of tastes, textures, eating practices and routines can bring otherwise unspoken meanings to the fore” (Pink, 2015, p. 110). Hopwood’s (2013) fieldnotes describe embodied infant care, for example, the arm positions an adult uses for receiving or holding a baby or the fit of infant/adult bodies when walking with a sleeping infant; Wacquant (2004, 2015) describes making data through “carnal know-how” as a boxer; Broerse and Spaaij (2019) learned at the level of embodied play how football teams in the Netherlands practiced multiculturalism in public but co-culturalism in private. Embodied learning materializes ethnographic know-how and enculturated knowledge; embodied practices may yield that knowledge to writing but sometimes not. The liveli­ ness of such data can remain resistant to textualization. While we acknowledge inscriptions of lessons and knowledge on the body, we concur with Spry’s (2016) observation: “Words are imperfect, unfaithful, imperialistic, break bones. But they’re all we’ve got” (p. 210). In the end, embodied experiences and learning must be written as fieldnotes to perform as data. Imagination, affective recall, and sensory memory are also embodied and often recalcitrant sites of fieldnotes as data. The body’s inculcation into an immersive sensorium invokes sensory memories that exceed conscious thought (Ellingson, 2017). Such experiences may elude cognitive “head notes” but still inscribe themselves in embodied impressions and reactions. Pink (2015) cites a study of panic attacks suffered by Cambodian refugees exposed to smells that triggered flashbacks (Hinton, Pich, Chhean, & Pollack, 2005; cited in Pink, 2015, p. 68). This applies to researchers as well; note Ellingson’s (2005) visceral memories of her own cancer experiences as she encounters smells, sounds, and proprioceptive sensations during her fieldwork in an oncology clinic. Written up as fieldnotes, such data manifest their sensory reductions as active deferrals; they are inadequate to the robust messiness of the sensorium. They invite

22 Engaging fieldnotes imaginative, affective, and sensory connections, flows, energies; they invite the vital conjunctions of and, and, and…. In this sense, what fieldnotes do is never complete, but on the move, and on the make. Our discussion resonates with the Deleuzian refigurations of qualitative data advanced by MacLure (2013b, c). In two reflective essays, she engages with data drawn from a team research study of a grade school in England. The team did fieldnotes, interviews, and took photographs and video of children and teachers at this school. These are conventional data and MacLure and her team address them as such, reviewing these records and discussing their significances. At the same time, she points to alternatives to the epistemological status of such data. In one article, she engages an affective becoming-with-data as a “data glow” (2013c) involving an unanticipated resonance between researcher and a particular datum that demands attention and invites further consideration. In another, she argues for data engagement as a “sense-event” with the potential to “trigger action in the face of the unknown” (2013b, p. 662). In both, she calls attention to how coding, representation, and meaning can fail us, render­ ing data inscrutable. Instead, following Deleuze, she argues for “tangling” with the materiality of language, foregoing representational strategies that seek either deep descriptions or summative insights in favor of transversal lines running over the surface of events and sense/nonsense. The point is not that one should no longer make videos or write fieldnotes; the point is that the liveness of data is in the affective or entangled engagements with materializations or textuali­ zations whether as a glow or a strange idea or an imaginative glimpse into a new becoming. These possibilities do not forestall fieldnotes as data; they animate those notes. Digitized fieldnotes Contemporary fieldnotes may be handwritten but eventually fieldnotes are usually done on computer. Fieldnotes may include digital text, digital photos, audio and video recordings, screengrabs, or video screen-captures along with written (usually digitized) notes. In their studies of virtual worlds, Boellstorff et al. (2012) advocate additional digital forms including chatlogs—“one of the greatest boons to the online ethnographer” (p. 113)—screenshots, forums, and wikis, although “none are a substitute for fieldnotes” (p. 84). Fielding (2019) notates a long list of digital tools for fieldwork and fieldnotes: web-based blogs, wikis, and image-sharing websites as well as all manner of note-taking apps for generating data (e.g., web-capture and clipping, Optical Character Recognition, dictation), storing and managing data (creating notebooks with sub-levels), searching (within and across notes), memo-ing (annotating documents with comments), coding (by tagging notes and paragraphs within notes), linking (using hyperlinking from within notes), and collaborating (by sharing notes and using chat functions). (p. 764)

Engaging fieldnotes

23

But as Markham (2017; also Sanjek & Tratner, 2016) notes, the life of such digitized fieldnotes should raise more questions than it does: should every version of written, rewritten, edited, and annotated field records be archived? How should these materials be curated, catalogued, or incorporated into ongoing conceptualizations about what is going on in the field? Along with such data management questions, she points out another aspect of data making that troubles our unreflexive practices: the status of technological actants. For example, an informant may not be a person but a technological vantage, stance, or affordance. Further, while it is a common practice to supplement written notes with webcam footage, video recordings, screengrabs, or video screencaptures, there remains too little regard for the implications of how multiple modes alter, complicate, and fragment data engagements.

Assembling fieldnotes We open this section by calling attention to the politics and dynamics of assembling fieldnotes. Conventionally, fieldnotes seem to promise to capture, order, and affect closure over the flux of lived field experiences, reifying data as inert and codable, emphasizing possession (“my fieldnotes”), and elevating the importance of analysis. Instead, we embrace the liveliness of data and encourage assembling practices that engage the mess and flux of fieldnotes as data. The politics of assembling fieldnotes Fieldnotes are technologies-in-use that, as Adams and Thompson (2011) have suggested in a different context, are agential as artefacts shaping the existential and hermeneutic conditions of lifeworlds. They urge researchers to account for the agency of artifacts like fieldnotes, “given an artefact may be exercising a nonneutral influence over us—encouraging, discouraging, inciting or even coaxing the one who grasps hold of it to participate in the world in prescribed and circumscribed ways” (pp. 733–734). Making fieldnotes entails a human–tech­ nology interface that is seldom explicitly acknowledged; for example, Clifford observed that “a short essay could be written about typewriters in the field” (1990, p. 63). Currently, it is not typewriters but laptops and tablets that interface and mediate fieldnotes (see Chapter 5). In addition, writing fieldnotes entails assembling thoughts and memories and organizing inscriptions; research journaling is a practice of assembling rather than writing (Denshire & Lee, 2013). As Horowitz (2014) demonstrates, fieldnotes invite us to assemble a spectacle of the ordinary. Such a spectacle is double-edged: the ordinary becomes remark­ able—we see the familiar with new eyes, a goal of conventional ethnography. Yet a spectacle can also objectify, affect a panoptic surveillance, and subject the ordinary to a judgmental gaze. As we noted above, most researchers write on computers, and storing data on computer files automatically makes file creation dates and times, searchable titles and descriptions, even tags that can find, categorize, and recover files and

24 Engaging fieldnotes passages. Indeed, the allure of fieldnote databases and word-processing software packages is this capacity for creating categories and searchable tags. The devices that accomplish the infrastructural assembling of fieldnotes as data are mundane and often unnoticed as such. For example, Boellstorff et al. (2012) reiterate the conventional wisdom of chronologizing fieldnotes and annotating contextual information: “Fieldnotes should be dated and time-stamped, with a title or short description summarizing the contents. Annotating fieldnotes is important so as not to lose track of contextual information” (p. 85). The power of such organizing devices is another example of how fieldnotes take on a life of their own (Bowker & Star, 2000). Even before researchers do any coding, the use of dates, tags, and annotations draws them into the lure of understandable chron­ ologies, relationships, associations, affiliations, connections, contrasts, and oppositions. Further, organizing and classifying schemes are deeply historical, powerful, and moralistic; “We stand for the most part in formal ignorance of the social and moral order created by these invisible, potent entities” including the incipient links among our own personally tailored schemas and the elaborated professional and institutional systems that regulate populations (Bowker & Star, 2000, p. 3). Even the seemingly banal advice to notate fieldnotes with dates and locations imposes a chronological order and invites sequential relations. This infrastructural assembling is not innocent: “These systems are active creators of categories in the world as well as simulators of existing categories” (p. 321). In this, fieldnotes as data are agentic: they reterritorialize the intra-actions of encounters and events by imposing a codable orderliness. Working counter to these convenient, builtin systems of organizing seems both counter-intuitive yet can be potentially productive—we need to “explore what is left dark” and invisible by the work­ ings of sensible classifications and organizing strategies. Fieldnote assemblages Fieldnotes as an element in a research-assemblage offers more dynamic and entangled appreciation for what fieldnotes do. Fox and Alldred (2015b) define the research-assemblage as “the bodies, things and abstractions that get caught up in social inquiry, including the events that are studied, the tools, models and precepts of research, and the researchers” (p. 400). Engaging fieldnotes through the research-assemblage highlights epistemological flows and intra-actions: “Thinking about data’s relationality, movement, entanglements, or multidirectional episte­ mological flows—that is, knowledge from data shaping researchers and research, knowledge from research shaping data, and/or knowledge within the dataresearcher relationship shaping the data–researcher relationship, among others” (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016, p. 46). For example, in a study of a South Korean family trying to assimilate to life in Australia, Masny (2014) argues that data proliferate in rhizomatic connections that (re)configure research-assemblages: “What is filmed and what transpires at the interview is the sensation of connecting relations and affect/becoming that come together in the assemblage (ex. [sic] research questions,

Engaging fieldnotes

25

video recording, interview, researcher)” (p. 350). To engage these ever-reconfi­ guring dynamics, Masny promotes emergent vignettes, raw tellings, intensive and immanent readings, experiments in palpating data, and provocative questions. These are ways of engaging data that do not isolate “what counts as data” from the myriad connections, disruptions, reversals, and dynamics of fieldnotes in/as a research-assemblage. What is critical is that there is no analytic isolation of “raw” data nor the rational sequencing of methodological steps that isolate one step from another and set data off as collected, contained, and codable. Instead, the incessant rhizomatic refigura­ tions going on in meshwork, entanglements, and assemblages work on and through these data bodies (bodies understood as effected in intra-actions and not as pre­ existing entities). Notably, the entanglements of ethnographic becoming often actualize compassion and joy. An exemplar is Vannini’s compassionate and joyful “animations” of the mundane affordances of island dwelling and spatiality “as relational, affective, sensual, and embodied” (Vannini & Taggart, 2012, p. 228). Vannini (2015) advances a vitalist nonrepresentational ethnographic approach to the everyday world that “emphasizes the fleeting, viscous, lively, embodied, material, more-than-human, precognitive, non-discursive dimensions of spatially and tem­ porally complex lifeworlds” (p. 317). This quality of non-representational vitality accords with our sense of data joy; in Vannini’s words, “a certain impetuous ardor possessed by both inanimate and animate beings” that renders data engagement “constantly on the move, forever becoming something else, something originally unplanned” (p. 320). Data joy is evident in Vannini’s extended engagements with the vitalities, dramas, and (im)mobilities that assemble and animate “islandness” (Vannini, 2012; Hodson & Vannini, 2007; Vannini & Taggart, 2012).

Becoming fieldnotes Becoming-with-data We have argued that data are materialized in, yet escape and exceed fieldnotes. The concreteness of fieldnotes and the way that words appear to sta­ bilize the dynamics of data invite a misplaced dismissal of such notes as deadened and lifeless. Yet data resist such fixity; we argue that fieldnotes as data are becomings: “Becomings belong to geography, they are orientations, directions, entries and exits” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2007, p. 2). Rather than taking fieldnotes as evidentiary, passive, or codable, an alternative research sensibility might engage fieldnotes as becoming-with-data. For example, Koro-Ljungberg (2016) queries the taken-for-granted assumptions about qualitative data and the assumed relationships among knowledge, researcher, research participants, contexts, politics, writing, and data (p. 51). Responsive to data-wants and desires, she advocates “bend[ing] methodological norma­ tivity,” problematizing “data from/within/by the data” (p. 74). “By creating an opening for escape, room for uncertainty, and respect for humbleness, data could become more than an object of possession or a sleeping signifier for

26 Engaging fieldnotes reality” (p. 75). In this sense, data are always on the make; it is not a matter of engaging data but of becoming-with-data (Amatucci, 2013). Qualitative researchers have been slow to move beyond representational perspectives that retain both the presumption that fieldnotes capture experience and the aim of explicating the meaningfulness of human experience. Despite a growing understanding about the “liveness” of material things and co-existing others, human understanding and agency is given priority (Gullion, 2018; Haraway, 2016; Kohn, 2013). Vannini and Taggart’s (2012, 2014) “sentient ecology,” Koro-Ljungberg’s “data disruptions” (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016; Löytönen, Tesar, & Koro-Ljungberg, 2016), Bennett’s (2010) “thing power,” and Barad’s (2007) “posthuman performativity” offer possible alternatives to “writing [human-centered] culture.” For example, Banerjee and Blaise (2013) engage the air of postcolonial Hong Kong as data through three becomingwith research practices: sensing air, tracing childhood memories, and cominglings. They are attempting to “Take a contact zone perspective and consider the mutual coshapings and entanglements that happen in particular locations” (p. 241). The agency of air co-shapes the research encounter and comingles Hong Kong’s colonialist past/postcolonial present/global future; memory and experi­ ence; politics of efficiency and waste; and class differences: Just as the open passageway from an air-conditioned space to the out­ doors spurred Mindy’s childhood memories of “wasting the air,” by letting it out through an open door, so also the different classes (first and second) on the buses and ferries are the remaining traces of a colonial Hong Kong. (pp. 243–244) Through visceral inscriptions of embodied, imaginative, and discursive-material intra-actions and inter-actions, they follow data’s lead in order to rethink Hong Kong’s postcolonial situation. Fieldnotes as nomadic writing St. Pierre (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005) makes a critical shift to “writing as a method of nomadic inquiry.” While she advocates “thinking with theory” rather than staying lively with data, we find possibilities for writing fieldnotes differently. Rather than an interpretive (hermeneutic) inquiry into meaning, St. Pierre puts writing “under erasure” and turns to Deleuze to ask “What else might writing do except mean?” (p. 969). One answer is that writing reveals data that are simply unavailable, absent, even inadmissible in conventional research protocols: “dream data, sensual data, emotional data…” (p. 970). She argues, “these data might have escaped entirely if I had not written; they were collected only in the writing” (p. 970). Thus, writing it down begins to follow the rhizomatic movements and moments that escape conventional fieldnotes. Further, writing allows rhizomatic connections that are “accidental and fortuitous.” This is not a deep description of what happened in the field or

Engaging fieldnotes

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with the research participants, nor is it a systematic inquiry into the mean­ ingfulness of lived experiences. Rather, this is “postrepresentational writing” that involves “a politics and ethics of difficulty” (p. 972) because the usual reassurances in fieldnotes about meaningful insights, disciplinary conventions, and authoritative authorial stance are undone. Instead, writing enquires into “possibilities for just and ethical encounters with alterity” (including the researcher’s alterities) that create new conceptions of “relations less impover­ ished than the ones we have thus far imagined and lived” (p. 972). Writing as nomadic offers an unruly and intense engagement with the liveliness of fieldnotes and encourages lines of flight and flights of fancy. Fieldnotes as nomadic writing is what Löytönen, Koro-Ljungberg, Carlson, Orange, and Cruz (2015) did at an academic conference in Las Vegas. Their “pink writing experiment” was a collaborative, unplanned, and incessantly unfolding assemblage of difference involving “percepts and affects, thoughts and feelings, senses, connections, and theoretical (re)conceptualizations within diverse research events and encounters” (p. 24). Each author walked through the conference space with the same questions, among them: “Where are you? What is happening? What is moving/changing/emerging? What do you see/hear/smell/feel/sense? … How can you activate the space, so as to reactivate your body and write with your body, in its many experiential dimensions?” (p. 27). The resulting fieldnotes were encounters open to “surprise, movement, and the unexpected” (p. 26) that invite the reader to “follow the adventures, the haphazard choice of roads, the serendipi­ tous detours, the nomadic wanderings and zigzagging lines of textual flights” (p. 28). Several encounters with a pink flamingo inspired collaborative rhizomatic flights of fancy, lines of flight from the orderliness and sense of conventional fieldnotes: Self inspector, one-legged performer; closing oneself within oneself. Subject hides underneath oneself. No heads but only one leg and pink feathers. Enormous body weighing on one thin leg. A qualitative miracle! Are quali­ tative researchers wrapping oneself around oneself, producing knowledge for oneself and for one’s own purposes? Pink flamingos move in groups and synchronize their movements collectively, opening legs and spreading their webbed foot and moving wings simultaneously. Flamingos moving-dancing finding connections and rhythm. Pink flamingos with dark shadows. Pink research with qualitative flamingos. What does qualitative do in qualitative research? Does qualitative quality focus on pinkness, moving structures, or hidden elements? Can research be pink? Colors, tastes, sounds, tactics and different senses? What do qualitative flamingos do? Think pink! Spread the Hope. Find the Cure. (pp. 27–28) The researchers/writers wonder: “Is this writing ‘fieldnotes’ or ‘data’? Is writing what data does?” Their final comment on writing in media res considers what fieldnotes do as a “less purified research practice”: “focusing on movements and embodied encounters with/in spaces and places, and jointly sharing these with others in writing might open up possibilities … for seeing and sensing

28 Engaging fieldnotes differently through accidental encounter” (p. 40). What fieldnotes do as nomadic writing engages lines of flight and fancy and what we have called joy in the research encounter.

Data-on-the-move Multimodal fieldnotes Various researchers have played with the potential of multimodal fieldnotes. We address some of these practices here as examples of material data engagement but especially to show the possibility of pragmatic and compassionate ethical commitments as integral to data practices. Elliott (2017) extols the “anthropologist as writer/artist/creator/poet/blogger” (p. 37) and advocates imaginative fieldnotes that play with both the form and content including “micro-writing” in tweets and text messages, poetic passages, drawings, and animations. She points out that such imaginative variations are differently embodied and performative; each attends differently to the world (p. 31). Based on their multimodal ethnography at an interactive science discovery center, Dicks et al. (2006) propose “the fusion of differently mediated forms into new, ‘multi-semiotic’ modes” (p. 77), arguing that multisensory ensembles in the field need to be considered in multimodal datarecords (see also Dicks, 2013). They contend that while perception is inherently multimodal, data records are more impoverished, limited by the affordances of technologies-in-use (pp. 77–78). Working against such limitations, they propose a pragmatic approach that enjoins the limitations of different data modes: The media available to do this—from pen to video camera—are much more restricted than those occurring in the field. Video footage, for example, limits the information recorded to that amenable to audio-capture and camera-work. Fieldnotes limit it to writing. (p. 78) Likewise, Pink (2015) advocates multisensorial, multimodal data engagement afforded by the different intensities of different media. She notes that whereas transcripts convey reflexive articulations made by respondents, photographs index sensory, material, and social relations that spark remembered moments. Similarly, cursory notes are reminders that can recall embodied memories and imaginatively return a researcher to a place, time, or event (pp. 190–191). These mediated affordances for fieldnotes are readily apparent in the use of pho­ tography as “a form of ethnographic note taking—rather than a way of visually recording data” (Pink, 2011, p. 272; see also Hinthorne, 2014). Like fieldnotes, photos reflect particular points of view, inscribe cultural norms, and function “not so much to claim ‘this is what is’, but to create a dialogue around the competing and complementary meanings of images” (Harper, 2003, p. 244). Just as when researchers begin to write fieldnotes by focusing on a setting’s physical details, photographing details of a place’s physical environment—landscapes, buildings, and

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public objects—can begin creating a sense of emplacement (Pink, 2013; Pink, 1989). Researchers, she notes, are emplaced, but at the same time we are both seeking to understand the emplacement of others and the practices through which the places they form part of are continually reconstituted. If place is … constantly being made and remade—then one task of the visual ethnographer is to under­ stand this process, and in particular the roles of audio-visual experience and media in it. (Pink, 2008, para. 4) Photographs as fieldnotes become both process and product and form an active part of data engagement as they not only intra-act with other data and the researcher but become part of the audiovisual mediation of a place. Our point is that multimodalities are not merely additive but introduce multiple dimensions, epistemic potentialities, and interpretive affordances. We are fooling ourselves if we think multimodal fieldnotes are merely “richer.” They may make inscription an interpretive struggle, they may resist coming together into readable configurations, or they may come together in uneven and fragile alignments and interpretive compacts. These concerns acknowledge data as agential, changing over time and modalities. Choreographies of assembling The idea that we assemble fieldnotes as data is consonant with the fertile metaphor of choreographies. The focus on attuned movement and intertwined intensities is central to several recent perspectives on fieldwork and fieldnotes. Law and Lien (2012) extend an ontological perspective on practices as assem­ bling that they refer to as “precarious choreographies producing empirical ontologies”: Take any practice. Ask about its choreography. Ask how it weaves its relations and enacts its objects. If we think in empirical-ontological fashion we discover difference and multiplicity. Then note that differences are chained together; the productivity of “precarious practical, heterogeneous and contingent rela­ tions” that produce relational realities but also a “shadowland of alterities”; it is time to attend to the textures on the margins. (pp. 372–373) Fieldnotes, as choreographic, assemble heterogeneous elements following the contours of the everyday. Yet the relational realities inscribed invite attention to absences, deferrals, and shadows; the promise of fieldnotes may be not only in adjusting the research focus but in drawing out “textures on the margins.” Cox’s (2015) study of Black girls living in homeless shelters in postindustrial Detroit is a classic urban ethnography; yet through performative co-witnessing (Madison, 2005), her data choreograph an assemblage of bodies, histories, institutions, desires, and forces that shapeshift in their entanglements. While she

30 Engaging fieldnotes follows conventional protocols for fieldnotes and interviews, her “remix” practices of improvising, borrowing, and sampling affect a vital choreography of Black girls’ lives, “a map of movement or plan for how the body interacts with its environment, but it also suggests that by the body’s placement in a space, the nature of that space changes” (p. 29). Similarly, Pink (2015) holds that walking with others affects a choreography of bodily movements, rhythms, synchronicities, mobilities, postures, speeds, and slownesses as sensory engagements. This assem­ blage of intensities and movements configures a collective and textured sense of the vitalities of mundane life. As well, it poses what fieldnotes do differently, as a mapping of movement and collective energies. Finally, Youdell and Armstrong (2011) describe their school ethnography as an affective choreography that attends to “the tacit collectivity of the event; the demarcation of what bodies can and cannot do; and the way that affective intensities exceed these demarcations” (p. 146). Using two extended fieldnote narratives, they follow the relations among collective and singular bodies, affective intensities, and the encroachments of social and institutional rules and roles. As choreographic, these fieldnote excerpts assemble a synchrony of material, social, corporeal, and disciplinary forces and bodies that map the intensities of contemporary schooling. Data on the make In order to emphasize the liveliness of fieldnotes as data, we suggest the phrase “data on the make.” This conveys our point that fieldnotes are not inert, static, or contained on the page or limited to one stage of the research process. Indeed, the agential reciprocity of data and researcher implicates a compassio­ nate epistemological practice: Data’s epistemological agency shapes us, data themselves, and our surroundings. Scholars might sense data and knowledge, they might see something surprising or disturbing, or sounds and colors in the classroom, for example, might produce various effects, events, and flows. Intra-active data might also guide qualitative researchers to think and talk in certain ways in relation to the objects, material, and forces around them. At the same time data’s epistemological agency might be in flux enough not to be recognizable. In many contexts data are here and there, everywhere and nowhere, coming and going. (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2017, pp. 4–5) Data on the make—fieldnotes that invoke surprise or guide researchers to notice or think in new ways—are well illustrated in Jones’s (2013) descriptions of children’s encounters with the everyday things in their classrooms like car­ peting, chairs, and soft toys. Following a conventional data-gathering period (“detailed observation/field notes, video and audio recordings of interactions both in the classroom as well as outside in the play areas” and interviews with teachers and children), Jones queries her data about the negotiated relationships among bodies, things, and material and discursive networks. Here are fieldnotes

Engaging fieldnotes

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on the make, configuring assemblages of power, affect, and meaning that intertwine bodies, minds, and things to realize institutionalized learning and discipline (p. 608). A fieldnote description becomes animate: a boy slyly slips into the teacher’s big chair, looking conspiratorially at the researcher. The sensi­ cality of these fieldnotes reassembles around a fragmentary moment that unsettles conventional research insights and makes “something else possible” (p. 608). In short, the data are on the make, opening alternative configurations of power, sense, and materiality and working with and sometimes against the researcher to craft new understandings. While the previous example draws on Deleuzian concepts, data are “on the make” regardless of the theoretical perspective. For example, Laviolette (2009) conducted home visits with elderly participants in a home-based telecare health-monitoring system involving activity sensors in the home and health-monitoring equipment (such as a blood-pressure gauge). His final visit was with a couple who were not interested in talking about telecare, distracted by their chirping budgie, and in the process of selling their home. They also showed him the miniature doll houses they were constructing together. The notes from this visit were errant, occupied with budgies and domesticity rather than the assistive technologies of the telecare system. Yet they broached affective forces of domestic routines, spaces, and intimacy, leading Laviolette to realize the possibility that such assistive technologies must “enter the intimate spaces of daily living” (p. 222). Data on the make were a creative force in reconfiguring relations among homelife, assistive technologies, sousveillance, aging, and biomedicine. The imp of fieldwork We adopt a figure of data engagement that seems to embody the ideas of liveliness, agency, creativity, and surprise: the imp of fieldwork. This is the disruptive self-questioning and incessant second-guessing that trouble an unreflective engagement with fieldnotes. As Whitaker and Atkinson (2019) explain, “There is often an ethnographic ‘imp’ that intrudes itself, questioning the very desirability or good sense of the fieldwork itself. The imps arise unbidden but can pose searching, sometimes unwelcome though ultimately productive questions” (p. 936). In his fieldnotes about a class he took in nude studio photography using a professional female model, Atkinson describes an “arresting moment” of intense attention, appreciation, and immersion in this sensory-material experience as well as the “practical and technical competencies and judgments” being learned. The imp is a disruptive element in these field­ notes—intruding with issues of male gaze, aging, aching joints, technical incompetencies, aesthetic failures. The imp asks, “Why are you doing this?” (pp. 938, 943) and disrupts more considered intellectual reflection. We suggest that the imp may well ask, “Where are the data going?” as it speeds along lines of eroticism, slows in the struggle with technique. Similarly, the imp of fieldwork interrupted Ellingson’s fieldnotes in a dialysis clinic. Her notes were

32 Engaging fieldnotes

Figure 2.1 Data joy and the errancy of fieldnotes

immersed in the routines of institutionalized biomedical care; such routine is critical to the smooth management of serious chronic illness (2008). Even as she took careful fieldnotes, her focus was incessantly interrupted by the imp’s question, “Where is this data going?” The fieldnotes seemed mired in routini­ zation—going nowhere. Yet, eventually, the fieldnotes yielded a focus on poetic and embodied perspectives on professionalism among dialysis technicians (Ellingson 2011b, 2015). Data engagement is an impish practice—it can be discomforting, disruptive, but there is also joy in the errancy of fieldnote data (see Figure 2.1).

3

Engaging recordings

Tangling with recordings Qualitative researchers frequently make data in the form of audio and video recordings. Visual ethnography (and related forms of research) “engages with audio-visual media and methods throughout its processes of research, analysis and representation. It is inevitably collaborative and to varying extents participatory” (Pink, 2008, para. 2). Audio and/or visual recording and digital photography (hereafter referred to as “digital recording” except where a particular form is specified) constructs rich data of otherwise difficult-to-access experiences (i.e., behavior) and accounts of experiences and meanings (i.e., interviews). Digital recording documents “the minutiae of social interactions in real time” and “offers a ‘microscope’ for an in-depth study of the on-going production of situated social order” (Knoblauch & Schnettler, 2012, p. 335) and of “the complex interplay of communicative activities” (p. 340). In this chapter, we delve into digital recordings as data that are constrained but cannot be contained by the technologies that researchers use to make them. Recordings offer lively and intriguing options for making, assembling, and becoming qualitative data. With current digital technologies, recording is widely available and easy for nonprofessionals to record and review (Whiting, Symon, Roby, & Chamakiotis, 2018). Historically, recording was done via analog tapes; digital recorders became normative as their price dropped and ease of use and portability increased markedly. A plethora of “data carriers” enable researchers to store and transport recorded data—computers, digital audio players, smartphones, USB memory sticks, and so on (Ayaß, 2015, p. 509). Researchers use these technol­ ogies to make recordings, typically interviews (e.g., Mitra & Buzzanell, 2018) but also soundscapes (e.g., Gallagher, 2015), ethnographic video recordings of orga­ nizational behavior (e.g., Toraldo, Islam, & Mangia, 2018), as well as creative, complex recordings of other sounds and sights within particular places (e.g., Makagon & Neumann, 2009). Further, research projects using participatory approaches may invite participants to construct their own digital recordings as both data and intervention (see Chapter 6 for a discussion of participatory recordings). Of course, not all digital recorded data are made by researchers and participants; researchers also assemble recordings constructed by others and

34 Engaging recordings shared publicly for other purposes (e.g., entertainment, self-expression, advertis­ ing, education) and “transform” these recordings into data (we discuss these forms of digital data in Chapter 5). Yet defining digital recordings as data is not as simple as it may first appear. Qualitative researchers engage in fruitful dialogues about the entanglement of lived experiences, the affordances of equipment used to record and access experience, the nature of the contents of recordings, the status of transcripts, clips, and images constructed from the recordings, and the intra-action of recordings with researchers, participants, and cultural discourses. Researchers disagree on whether the material recording (artifact) is the data, or the infor­ mation/sounds/images on the recording comprise the data (Black, 2017; Erickson, 2011; Hinthorne, 2014). For some researchers, recordings do not become data until the oral or visual is further processed/transformed into tran­ scripts (see Chapter 3 for a discussion of transcripts as data). To contextualize our examination of digital recordings, we provide a brief overview of the evolution of digital recording and its status within qualitative inquiry. Before the advent of portable, relatively easy to use (analog) audio and visual recording equipment in the 1950s, fieldnotes were the main source of documentation of participants’ words and behavior (Warren & Karner, 2014). The transition to recordings of interviews and of “naturalistic” behavior was accom­ panied by an unwarranted, widespread faith in audiovisual recordings as true representations of reality, no longer encumbered by researchers’ “biases” or other contaminants that prevented an objective rendering of recorded interactions. This positivist understanding of recorded data lingers not only with (post)positivists but among those who readily accept that data are socially constructed through interaction between researchers and participants (e.g., Charmaz, 2006). One methodologist put it this way: “Video recordings are particularly prone to problematic, unreflexive acceptance as objective ‘data,’ perhaps because of a cul­ tural privileging of the eye and vision as metaphors for truth, understanding, and knowledge” (Black, 2017, p. 54). Another researcher pointed out how many aspects of recording are simply ignored by researchers. [V]ideo recordings are often considered as “transparent windows” onto social reality: their technical and formal features, their materiality, their editing, the choices that make certain details visible or invisible are ignored by analyses focusing exclusively on what they make available, such as glances, gestures, body postures, spatial arrangements, object manipula­ tions, etc. (Mondada, 2009, p. 68) Postpositivist researchers generally report little beyond the existence of recordings. Social constructionists and critical researchers accept that recordings are made rather than collected and meanings co-constructed rather than extracted from participants’ minds. Yet even these researchers—and we count ourselves among them—rarely discuss within research reports and presentations the consequential choices involved in the construction of recordings as material artifacts (Ellingson, 2017).

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We urge researchers to resist notions of recordings as transparent representa­ tions of reality and acknowledge the powerful agency of the digital recording device and the files it produces; accountability calls. Yet this raises the question of the agency of digital recordings—what do recordings do? Caronia (2015) articulated a useful answer to this question, inviting researchers to distinguish between the so-called “natural occurring” behavior and its document, between the recordable and the record, the living experience (the actual talk-in-interaction) and the data (p. 152) … Once recorded, the interac­ tion becomes the data; data are used as a specimen of something more general and they are not (i.e. do not correspond/overlap with) what they stand for (p. 153) … . Far from being granted a priori, the correspondence between the ongoing interaction and the recorded one (i.e. textualized, represented) is negotiable and negotiated. (p. 154) Thus digital recordings produce records of interaction events but cannot contain the events themselves, nor do their contents remain stable. More­ over, the documentation of research typically exceeds the digital recording itself; researchers often require further details from ethnographic fieldnotes, interviews, organizational documents, or other data in order to render recordings intelligible, further establishing recordings as always already embedded within a complex configuration of data (Knoblauch & Schnettler, 2012). As we discuss later in the chapter, digital recordings remain lively, continuing their negotiations between interactions and recordings within data assemblages in intriguing ways. We consider possibilities for making recordings that are ethically responsive, rich with insights, and potentially aesthetically pleasing as well. For now, we turn to the processes involved in making recordings.

Making recordings In this section, we explore data engagement processes for making digital recordings and some of the different ways in which making is framed and understood. We consider recording as constructing, acknowledging awareness, and respecting boundaries. Constructing From a critical material perspective, recordings are interpretations of reality; recording is “a situated and contingent social practice constituting the very data” that it purports to capture (Mondada, 2009, pp. 68–69). Researchers make decisions about what to record, when and how long to record it, from what angle(s), whether to use video, audio, or still photography, and so on. Indeed,

36 Engaging recordings it would appear difficult to use video data without considering how they have been produced and how production and representation practices shape, select, highlight, and displace interactional details. These considera­ tions are not external or marginal to the analytical exploitation of video data, but rather are central to them. They are pervasive and consequential to the way in which we repeatedly look at [recordings]. (p. 96) Clearly, researchers make active choices as they make recordings, and yet the temptation remains to naturalize recordings as self-evident representations of events. Recording devices, wielded by researchers and participants, become “a taken-for-granted material-discursive practice” (Nordstrom, 2015, p. 389). Construction as a metaphor for recording evokes materiality, reminding researchers to stay engaged with the embodied and emplaced processes through which recordings construct social worlds. We explore briefly three issues that provide generative openings for engaging the constructed nature of recordings: a pragmatism–art tension, (re)learning sensory acuities, and poli­ tical resonance. At the same time in which researchers may (at least to some degree) take for granted the pragmatic utility of digital recordings as reliable accounts of events, making audio/visual recordings and taking photographs can also be regarded as manifestations of creativity in artistic mediums. The tension between the sheen of realism on these mediums and the artistry that they embody provides a vibrant frame through which to consider the making of digital recordings. As tools of realist representation, recorders and cameras document and capture images and/or sound through the technical capacities of the equipment, pro­ viding evidence of what happened in particular times and places. As tools of artists telling unique stories from particular vantage points, digital recorders and cameras enable researcher-artists to play with lenses, light, sound, angles, speed, focus, figure, and ground to make beautifully subjective art (see La Jevic & Springgay, 2008 for a discussion of the artist-researcher-teacher role). Staying with this tension rather than trying to resolve it fosters an intersubjective vitality that neither the acceptance of a simplistic realism nor the embrace of a purely visual aesthetic provides. A compelling example of this balance can be found in the text, photos, and video stills of an ethnographic study of how public places are imagined from the perspectives of migrant children as public cultural agents and co-creators of visual culture in their urban environment, El Raval Sud, an intercultural neighborhood in downtown Barcelona, Spain (Trafi-Prats, 2009). A second generative aspect of constructing is sensory learning. As we con­ struct data in new research settings, researchers may learn new practices for actively interpreting what goes on there. We expand our sensory capacities and skills for seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, moving, and even remaining still (see Paterson, 2009; Pink, 2011). Vision is not only a key sense but also a metaphor in dominant Western cultures for comprehension and understanding. We learn how to see in particular ways.

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Practices of looking … are not reducible to visual perception but rather are constituted by an embodied set of social activities, arranging the body of the viewer and the context of the visible features … through professional vision (Goodwin, 1994, 2000), embodied in professional practices in which experts examining videos, fixed images, or other visual objects “see,” select, and highlight certain details and reflexively accomplish the “visibility” of conducts, facts, or features. (Mondada, 2009, p. 70) Of course, embodied learning and practices are not limited to vision but encompass all our senses. Similarly, learning embodied practices is not limited to professional contexts such as medicine, education, or engineering but encompasses all manner of trained activities—domestic tasks, sports, dance, crafts. Goodwin and others have documented the manner in which various activities require socialization into new ways of sensing. Furthermore, when we learn to practice our senses in particular ways, this may challenge customary ways of sensing. Digital recordings and photos are not only viewed/listened to through specific sensory practices but constructed in and through them as well. For example, Sutton’s (2010) review illustrates rich opportunities for under­ standing food, taste, and culture as learned sensory experiences—not only of taste, but all the sensory pleasures, meanings, and materiality of food as part of everyday life, family customs, and social rituals. Constructing digital data also encompasses political resonance. Like all data, digital recordings are never neutral but partial, partisan, and problematic. In exploring digital audio recordings and how they resonate with people in dif­ ferent ways and across various contexts, Gershon (2018) explained: Reverberations and resonances, like narratives, are not apolitical. They can be enhanced, dampened, sneaked through cracks of oppression, or arrived in a torrent, an informational spigot opened wide for as much mass con­ sumption as possible. They also carry sets of norms, values, possibilities, and problems in such a way that no reverberation or resonance is without some kind of intent at its inception or attention in its reception. (p. 2) Recorded data are thus potentially disruptive of some cultural orders and bol­ stering of others, within research processes and more widely. As feminist and other critical scholars have long contended, making data that question natur­ alized hierarchies and taken-for-granted assumptions requires methods that do not merely reinscribe dominant ways of knowing (e.g., Reinharz, 1992). To conduct research that amplifies marginalized voices without speaking for them or framing them in unproductive or harmful ways is fraught with further challenges (Hesse-Biber, 2013). Further, resonances will not impact all bodies/ selves/objects equivalently. The generative concept of “[e]xpanded listening refers to the varied ways in which bodies of all kinds—human and more-than­ human—respond to sound” (Gallagher, Kanngieser, & Prior, 2017, p. 618). A disturbing embodied agency of sound, for example, is its capacity to act as a

38 Engaging recordings tool of warfare, torture, and political control in public spaces through “acoustic technologies designed to stun, disperse, intimidate and control civilian popula­ tions” including flash bang grenades used by police to disperse crowds (Galla­ gher et al., 2017, p. 627). The concept of resonance offers an embodied approach to understanding how data as politicized sonic vibrations act not just in our ears but on and in our whole bodies and minds, as well as through the material objects and environs with which we are entangled. Acknowledging awareness Somewhat ironically, researchers—even those who acknowledge that they coconstruct recordings and exert significant agency over both form and content— tend to claim that although digital recorders influence participants’ behavior, before long the participants “forget” that a recorder is present (Caronia, 2015). Yet little or no evidence supports this claim, and it appears to reflect researcher desire more than any epistemological or methodological reasoning beyond a simplistic positivism that suggests that “there are pristine objects of study which exist inde­ pendent of the research activity, and that these become degraded by a corruption of the scene through the introduction of” a recording device (Hazel, 2016, pp. 448–449). Thus to argue that participants and digital recorders do not intra-act requires acceptance of three points: First, that the powerful agencies of digital recorders stop exerting influence over time; second, that participants fail to remember the presence of the (now ubiquitous) potential for digital recording; and third, that activities (e.g., work, meetings, learning) occur in a stable manner prior to the arrival of researcher-contaminants. Researchers who accept that recordings are constructed are highly unlikely to accept this line of reasoning once it is made explicit. We concur with Caronia and advise researchers to instead inquire into how participants’ expectations and perceived agencies for recording may (not) change over time and how they may be embedded within recorded data. Tuncer (2016) accomplished this aim by focusing on how participants oriented to the camera during ethnographic video recordings and then “domesticated” it, not only as a way to produce humor and laughter, but also to achieve “locally and sequentially relevant actions, such as closing a complaint or assessing an activity” (n.p.). Thus the digital recorder becomes one actant within an assemblage of participants, recorder, researchers, and ongoing interactions. Some qualitative researchers have moved beyond arguing that participants forget about digital recorders to demonstrate how such equipment may act as material resources that participants commented on, responded to, and configured their bodies in relation to when they are used to make ethnographic data recordings. Moreover, researchers express concern about the ways recording may suppress expression or render it inauthentic, yet it could conceivably have positive effects; digital recording can also be understood as an invitation to participants to collaborate in storytelling and reflection (Wilin´ska & Bülow, 2017). For example, a visual ethnography of leadership practices among interprofessional healthcare team members used “video­ reflexive ethnography” to record everyday participant behavior at work (Gordon,

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Rees, Ker, & Cleland, 2017). Not only were participants well aware that they were being video-recorded, researchers invited them to participate in video-reflexive ses­ sions in which they viewed examples of their (and others’) interactions and discussed meanings, outcomes, and possibilities for improvement. Thus participants’ awareness of recording was framed not only as not a barrier to making recorded data, but that awareness was recognized as a valuable, pragmatic resource. Respecting boundaries Sometimes making recorded data also means knowing when or how not to make them. Demonstrating compassionate and appropriate (non)use of recording tech­ nologies is an important ethical consideration for making recordings in many con­ texts. One ethnographer working with members of a Zulu gospel choir comprised of people living with HIV in South Africa explained that he “learned how to utilize the communicative affordances of recording technologies in culturally specific ways amid stigma and inequality, including ethical-communicative affordances offered by not using an available recording device” which “communicated to group members that [he] understood the dynamics of stigma, support, and respect” within their culture and in particular settings (e.g., a funeral) (Black, 2017, pp. 51, 52). Further, respecting participants’ privacy emerged as an important issue for some other types of recorded data as well. For example, the common practice of recording interviews via Skype (i.e., Internet videoconferencing) raises issues around privacy and monitoring of electronic communication (Lo Iacono, Symonds, & Brown, 2016). Corporations such as Google, along with U.S., UK, and other governments, have the capacity (albeit are highly unlikely to be motivated) to access interviews recorded over Skype and other videoconferencing technologies that use the Internet. Another aspect of privacy of which participants may not be aware is the need to determine what is visible via their computer webcam during recorded interviews; participants may inadvertently share views of items in the background of their homes or other loca­ tions (Lo Iacono et al., 2016). Finally, issues of ethical and respectful editing of recorded data frequently arise. In an “audio drift” comprised of soundscape plus interviews and special sound effects, the researcher obtained standard informed consent but then further “felt a responsibility to edit the material in a way that would be respectful towards [participants], representing their contrasting views and experiences without allowing any one voice to dominate” (Gallagher, 2015, p. 479). Each of these issues of respect for participants influenced how recordings were made and/or shared with others during data-making processes, reflecting a commitment to ethical data engagement.

Assembling recordings Recordings become part of larger data assemblages that are always dynamic. Two ways in which we follow the data flows of recordings include attending to action possibilities and embracing researcher wonder.

40 Engaging recordings Engaging action possibilities In addition to the choices made by researchers and participants, recordings are a product of available technologies (Modaff & Modaff, 2000). That is, “recording devices … make a difference in the making of the data … not as extrainteractional inert objects but as nonhuman agents shaping” both (inter)actions being recorded and the qualities of the recording itself (Caronia, 2015, p. 157). The ways in which recording technologies have changed shape how recording equipment intra-acts within data assemblages. Digital audio/video recorders and digital cameras have replaced analog technologies of light-sensitive film and sound-sensitive tape with digital light- and sound-sensitive (CCD or CMOS) sensors. The digital recordings/images can then be transferred to a computer in order to compile, replay, and edit them. The affordances of current technologies overlap with those of previous analog technologies in some ways, while offering unique opportunities and chal­ lenges as well. These recorders and their accessories enable or structure how researchers and participants can make data (see Figure 3.1). “Technology affor­ dances are action possibilities and opportunities that emerge from actors engaging with a focal technology” (Faraj & Azad, 2012, p. 238). Moreover, this affordance perspective “recognizes how the materiality of an object favors, shapes, or invites, and at the same time constrains, a set of specific uses” (Zammuto, Grifith, Majchrzak, Dougherty, & Faraj, 2007, p. 752). Making intelligible digital recordings is a process in which the culture, norms, and practices of a group or place intra-act with recording technologies to make a (hopefully) useful digital text. [T]he way in which coherent images are assembled, as well as the way in which interactional order—as it is witnessable, accountable, and intelligible for members (not only researchers)—is a social accomplishment made possible through technological resources within the social practices of video recording and video editing. (Mondada, 2009, p. 70) Researchers make active, consequential choices in accordance with the affordances, for example: “Although seeming to be a practical and technical

Figure 3.1 Composing lively video data

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consideration about recording data, selecting a camera angle uncovers metho­ dological concerns that reveal the distinctive demands that video places on researchers concerned with … naturally occurring social interaction” (Luff & Heath, 2012, p. 257). Camera angle choices have aesthetic, practical, and even ethical implications for how we make recorded data. Further, technological affordances are not neutral but privilege some modes of being and doing and thus some categories of people over others: “Each recorder is engineered to select for, and often to amplify, particular physical features while muting others. Each recorder is also designed to afford particular types of intersubjective engagement and may intentionally or unintentionally neglect other types of engagement” (Black, 2017, p. 50). And of course, recordings also leave out vital information that is not digitally recordable. Describing video recording, researchers suggest that permanent conditions of social situations become evident through the visible social environment of the recorded interactions. However, a situation may be marked by other continuous characteristics, which are deeply affecting how we perceive this situation, although they are not recordable—think of temperature or odour. Even though video provides very rich and overly abundant data, audio-visual recordings have obvious technical limitations. (Knoblauch & Schnettler, 2012, p. 342; emphasis in original) And those limitations affect the making and interpreting of recorded data. For example, a study of participant videos of family Christmas rituals explored the difficulty of evoking the scent of a turkey roasting for Christmas dinner and other ways in which the sense of smell was intertwined with the meaning of holiday rituals that were difficult to document explicitly in video (Muir & Mason, 2012). In addition to the technologies that make the data recordings, technological affordances also structure the ways in which researchers can access recorded data as part of a data assemblage. That is, “software developed for digital sound files makes it easier to jump through interviews when searching for a specific excerpt. Hence … data [can] be retrieved and examined in a more flexible manner” (Tes­ sier, 2012, p. 449). All recordings are entangled with the technologies used to make them and their affordances, notably the ubiquity of smartphones with digital recording capacities (Moylan, Derr, & Lindhorst, 2015). Researchers may feel simultaneously a sense of control over the research situation through a recorder, a respect for the recorder as “sacred object,” and also a sense of distance in which the digital recorder sets them apart from participants (Wilin´ska & Bülow, 2017). Entangling wonder Embodied entanglement of data with researchers is an intriguing aspect of data assemblages. At the same time that recorded data are co-constructed through participants, material objects, and technological affordances, data-recording

42 Engaging recordings practices and products intra-act with researchers. Qualitative methods texts typi­ cally spend considerable space considering how researchers affect or shape their data but contemplate far less how the data influence researchers, beyond minimal attention to physical safety. As researchers make recordings during data engage­ ment, “we (recording device, cultural conceptions, participant, bodies, and the physical space of the object-interview) constitute each other” (Nordstrom, 2015, p. 394). Recording data constructs the researcher in part through our curiosity and sense of wonder about the world—“the capacity for wonder that resides and radiates in data, or rather in the entangled relation of data-and-researcher” (MacLure, 2013c, p. 228)—that is to engage with our topic, extant literature, and participants. MacLure continues: Wonder is relational. It is not clear where it originates and to whom it belongs. It seems to be “out there,” emanating from a particular object, image, or fragment of text; but it is also “in” the person that is affected. A passion: the capacity to affect and to be affected. When I feel wonder, I have chosen something that has chosen me, and it is that mutual “affection” that constitutes “us” as, respectively, data and researcher. (p. 229) Moreover, wonder is a deeply embodied affect of joy. For example, Laura (an avowed methods geek) described the experience of wonder while reading articles in preparation for writing her previous book. I lean forward eagerly, my spine straightens, and my eyes focus intently on the database link on my laptop screen … . A little shiver of delight passes through me as I silently mouth the words “promiscuous analysis,” savoring the pairing of a standard methodological term with a naughty, sexually charged term … Quickly scanning the abstract, I feel my gut tighten with excitement … My mouth forms a bright grin as I gleefully … download the PDF … I have downloaded hundreds of [articles], zealously inhaling embodiment theorizing in a wild, haphazard assemblage. As I read Childers’ (2014) article, I find myself nodding … As my reading continues, my bodyself bounces in my seat with joy … [,] gasps over intriguing concepts, and hums through fascinating analyses. (Ellingson, 2017, pp. 10–11) In this way, Laura persists in being “open to the world’s aliveness, allowing [her]self to be lured by curiosity, surprise, and wonder” (Barad, 2012, p. 207). Researchers are shaped through deeply embodied, sensual engagement with the vibrant matter of data (Bennett, 2010). Wonder is a visceral and intense response. Researchers may experience wonderous entanglements of passion for research and compassion for participants that mutually constitute not a trite sentimentality but a vital affective contagion from encountering each other’s perspectives. Researchers’ wonder may entangle specifically with the making and assembling of digital recordings in amazing ways. A compelling example of researcher wonder is evidenced in Rawlins’ (2013) digitally recorded

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performance (previously performed live). In “Sample,” Rawlins problematizes conceptualizations of friendship and social support as presented in both a personal narrative told to him by an older man (and recorded) and a technical discussion about the same topic taken from a gerontological journal article. As Rawlins sings his original song, his whole body moves and his voice rises with passion as he vigorously strums his guitar. He is lost in wonder within the assemblage of researcher, academic narrative, and personal (recorded) narrative intra-acting in an aesthetically powerful, digitally recorded performance (which then becomes part of the data assemblage as well).

Becoming recordings Recordings live on, offering new qualities that were not in the recorded event, while losing others that were; shifting meanings over time as cultural norms change; and performing the magic of transporting listeners emotionally, cognitively, and sensually to other times and places. Recording more and less Researchers construct recorded data through series of choices, as we discussed previously. We typically consider the consequences of choices in terms of the plethora of details omitted from our recordings—e.g., everything outside the frame, smells and temperature, preceding and following actions—or choices that shape the content of the recording, such as the use of a wide-angle camera lens or whether a microphone was stationary or mobile. However, data recordings do not only omit or elide; they also introduce novel elements to events they record (Ashmore & Reed, 2005; see also Mishler, 1991). First, the digital recording— referred to as “the tape” in most qualitative methods literature—acquires a veneer of “stubborn realism”; the tape is naturalized and becomes difficult to problematize (Ashmore & Reed, 2005, p. 76). Further, this added “[r]ealism suggests that the recording device captures those realities and meanings that exist outside of the researcher”—nothing more and nothing less (Nordstrom, 2015, p. 389). Second, researchers typically construct the tape as the object of inquiry; the recording seamlessly “provides for the ‘forgetting’ of the Event, and its wholesale replace­ ment by the Tape” despite crucial differences between them (Ashmore & Reed, 2005, p. 76). Moreover, the tape adds infinite “replayability” to what was pre­ viously an ephemeral event (Ashmore & Reed, 2005, p. 77; see also Tessier, 2012). Replaying reinforces the realism of the tape through repeated listening, making the tape appear to be static. And “[t]he interpretative and productive act of listening changes the Tape’s status from an unknown to a known, from an object that is radically unstable to one which is relatively fixed. Listening polices the Tape” (Ashmore & Reed, 2005, p. 87). Researchers typically police digital recordings multiple times in the process of constructing and checking transcrip­ tions that render the data amenable to coding and analysis, each time becoming more certain of what the tape proves “really happened.”

44 Engaging recordings And yet at the same time, while these steps appear to fix the tape, making it a stable object under realist ontologies, a critical materialist perspective on the process of the tape’s becoming reveals stability as a fiction. The tape remains in flux. Each time we listen again to the tape, or another object is formed based on the tape (e.g., transcript, sound clip, artwork), the tape exceeds its fixed state through its replay-ability. Nordstrom (2015), drawing on Barad (2003, 2007), argues for a posthumanist “agential realism” in which recording devices are understood to intra-act with researchers, participants, cultures, and objects to create and recreate meanings. Recording devices … never were innocent or mute … . [R]ecording devices can no longer be taken for granted. Recording devices are material-discursive practices that are part of and result from onto-epistemological frameworks. Different frameworks are possible, and, as a result, different material-discursive practices with recording devices are both possible and desirable. (Nordstrom, 2015, pp. 398–399; emphasis in original) In other words, rather than embracing a “stubborn realism” in digital recordings through a realist framework, researchers doing data engagement can employ a critical appreciation of how digitally recorded data continually omit, add, and transform within data assemblages. This critical awareness is evidenced in L. Allen’s (2016) study of photos and interviews related to sexuality within school settings; she critically examines presences and absences in teens’ photos of “nothing” that were considered to be “mistakes” and how they inform a feminist materialist understanding of sexuality—not as realist documentation but as creative constitution of absence, multiplicity, intentionality, and flux. Lively recordings Increasingly, it is possible to listen to recordings made in bygone eras (or last week or pre-September 11, 2001 or before the ubiquity of smartphones or in the midst of whatever social transformation with which one is intrigued). Listening to a recorded moment when inhabiting a far different sociohistorical moment offers the possibility that meanings of recorded data will change as time, selves, and cultures shift. From a data engagement perspective, such recordings are not fixed data-objects (i.e., an archived recording whose meaning has been interpreted) but manifest an ongoing “search for potentialities [that] criss-crosses data liveliness and data stasis. Data collection in this sense is about imagining possibilities and creating conditions for possibilities to materialise in a sharing of the world in all its liveliness” (Duhn, 2017, p. 11). Data liveliness inhabits digital recordings, destabilizing their meanings. Research archives house extensive collections of recorded data, enabling researchers, journalists, and others to access recordings made decades earlier and to make sense of this data under vastly different cultural landscapes. Historically, data were lost as analog materials (e.g., cassette tapes) broke down due to

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unstable compounds or imperfect storage conditions or became worn due to repeated replayings. Digital recording files do not suffer such routine damage, and multiple digital backups may be stored compactly to ensure file integrity (Tessier, 2012). And of course, archivists painstakingly convert historically sig­ nificant analog recordings into digital formats to preserve them and (sometimes) to make them more widely accessible. For example, Warren and Karner (2014) consider meanings and interpretations of well-known sex researcher Alfred Kinsey’s archive of recorded interview data. The same interactions listened to through 21st Century sexual norms invite insights about 1950s-era sexuality that diverge from Kinsey’s. Some sexual topics—same-sex desire, sexual activity outside of marriage, oral sex—were considered quite scandalous and uncom­ mon topics in the 1950s but are understood in today’s cultural landscape as unremarkable (or differently marked). Moreover, social scientists today evaluate Kinsey’s research processes differently than his peers had. For example, Kinsey refused to employ interviewers whose identities fell outside a narrow set con­ sisting of white, Protestant (non-Catholic Christian), middle- or upper-class men. This group represented Kinsey’s constructed ideal of objectivity and nat­ ural rapport, and he believed they alone held the requisite skills and aptitude to interview people across all genders, races, and classes (see also Davidson & Layder, 1994). Today, researcher perspectives on “matching” interviewers and participants by gender, race, religion, or other demographic categories seriously consider the complexities of intersectional identities. Matching is understood as fluid and dependent upon multiple identities, which may be more or less relevant depending upon research topic, individual experiences and attitudes, and circumstances of any particular interview (Ellingson, 2017). Data liveliness persists not only through historical social or cultural change, however. Researchers’ selves are equally dynamic, reflecting mundane and transformative experiences (including research) that shape embodied standpoints through which data are engaged. Moreover, the same or other researchers may approach the “same” data assemblage from a different perspective and pose questions predicated on disparate assumptions, methods, and ideologies. Rather than pointing merely to how the world or an individual or a research mode changes over time and circumstances, or imagining data as held constant and dead, we engage with the intra-action of digital recordings and their data agencies with culture, events, and so on. This liveliness reflects our commit­ ment to joy as a vital force in vibrant recorded data that enables us to imagine new social worlds and endless possibilities for how we might live otherwise. Date improvise; they are not just linear and rational. They exceed the ration­ ality of academic reasoning, with ambiguity, uncertainty, partiality, and more possibilities than existed earlier in the data history. Researchers can learn to engage with the liveliness rather than imagining dead data—or data zombies (Duhn, 2017). Such liveliness engages “the improvisational elements of uncer­ tainty and displacement” in digital recordings, and the lively recordings “evoke a new version of the world, are provocative and stimulating” (Tarr, GonzalezPolledo, & Cornish, 2018, pp. 46, 48).

46 Engaging recordings Transporting Digitally recorded data also are always becoming, as sounds and images transport researchers, participants, and others to new thresholds across time and space, (re) making connections between disparate people, objects, discourses that are always in flux. What songs instantly transport you back to your high school dance or your university years? How does a movie remind you powerfully of a former lover who frequently quoted lines from it? A “more-than-representational excess” is produced when images and “sounds are recontextualized in another space and time, giving rise to new associations” (Gallagher, 2015, p. 479). These associations are forms of resonance, inherently multiple and mobile: Sounds are at once fleeting and resounding, affective vibrations that are characterized as much by their mobility as their liminality … [S]onic relations are always already in a state of omnidirectional expression and reception … . [and] sonic inquiries are always multiple. (Gershon, 2018, p. 5) For example, we previously collaborated on a project researching and theoriz­ ing aunt as a verb, that is, aunting as a flexible assemblage of practices rather than as a fixed familial role or identity (e.g., Ellingson & Sotirin, 2010; Sotirin & Ellingson, 2013). In addition to written accounts, we co-created a perfor­ mance piece shared at a conference and broadcasted over local radio that featured participants’ stories of their aunts and aunts describing the ways in which nieces and nephews (and other kin) wove in and out of aunts’ lives (Sotirin & Ellingson, 2004). The stories told in a variety of voices powerfully evoked love, loss, nostalgia, hope, and a variety of other affective forces, as well as more politically informed responses to the ways in which aunting and being aunted articulated different communities and family forms. Even the way in which the word “aunt” is pronounced embodies a sonic multiplicity, with some rhyming it with “pant” and others with “haunt.” Laura and Patty grew up in different regions of the U.S. and continue to enjoy our disagreement concerning aunt’s “correct” pronunciation. Likewise, in a study of secretarial bitching, Patty and her colleague found written accounts to be missing the ways sound could transport listeners into the semi-private spaces—break rooms, hallways, restrooms, and other carefully negotiated work spaces—where secretaries bitched to each other in relative safety (Sotirin & Gottfried, 1999). Patty devised a way to incorporate the power of sound for emotional and cognitive transporting during a conference poster presentation. Beside her poster, a recording of secretarial bitching played in a continuous loop, intra-acting with the visual data display, Patty, and conference attendees who heard the sounds (Sotirin, 1997). The mobility and multiplicity of recorded sounds and images are continually becoming in powerful ways that cross time, roles, work and family places, and local and global settings, fostering feelings of intense connection and disconnection, clarity and ambiguity, presence and absence. We do not mean to suggest that

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digital recordings will always, under all circumstances, transport audiences affectively, cognitively, or viscerally, but that the potential for transporting persists in recorded data.

Data-on-the-move Our focus here remains on what data recordings can do. In this section, we offer a myriad of suggestions for making recordings of varied types. Transient data Some researchers have followed the mobilities turn and embraced curiosity about the “fleeting, ephemeral and often embodied and sensory aspects of movement” in everyday life (Spinney, 2011, p. 162). Yet “mobility is always on the move and therefore it is often difficult to apprehend, record and analyse the multiple and transient contexts and experiences of subjects” (p. 164). Traditional methods of tracking or documenting evidence of mobility, such as traffic counts and surveys, proved insufficient to understand the richness of mobilities, so researchers have developed new ones, through which data can boldly go where no one has gone before to record movement in novel ways (Pink, 2008). A popular approach to research now utilizes “GoPro” cameras, which take high-definition video and still photos using wide-angle lens in a light, compact, and durable device that can be mounted on nearly anything and used under water, in extreme cold, and in other challenging contexts. The cameras coordinate with smartphone apps and enable researchers to capture previously unseen or unrecordable aspects of mobility. For example, Jensen (2018) sought to study enlivened urban surfaces by attaching GoPro cameras to the chassis of prams in which parents placed their infants while strolling in Copenhagen. He was able to “animate the rhythmicity of different material designs, particularly the textures, shapes and qualitative properties of surfaces as they are moved across and negotiated with a pram (e.g. gravel, asphalt, cobble stones and associated challenges such as kerbs and cracks)” (Jensen, 2018, p. 588). Parent (2016) examined disabled people “negotiating the space” of urban sidewalks, public transportation, and neighborhood streets using GoPro cameras mounted on wheelchairs. She questions how disabled people feel a sense of belonging (or not) in their cities. Spinney (2011) used GoPro cameras on bicycles to record urban cyclists in order “to retain much of the context and detail of people’s riding” as possible, which was then replayed (often slowly) and discussed with participants during interviews (p. 167). This enabled participants to “extend sensory vocabularies” of “daily corporeal mobility” (p. 163). Interest in mobility also motivates digitally recorded walking interviews (Hall, Lashua, & Coffey, 2008; Kuntz & Presnall, 2012). Walking interviews generate conversations that differ from stationary interviews, even if the same questions were asked. Sense-making and speech happen through the motion of walking with another person while an audio recorder makes a recording.

48 Engaging recordings Interviews also incorporate the ever-changing places, people, and material objects that they pass, combining ambient noise, vibrations, and other sensa­ tions in a process of “soundwalking” (Hall et al., 2008). Recorded walking interview data construct complex relationships among the contextual elements and the participants’ embodied experiences, which may be articulated when attention is focused on how background locales function in their lives, includ­ ing the streets and social worlds of urban neighborhoods (Bairner, 2011). Another study combined walking with driving in mobile or “peripatetic” interviews, where the researcher acted as a tourist, inviting local residents to select locations and then driving and walking around chosen locations with residents while interviewing and audio-recording them. Being in these places during the interviews was crucial because “material things and spaces have a sort of narrative residue. People connect stories and memories from past experiences and dreams of certain futures to particular places” (Wiederhold, 2015, p. 609). Mobilizing recorded data offers rich opportunities to amass copious amounts of footage that embodies movement and rhythms of people, wheelchairs, prams (strollers), bicycles, and public transportation vehicles, among other possibilities. With the advent of unobtrusive equipment capable of generating high-quality images and sound, data embrace the sensory, the fleeting, and the often taken­ for-granted experiences of navigating through familiar places. Elusive knowledge flows Video and audio recording also occurs in locations such as workplaces, health­ care delivery settings, education, and domestic spaces. Researchers typically use stationary (fixed) video or audio recorders so as to be less obtrusive but some move through indoor spaces with a recorder. As discussed earlier in this chapter, researchers understand recordings as capturing or constructing practices and meanings, depending on how they position their research epistemologically and methodologically. The agencies of recorded data come into play as they observe and document practices, even as they intra-act with the scenes which they record, that may illuminate “elusive (i.e., embodied, tacit, aesthetic) knowledges” in organizations (Toraldo et al., 2018; see also Hassard, Burns, Hyde, & Burns, 2018). Researchers use video recordings to explore how work is accomplished in organizations (Hassard et al. 2018; Jarzabkowski, Pratt, & Fetzer, 2018; Mengis, Nicolini, & Gorli, 2018; Smets, Burke, Jarzabkowski, & Spee, 2014). For example, Mondada (2012) analyzed video recordings of architects during work meetings as they talked and used tools, drawings, and models, while Hindmarsh and Llewellyn (2018) used recordings to explore the sociomaterial aspects of everyday work practices in service settings. Health care delivery is both another form of workplace and a setting of deeply personal, embodied experiences for patients and their companions. Digital recordings have facilitated the observation and analysis of communica­ tion among nurses and physicians regarding medications (Liu et al., 2015);

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contact between mothers and babies following cesarean section delivery (Stevens, Schmied, Burns, & Dahlen, 2017); and how body alignment construes engage­ ment among members of surgical teams (Moore, 2016). Likewise, educational settings are both workplaces and sites of students being educated: Blikstad-Balas (2017) used recordings to make sense of social practices in education, and Gerdin and Larsson (2018) studied pleasure, power, and gender normalization processes in a group of boys during physical education classes. Other researchers use video-recorded data both as data for analysis and as a source of footage for creating film documentaries, such as Harter and Hayward’s (2010) documentary of an adolescent orthopedic oncology program which also incorporated video created by participants. Recording also documents people in their homes or everyday spaces (Riley, 2010). One study observed children in home ethnographic video recording (Aarsand & Forsberg, 2010), while another conducted video tours of laundry practices within people’s homes (Pink, Mackley, & Moros¸anu, 2015). Recorded data may enable researchers (and participants) to see or otherwise sense “elusive knowledge” that is largely taken for granted or unnoticed. By documenting practices in action, recorded data enable close scrutiny and make space for reflection that can lead to improved practice. Assembling sounds Video- and audio-recorded data may engage in soundscaping by attending to, curating, and assembling recordings of a variety of sounds in particular places. Recording an array of sounds during fieldwork decenters human speech to focus on what may otherwise be considered ambient or background noise and vibrations (Paterson, 2009; Pink, 2009). Audio ethnographies and a range of creative sonic recording projects record sounds of people, objects, the built environment, and elements of the natural world (e.g., wind, thunder) (Makagon & Neumann, 2009). For example, Gallagher (2011) constructed a soundscape of a primary school, drawing attention to the myriad ways in which sounds and silences reflected authoritarian usage of surveillance and control, as well as “the disparity between the ideal model of disciplinary power and its everyday functioning in the school” (Gallagher, 2011, p. 52). Soundscape data also generated “polyphonic sound montages” of interviews of cardiology patients that included sounds of giving and receiving care and of clinic administration, offering insight into patients’ perspectives (Arnfred, 2015). Medford (2018) engaged in pedestrian mapping of an urban park by walking around it in both designated routes and more spontaneous wander­ ing while using a digital audio recorder, digital camera, and a small notebook to note the everyday ways in which the park was always in motion and always changing in small ways, as well as documenting significant seasonal changes. He sought to unobtrusively record people’s interactions with each other, with the park’s materiality, and to record routine and everyday moments, patterns, flows, norms, but also the dynamic shifting of weather, growth of vegetation, and people’s ways of using the space.

50 Engaging recordings Another set of audio-recorded data included environmental field recordings that were used to construct an audio drift, “an experimental environmental audio work … designed to be listened to on portable MP3 players whilst walking in that landscape,” thus layering the sonic data experience (Gallagher, 2015, p. 468). All recordings are entangled with technologies and their affordances, notably the ubiquity of smartphones with digital recording capabilities. Recording with compassion invites careful consideration of privacy and vulnerability, and the joy of “catching” particular moments in replayable form transforms some moments while necessarily passing over others. Audio ethnographies and creative sonic fieldwork projects feature recorded data that embody powerful agencies for constructing and exploring soundscapes (Adams et al., 2008; Yong Jeon, Young Hong, & Jik Lee, 2013). Hither and thither Audio-recording interview data remains common practice, and video-recording interviews is common in some fields, particularly those that focus on nonverbal communication cues (e.g., eye contact, smiling). Increasingly, interview recordings are being made remotely (with researchers and participants in different locations) using a variety of technologies. Through the intra-action of researcher, Internet, phones, other technologies, and participants, data recordings cross literal and figura­ tive distances and forge connections. Researchers use phones, Skype, Zoom, FaceTime, and other Internet technologies, which “overcome time and financial constraints, geographical dispersion, and physical mobility boundaries” and facilitate participation (Janghorban, Roudsari, & Taghipour, 2014, p. 1). A tacit assumption persists that face-to-face interviews are inherently better than phone or Internet interviews, yet there are reasons to doubt that this is always the case. In one study in which participants engaged in phone interviews, participants reported that phone interviews are valuable. Participants described themselves as being ‘phone savvy,’ with a lot of experience conducting their business over the phone; suggested that the phone allowed participants to concentrate on researchers’ voice rather than their face; felt that it was easy to establish rapport over the phone; and expressed that they did not feel judged or inhibited when communicating over the phone, making it easier to talk freely about more sensitive topics (Ward, Gott, & Hoare, 2015); recordings of telephone focus groups have also proved workable (M. D. Allen, 2014). Likewise, Skype and similar videoconferencing technologies are convenient, low in cost, enhance researcher safety, enable wider geographical access, and even avoid the environmental impacts of travel for in-person interviews (Hamilton, 2014; Janghorban et al., 2014; Oates, 2015). Both individual and group interviews or focus groups can be conducted this way (Moloney, 2011; Tuttas, 2015). Through making synchronous interview recordings in which researchers and participants talk across distances, recorded data exert considerable agency on participants’ and researchers’ capacities for connection and collaboration.

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Negotiating ambiguities Photography’s role in qualitative research is increasingly crucial to consider apart from that of video and audio recordings. We have previously discussed and rejected positivist views of photography and digital recording as trans­ parent evidence of reality and instead figure them as constructed, partial, and culturally situated. Explains a visual sociologist, “I consider photographs inherently ambiguous, their specifiable meanings emergent in the viewing process. This ambiguity is not a disadvantage or limitation; rather, the multiple meanings negotiated by viewers can be mined for the rich data they yield.” (Schwartz, 1989, p. 122). Some contend that photography enables researchers “to see modes that are visual: colour, shape, size, posi­ tion, light. What they do not show us are modes that operate through the other senses—of touch, smell, hearing and taste—such as bodily movement, texture, three-dimensional shape, sounds” (Dicks et al., 2006, p. 88). Pink (2011) suggests alternatively that photographs “hav[e] great potential for representing/evoking other sensory experiences,” opening “possibilities of communicating about tactile experience, and texture,” such that researchers may “imagine and recognize our sensory embodied responses to other people, objects, textures and more” in the photos (p. 266). Photos also attend to participants’ embodiment (Ellingson, 2017). Photos may function as a basis for eliciting participants’ accounts and reflections, whether the photos are generated by researchers, participants, or other sources in the community under study. An innovative study of visuality and incarceration urged attention to what is omitted from photographs of prisons and jails and the ways in which the prison industrial complex controls what we are able to view from outside the system (Schept, 2014). Schept’s argument about the naturalization of incarceration and related sociopolitical forces juxtaposed powerful photos of a tornado-ravaged town located between two prisons in Kentucky, an abandoned prison and a landscape view from the abandoned prison, the entrance to an abandoned coal mine, and the courtyard of a bed and breakfast housed in a renovated (and fetishized) former jail and gallows. In a study of interactions between nurse anesthetists and patients, researchers assembled photos of surgical equipment and other biotechnology and of the medical spaces in which these interactions occurred with other data (Aagaard, Laursen, Rasmussen, & Sørensen, 2017). The rich data of visual ‘notes’ and the meanings they provoked (and that provoked them) visualize the field of study, illuminating complex intraactions of people, objects, discourses, and contexts in which they are emplaced (F. M. Bartlett, 2018; Pink, 2011). Photography fixes images that appear as static yet, as part of an assemblage, are understood as constructing moments that are always already different than constructed because they are always ambiguous and in flux.

52 Engaging recordings Marshaling the mundane Mundane data surround us, embodied within largely unnoticed, taken-for­ granted, everyday routines (Pink, 2012). Making digital recordings of mundane aspects of life yields rich insights into how people live: “the mundane is a domain of creativity and improvisation as well as a site of these everyday routines, contingencies and accomplishments; it is an inseparable and undeniable part of the digital–material environment in which we live” (Pink, Sumartojo, Lupton, & Heyes La Bond, 2017, p. 1). Pink et al. studied bicycle commuters who used self-tracking data technologies, incorporating “layered uses of video” in order to shed light on the complexities of com­ muters’ routines. Digitally recorded data include video-recordings made with GoPro cameras on cyclists’ helmets as they rode, video recordings of partici­ pants preparing their bikes for a ride, and also edited clips drawn from the recorded data that were then shown to participants during video-elicitation interviews. In this way, the researchers focused on important aspects of commuting on a bicycle (and tracking their progress; see Chapter 6 for a discussion of life logging) that are rarely discussed. Similarly, a study using ethnographic video data and interviews of dual-earner couples with children examined everyday, routine chores and running errands as sites of quality time or family time (Kremer-Sadlik & Paugh, 2007). Finally, Pyyry (2015) examined the seemingly unremarkable practices of teen girls engaging in everyday hanging out with each other in urban environments; the study also incorporated the girls’ photos to inquire into embodied and sensory aspects of hanging out practices. Each of these data engagements marshals mundane details of everyday life to provide insights into the powerful ways in which everyday routines and practices are taken for granted as part of social and material landscapes. Digital recordings did not fully capture or contain the mundane, of course, but they provided terrific data that drew attention to previously ignored details, enabled close scrutiny of practices in conversation with participants, and eventually enabled multimedia representation of research findings.

4

Engaging transcripts

Tangling with transcripts Transcription is a selective, interpretive activity conducted to transform audio (visual) recordings of spoken language into written texts that are more readily reread, studied, and analyzed using qualitative methods for scrutinizing data (e.g., grounded theory, thematic, narrative, or conversation analysis techniques). Given that the previous chapter focuses on digital recordings as data, one could reasonably inquire as to why we included a chapter on transcription—which is necessarily constructed from recordings—as another form of data. We draw on Slembrouck’s (2007, p. 823) concept of data history as the complex processing of data from its earliest to later stages of detection and documentation. Clearly, recordings embody an earlier form of data than transcription in the data engagement history, and yet transcriptions remain data, albeit data that have been transformed into a textual form that is amenable to analysis. Of course, this entextualization of speech is also the beginnings of analysis, for the researcher’s choices regarding transcription relate directly to the research purpose (Mishler, 1991). Yet we contend that, despite the move further forward in the data’s history and significant choices and transformations, transcription remains data in fundamental ways that need to be integrated within our development of data engagement. Moreover, in our experience, transcriptions of recorded accounts—of experience, work, beliefs, values, culture, interaction, and so on—are most commonly treated as data by researchers. Researchers may go back and check transcripts against record­ ings to resolve errors and inconsistencies and to ensure reasonable correspondence between the two formats, but once verification processes are completed, most forms of analysis do not require, nor encourage, returning to recordings to re-listen but simply naturalize the transcript as an authoritative rendering of the interaction (Ashmore & Reed, 2005). Cannon (2018) elaborated: within the field of qualitative research, the complexity of transcription has been acknowledged, and transcription is recognized as a political and interpretive act of representation, yet, it is still tempting to take up and use transcribed texts as placeholders for truth. Without attention and intention, the intermediate and interpretive status of transcriptions is easily forgotten. (p. 572)

54 Engaging transcripts Our professional experience, methods textbooks, and other accounts make it clear that transcript-as-data is the de facto standard of practice amongst those conducting traditional forms of qualitative analysis (and many performing less traditional forms). Given the material role transcripts play in our research (and our researcher-selves), we seek to illuminate what transcripts-as-data do and how we and our studies are, in turn, done by transcripts beginning early in the data history. We also want to encourage more attention to the ways in which the status of transcripts becomes naturalized within a project’s data history. Researchers’ allegiance to particular paradigms (e.g., critical, social construc­ tionist, postpositivist) determines the perceived consequences of transcription’s transformation or re-presentation of data for describing participants’ (and researchers’) meanings. Few qualitative researchers include in their research reports any discussion of transcription beyond a passing acknowledgment that it took place. For some, transcription seemingly has no significance for a study’s findings, while others admit that transcription does matter but bracket (or are directed by reviewers and editors to bracket) these significant considerations as so tangential to an article’s primary purpose as to not warrant explicit mention. For example, conversation analysis researchers consider recordings of interactions to be the data and transcripts to be a representation of that data, and the two are to be used together with “the transcript as a convenient tool of reference” and the recording upon which it is based “viewed as a ‘reproduction’ of a determinate social event” (Wooffitt & Hutchby, 1998, p. 74). Among those engaging in other forms of qualitative analysis, “It is now widely recognized that transcripts alone are not data, that they cannot be autonomized from the recordings, which are the primary data—transcripts being secondary products of representation and annotation practices” (Mondada, 2007, p. 810). And yet transcripts are not merely the “same” data at a later stage; transcripts and recordings intra-act in complex ways: transcripts facilitate access to the recordings and highlight detailed features for the analysis; reciprocally, recordings give to transcripts their evidence and substance, they allow and warrant an enriched and contextual interpretation of tiny conventional notations. They mutually produce their accountability, intelligibility and interpretability. (p. 811) Transcripts also invoke disciplinary histories and practices that guide us to generate that data in particular formats. Historically, social science embraced a “quasi-positivistic reification of the transcript as ‘data’ about the interviewee, frozen in time (and space)” and some researchers continue to operate under similar assumptions (Poland, 1995, p. 292; see also Lapadat, 2000). In presenting transcripts as transparent representations of the encounters for which they stand in, a transcript may be figured (with a nod to Deleuze) as a “tracing [that] limits possibilities and imposes a hierarchical structure on what should be a fluid experience. As a result, there is little space to wo(a)nder” (Sinclair, 2018, p. 4). The presumption of transparency and tracing is

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reflected in the term commonly used in methods sections of researcher reports, “verbatim,” as in, “interviews were transcribed verbatim.” Researchers’ implicit or explicit use of terms such as tracing and verbatim erases the presence of the transcriptionist entirely (whether the researcher or another person), rendering that figure “an inert ‘subject’ (if subject is even the right word) who mechanically and (presumably) faithfully follows and repeats the other’s production in his/her repe­ tition” (Inoue, 2018, p. 218). We discuss strategies for resisting such erasure to engage meaningfully with the constraints and agencies of transcribed data. In this chapter, we discuss multiple approaches to theorizing how transcripts intra-act with technologies, researchers, recordings, and other data within a data assemblage. We urge researchers to be open to possibilities for forming new engagements with transcripts and to playing with transcription processes in creative ways to enliven what can be seemingly dead artifacts into sites of col­ laboration, reflexivity, and multiplicity.

Making transcripts In this section we explore making transcripts through three sets of practices, each of which offers a different metaphor or perspective that illuminates particular capacities and constraints of transcription—mapping, translating, and selecting. Mapping If transcripts are not transparent or equivalent to the interactions that they represent, what are they? Better still—we ask: what do transcripts do as part of the data assemblage? We contend that transcription is “an embodied sociocognitive prac­ tice” (Duranti, 2006, p. 305), consisting of “situated analytical practices” (Mondada, 2007, p. 810), and that “transcripts [are] artifacts” (Davidson, 2009, p. 37) whose construction includes “temporal-historical dimensions” (Duranti, 2006, p. 302). These representations map the interactions, as well as some amount of ambient sound, action, and affect, present on data recordings (Warr, 2004). The territories of the interview or the moment of work practices or the soundscape of an urban neighborhood are represented through a drawing composed of words and symbols, a map that shows features that are relevant to researchers’ (and possibly participants’) goals. Transcripts serve (and reflect) a variety of purposes; “what is re-presented [in a transcript] is data constructed by a researcher for a particular purpose” (Green, Franquiz, & Dixon, 1997, p. 172). To extend the metaphor of mapping, consider that a variety of maps fulfill different purposes – political maps show boundaries of cities, counties, and countries, for example. Topographical maps highlight elevation and terrain. Feature maps help tourists find points of interest. Likewise, transcripts lead in particular directions; they move researchers toward some places and spaces and away from others. Transcripts can be constructed in ways that feature words, vocal rhythms, poetic expressions, conversational turn-taking, connections between words and images, or other areas of interest. The transcriber-mapmaker (re)constitutes the data in order to move toward specific ends. Thus,

56 Engaging transcripts the transcriber is a meaning-generating agent, selecting portions from the flow of the recording and turning them into meaningful units. What they do can thus be described as “doing data”—a methodical generation of a social reality; more precisely, an artifact, which then determines the reality of the research process. (Ayaß, 2015, p. 511; emphasis added) For the purpose of exploring data engagement, we consider the transcript arti­ fact to be a limited, inherently political, and yet highly useful map for navi­ gating the data terrain. Within the data assemblage, maps continue to be redrawn, with more points of interest added, nuanced terrains delineated, and new trails forged and described as transcripts intra-act with the researcher, other data, and discourse. Maps are never innocent but reify intersecting webs of power from the perspective of the cartographer (Harley, 1989). Transcripts’ power has material consequences analogous to those of maps. First, maps have the appearance of objectivity. “Much of the power of the map … is that it operates behind a mask of a seemingly neutral science. It hides and denies its social dimensions at the same time as it legitimates” (Harley, 1989, p. 7). Colonialist legacies of mapping “virgin” territories as a method of delineating and legitimizing the political domination over indigenous peoples by conquering armies further complicate mapping as an activity (Brunyé et al., 2012). Thus one of the most significant affordances of transcript data is a face validity akin to that afforded to maps. Transcripts have an air of truthfulness, particularly in multimodal tran­ scripts that include hyperlinked video, photographs, or other data (Ayaß, 2015). Over time, transcripts “became part of bureaucratic machinery as an artifact of evidence and accountability, the materialization of durable indexicality” which then makes the linguistic territory that they map difficult to dispute or even to question (Inoue, 2018, p. 223). Second, researchers and transcribers must make power-laden decisions about “cleaning up” transcripts, risking the loss of vital clues such as hesitations, pauses, or awkward struggles to rephrase a passage. Such verbal disfluencies often relate to experiences of marginalized people that are difficult to express through dominant languages that lack nuanced words for experiences of exclusion, discrimination, and violent victimization (DeVault, 1990). Third, transcription is linked to “social institutions and systems” and their “exercise of power and its attendant knowledge production” (Inoue, 2018, p. 218). The systems have histories of classifying people to facilitate dis­ crimination and exclusion, such that “any transcription is indexically connected with and embedded within the broader social structure of gender, class, race, and other socially salient systems of difference that allocate value and meaning” (p. 222). Finally, today transcription intertwines with corporate colonization through technology and globalization. Transcription processes are routinely outsourced by the Global North to the Global South, often to former colonies where fluency in the language of the colonizer became a capital resource for transcribers, as part of a larger gendered, racialized, classed history of steno­ graphy (Inoue, 2018).

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The legacies of power and domination in both cartography and transcription must be acknowledged and their consequences addressed. Yet despite this complex legacy, mapping also may be done joyfully, with vitality and a spirit of liberating play as borders are redrawn, places names restored or amended, and new paths constructed. Clarke’s (2005) method of situational mapping of discourse is an excellent case in point that offers insight into the compassionate and vital potential for transcripts to (re)map research territories. Clarke advocates a nonlinear representation of connections among key concepts, objects, people, and discourses as maps of research findings. Likewise, transcripts can embrace visual data, become hyperlinked/intertwined with audio clips, refashioned into poetic forms, and otherwise made with creativity, multiplicity, and indeterminacy. Thus transcription “is not about capturing what has been with photographic accuracy; it is about mapping what is possible … [in order] to (re)imagine transcription as an act of mapping and space of multiplicity instead of an act of tracing” (Sinclair, 2018, p. 2). Sinclair exemplifies this approach as she maps her young, male participants’ speech through flexible, dynamic transcripts that combine reflexive thoughts and questions amidst the talk about “not being a reader,” an identity each of the participants claimed. Translating Moving from oral to written speech involves not accurate dictation and notation but instead translation (Mishler, 1991). Stripped of most nonverbal interaction cues and notes on context, standard transcripts of research inter­ views focus on representing spoken language, emphasizing verbal content while ignoring differences between oral and written speech (Del Busso, 2007). And yet, listening to spoken speech in recorded interviews, other (inter)actions, or soundscapes is not merely a matter of listening to sounds as they are spoken and writing them down; “we do not first transcribe the sounds and only then try to identify the meanings, we ‘hear’ sounds and meanings simultaneously in the course of transcription” (Hammersley, 2010, p. 558). Moreover, we then take the sounds and meanings heard simultaneously and interpret them again, this time by rendering them through the norms of written speech. Mishler (1991) suggests that transcribing oral to written speech involves translation. Just as translating ideas from one language may not make sense using the direct equivalent in another, writing down oral speech may give it a very different flavor of meaning. People do not process oral speech the same way we read it; we make sense of language in vastly different ways depending upon how our bodies take in the cues (Warr, 2004). Moreover, “[P]eople do not really speak in sentences … I inscribed this normality as I made decisions about which part of [respondent’s] discursive moment-by-moment information-building fit into what phrase or sentence” (Skukauskaite, 2012, para. 23). This is because “written down talk exhibits many features of written language that do not actually occur in spoken talk. For example, commas, full stops (periods), and paragraphing are incorporated”

58 Engaging transcripts (Davidson, 2009, pp. 38–39). So we add punctuation and even decide when speakers have moved to their next paragraph in order to make spoken speech intelligible in written form. At the same time, many researchers prefer that nonlexical sounds (e.g., um, uhhh, er), laughter, pauses, and other aspects of spoken speech be represented in transcripts—and there are very good reasons for doing so—even though doing so renders the transcripts difficult to read and limited in their ability to evoke an embodied interaction. Because of all of these differences, accuracy is a naive standard for quality in transcription; retaining the actual words in written form does not convey the truth of what happened in the (oral) moment (Mishler, 1991). Transcription is better understood as interpretive and translational (Davidson, 2009; Duranti, 2006). Accuracy in translating spoken speech through transcription may be under­ stood as paradoxical, given our suggestion that transcripts are constructed, selective, and involve continual, active choice-making. In transcribing, skilled researchers can make interpretations and choices that disagree in meaningful, impactful ways. We recognize the “slippery slope from recognition that decisions and interpretations are necessarily involved in transcription to the conclusion that the data are created or constituted by the transcriber rather than representing more or less adequately ‘what occurred’” (Hammersley, 2010, p. 558). We are “as uncomfortable with unbridled relativism as … with naive positivism/relativism, and therefore resist a purist interpretation” (Poland, 1995, p. 295). That is, we hold in tension accuracy’s realism with translation’s interpretive nature. Furthermore, even a more sophisticated conceptualization of accuracy is threatened through errors that creep into the research process due to sloppiness, inattention, or misunderstandings: Some discrepancies between recording and transcripts “can be unabashedly characterized as errors,” and transcribers should attempt to render speech as closely as possible to what they heard when listening to recordings (Poland, 1995, p. 293). This “preserves some of the evidence in a relatively concrete form that may be necessary for us to assess, and re-assess, our inferences” (Hammersley, 2010, p. 565). Specifically, Poland (1995) identified three types of challenges to transcription quality and accuracy, over and above the fact that transcription is interpretive and the effects of poor recording quality: (1) deliberate alterations of the data (e.g., a transcriber’s attempt to standardize grammar); (2) accidental alterations of the [meaning of the] data (e.g., mistaking one word or phrase for another); and (3) unavoidable alterations (e.g., inability to capture intonation or emotional expression). Each of these challenges embodies political implications. Standardizing grammar, for example, distorts participants’ meanings by imposing dominant cultural forms onto accounts of experiences that fit more closely with other modes of speaking or lose their edginess when tempered with grammar. Even the accidental or unavoidable alterations are political; transcribers attend differentially to particular aspects of recordings depending upon (lack of) shared vocabulary, experiences, or culturally specific referents, making mistakes accordingly. Proactive strategies to improve quality include transcriber training, inviting transcribers to provide feedback or

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commentary on anything they found noteworthy in the interaction that affects its meaning as transcribed, member checks (inviting participant feedback on their transcribed interview or interaction), and use of fieldnotes from the researcher who conducted the interview (or witnessed the recorded behavior) being tran­ scribed. All of these choices and challenges should be reported in methods sections of articles or other research representations as transparently as possible (Skukauskaite, 2012). Of course, the complexity of transcription as translation means that no amount of transparency could be sufficient to capture fully the nuances and implications of the choices involved. Selecting All transcription is selective; one cannot include every detail from an audio or video recording, and the more symbols included to represent elements of speech, the less readable and intelligible transcripts become (Ochs, 1979). [T]he recognition of the inherently selective nature of recording first and transcribing later should alert us to the fact that the real … must be approa­ ched, approximated, simulated, and even induced and seduced by means of multiple selective processes that are complementary to one another and not substitutes for one another. (Duranti, 2006, p. 306; emphasis in original) Inducing and seducing data are great ways of thinking that evoke the embodied and visceral elements of transcription. Seduction brings data to researchers in a state of excitement, mutual attraction, and deliberate, conscious intra-action. As we transcribe, we seek the object of our desire—data—and its liveliness. Through desire we encounter the transcribed data as material, intoxicating, full of wonder and possibility and choice. We select formats, genres, details, and practices, our choices becoming part of the bonds forged among researcher, data (recordings and transcripts), and world. We necessarily select some details and discard some as not interesting or pertinent enough to include; this is unavoidable. We need to take seriously what goes unselected, even as it is set aside in order to embrace other elements, the ones to which we are irresistibly drawn, the “hot spots” in our data that come alive in our bodyselves (MacLure, 2013a). In addition to selection of elements to include, a second key aspect of tran­ scription practices is “the unavoidable use of cultural knowledge and skills by the transcriber to interpret and represent what is going on” in the recording (Hammersley, 2010, p. 558). These two activities are, of course, mutually constitutive and inherently politicized; we cannot make decisions on what to include without cultural knowledge and skills, and we cannot interpret and represent meanings in data without making constant selections and rejections of words and alternative foci of all types. Rather than naturalizing it, selection of some cultural details over some others should be described and justified in relation to the research goals (Davidson, 2009). So, for example, if a researcher

60 Engaging transcripts labels health care providers by their discipline (e.g., registered nurse, clinical social worker, physician) in transcripts of interdisciplinary team meetings because the goal is to examine patterns of cross-disciplinary communication, this can be addressed briefly in the methods section as a choice to select that aspect of parti­ cipant identity. Another option is to select very few nonverbal cues to represent in transcribed interviews in favor of a focus on language (Del Busso, 2007). In our analysis of how nieces and nephews described their relationships with their aunts (Ellingson & Sotirin, 2006), our transcription choices reflected our goal, which was to cast a wide net for participants’ language explaining who is thought of or called an aunt and what behaviors or sentiments count as “aunting.” With lan­ guage as our focus, we included minimal vocal cues. Of course, the transcription choices also made our data amenable for our study’s method of thematic analysis. Strategizing or settling on a particular purpose for a transcript that will guide its construction is not always simple or straightforward. “Only once we make clear what this transcription is meant to be good for can we decide whether it is doing what it was meant to do or whether there are other, better ways of achieving the original goal” (Duranti, 2006, p. 307). For example, in a study of work of foreign language teachers in Lithuania “the representation of [respondent’s] speech in sentences that are not grammatically correct inscribed participant-researcher relationships and ideological positions in particular ways” (Skukauskaite, 2012, para. 24), including shared language and culture, as well as teaching philosophy. Through these rhetorical strategies, the constructed nature of transcripts become more apparent. Finally, we note that selection of transcription elements in ser­ vice of the researcher’s purpose changes over time as the transcript is utilized in multiple strategic ways. Such “changes are not simply cumulative steps towards an increasingly better transcript: they can involve adding but also subtracting details for the purposes of a specific analysis, of a particular recipient-oriented presentation, or of compliance with editorial constraints” (Mondada, 2007, p. 810). We revel in the ongoing becoming of transcripts’ purposes, audiences, and contents as part of the data-making process.

Assembling transcripts Transcribed data continually intra-act within an assemblage of discourse, material objects, methodologies, and other data. Through this dynamic intra-action, tran­ scripts “make visible the consequential relationships between transcribing choices, research purposes, and data representations” (Skukauskaite, 2012, para. 7). In this section, we play with two generative flows—liminality and (resisting) flatness. Lingering in the liminal Transcripts persist in liminal spaces. The “in-between-nesses of the transcripts” embodies their “hybrid, oscillating” materiality while also rendering them “objects of knowledge” through which “the phenomena studied are made accessible to a scho­ larly discourse in presentations and publications” (Ayaß, 2015, p. 524). This process

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of accessibility is mutually constitutive with “an epistemo-phenomenological schema of evidential and analytic utility” (Ashmore & Reed, 2005, p. 90) which we unsettle by considering transcripts within a complex and fluid data assemblage. The assemblage is always in flux as researchers, participants, technology, and data—in various forms and at multiple points in their collective data history—intra-act in liminal space. “I think of transcription as operating in the liminal,” that is, in “the spaces between research and life, talk and text, speaking and reading, author and reader, which is the only space there is” (Cannon, 2018, p. 571). The transcripts’ in­ between-ness complicates attempts to stabilize them as transparent evidence of reality and instead gives them room to move. Technologies are irrevocably entangled with transcription and contribute to its liminal status: at the very onset, the technology of the typewriter [keyboard] … is incorpo­ rated in the practice of transcription in a determinate way. Transcription itself, from the recordings to the playback and the transcript, is bound to devices and thus is a process imbued with technology. (Ayaß, 2015, p. 520) Within the data assemblage, researchers make sense of “transcript[s] in the presence of audio or video data, field notes, or other forms of head notes (knowledge gained from being in the situation). Thus, a transcript is shaped by and, in turn, shapes what can be known” (Green et al, 1997, pp. 173–174), and “the particular technology and the demands of technological devices not only become ingrained in operational processes in general, but also, and more importantly, determine research processes” through their affordances (Ayaß, 2015, p. 509; see also Davidson, 2009). That is, affordances make possible some choices and constrain or eliminate others. In so doing, technology is not just an influence on or part of research processes but actually co-determines what is possible and fitting with the study’s purpose. Moreover, after a transcript is produced from a digital recording using word processing, voice recognition, or other technologies, the object produced is yet another technology; transcription “is always from a technology-mediated inscription to (a sometimes different, sometimes the same) technology-mediated representation” (Duranti, 2006, p. 306). Entanglement with the technology and transcripts places the embodied researcher within liminal space as well: “I became aware of my entanglement with sound, machine, text, body,” offers Cannon (2018, p. 575). Bodies not only produce and consume recordings and transcripts, bodies in turn are shaped by these powerful actants. Lingering in the infinite betweenness allows for entangled and exciting and anxiety producing relations. Though I might have thought at one time that my research could be cleanly separated out from my life, the past year and a half has made that painfully unthinkable. I have been

62 Engaging transcripts remade through this research and continue to ask questions because of it that will perpetually remake me. (Cannon, 2018, p. 571) Our remaking as researchers is one of the most fascinating elements of research involving transcription. These seemingly mundane, modernist, evidential representations become entangled in sticky webs of human, compu­ ter, screen, paper, and pen, remaining ever liminal, refusing fixity. Troubling flatness If transcripts’ primary purpose is to provide written representations of speech, it is nonetheless true that they also offer descriptions of settings, nonverbal communication (e.g., tone, rate of speech, sarcasm, laughter, crying), clothing and appearance, and other presumably relevant details. For video recordings, descriptions of actions and interactions are crucial both to understanding speech and to explaining recorded behavior or events. Moreover, descriptions may illuminate how not just people but also objects have consequences for the meaning of the recorded event. [H]ow we select the objects to be described, how we formulate their character, what out of all the various attributes we could ascribe to them we actually do, and so on, depends upon the framework of relevance defined by the questions our description is seeking to address … There is an important element of givenness even in descriptions … so that what we subsequently describe will have been constrained by evidence about what is going on in the situation. (Hammersley, 2010, p. 562) These descriptions provide needed context and cues (Tracy, 2019). Yet they also can be unsettled by rethinking them as opportunities. Sinclair (2018) further enhanced her transcribed data by embedding “event memories” into transcripts, rather than keeping her descriptive and speculative notes separate from the transcripts. Event memories are amalgamations of my memory of the moment, my journal notes taken at the time, and my thinking as I transcribed and read the transcriptions. These do not function as an objective data point; rather, they attempt to trouble the flatness of the transcript, to open other possible entryways. They are written while transcribing and are indicated by italicized text imbedded in the transcription … . [T]hese event memories are no more “truth” than any other aspect of the transcript; rather, they are further contours on the map. (Sinclair, 2018, p. 5; emphasis in original) In this way, the researcher’s memories, thoughts, and assumptions become “tangible records” that are explicitly labeled as part of the transcribed data. Tangibility is not intended to render the data fixed or static by completing it; on

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the contrary, “[e]vent memory seeks to write in the in-between spaces” that remain in flow (p. 6). That flow may also include inviting participants to contribute their own event memories “to further open the interpretative landscape” (p. 6) to a multiplicity of experience, memories, and meanings. Each of these strategies further troubles the flatness of the transcript, adding textures and vitality.

Becoming transcripts Despite our claims as to how transcripts can be made and assembled in ways that sustain their vitality as data, the danger remains in understanding them as Clifford (1990) did in our earlier discussion of fieldnotes (see Chapter 2); he playfully refers to inscription as chopped and prepared for cooking, description as sautéed and ready for theoretical sauce, and transcripts—unappetizingly—as “reheated leftovers” (p. 58). In this section we explain two creative ways to resist this denigration of transcripts’ potential for generative becoming—enli­ vening data and stretching the space. Enlivening data Back (2007) valued data liveliness and argued for the need for methods which “document and understand social life without assassinating it” (p. 164), nor rendering “the life of the research encounter into a corpse fit only for autopsy” (p. 163). In the introduction to this book where we lay out our model for data engagement, we quoted Duhn’s (2017) fantastic reckoning of “modernist data-zombies” and “post-qualitative data-liveliness” and proposed that data engagement may be a generative conceptualization of what could lay between the two as a vibrant possibility for doing data now. Duhn did not specify a particular type of qualitative data-zombie (and presumably included all). To our eye, transcripts, even more than any other data form, exemplify the notion of data-zombies—the dead reanimated in a false life in which they (if popular culture got it right) stagger along in a mob, dropping bits of themselves as they go, subject only to a desperation to eat brains and infect others. The zombie apocalypse now looms as a perpetual threat to social order. Duhn continues: In a performative mode, the shadow trails appear in brackets and/or are itali­ cized to indicate moments of out-of-line entanglements where data foci blur vision. These entanglements bring to the fore the awareness that data-zombies linger on, and that data performance as search for potentialities criss-crosses data liveliness and data stasis. Data collection [in] this sense is about imagining possibilities and creating conditions for possibilities to materialise in a sharing of the world in all its liveliness, where differences are valued. (p. 11) We propose that data-zombies, then, can be reimagined as transcript-zom­ bies that are always on the move through an animated liveliness that can

64 Engaging transcripts prove vastly entertaining to those who know not to dismiss them too quickly nor fear them too deeply. Transcript-zombies participate in the possibilities in that middle-space between stasis and liveliness. Other meth­ odologists also have noted transcripts’ potential for liveliness. [T]ranscripts have a life or, rather, we give them a life. Transcripts are born, get longer and fatter, and change in character, sometimes through our revisions, other times by simply sitting in a drawer for a few years. When we pick them up again, they read differently … [which] makes our transcription process a classic hermeneutic circle, or actually a spiral, in which each loop gives us a new listening, a new viewing, exposing us to the possibility of a new interpretation, which happens at a different time. (Duranti, 2006, pp. 307–308) As we continue to engage with transcripts, their liveliness can infect us with possibilities for new interpretations, creative modes of expression, and more. Given that Duhn (2017) suggested playfulness, light-heartedness, and humor may facilitate productive engagement with data as they—and we—continue to become, we like to think that she would approve of our transcription-zombies (see Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1 Reanimating data joy

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Stretching the space Another lively metaphor for transcripts’ becoming is to stretch the space of transcription through creating multiple iterations that “work the liminal spaces of transcription and research” (Cannon, 2018, p. 572). “I have teased transcription,” claims Cannon, “played around with it, stretched it this way and that, re-turned it. I have worked to unthink what it is and think its possibilities” (p. 580). Her creative responses to her interview recording and transcripts included photos, self-portraits, transcripts with poetic transcription elements, a musical composition available on a website that attempts to represent the rhythms of speech in the interview (composed by a collea­ gue), transcripts with collaged pictures from Google searches on topics raised in the interview, and more. “I did think in multiples, in iterations. I wanted to stretch these data to its limit. To produce it beyond contain­ ment” (p. 576). To move beyond containment by stretching space is a wonderful way of thinking of transcript data’s continual state of becoming. Stretching beyond containment points not only to an enlarging of the space that transcripts occupy but also to the change of shapes and textures of the stretched space(s). Even with lots of stretching, much is absented through transcription. Cannon continues: I am not the only one who has lost data … and data are not the only thing I have lost over the course of this study. So, what do I hope that this work will do? Make evident (again—differently) the messiness that’s absent from a neat transcription page. (p. 579) That stretched space, multiplicity, and uncontained messiness is data’s becoming. Mess and multiplicity go together; Norris (2016) exemplifies mul­ tiplicity and stretching by making multimodal transcript data for her linguistics research on interactions using videoconferencing software to talk via Internet connection to family members who live across the globe. The transcripts included still images from videos from not only the webcam (through which the videoconference took place) but also images from cameras in participants’ homes. These complex transcripts open possibilities for new ways of sensemaking and then representing that sense-making. With multiple images and language excerpts, Norris does not argue for definitive truth but for a multi­ plicity of understandings about what it means for families to keep connected when living on different continents.

Data-on-the-move Transcripts remain flexible and open to possibilities. In this section we discuss several creative paths to experiencing transcript data as mobile, energized, and embodied.

66 Engaging transcripts Re-doubling translation Intriguing, multisensorial possibilities include multimedia or multimodal transcription practices (Davidson, 2009; Nordstrom, 2015). Multimodal transcripts include photo stills and video and/or audio clips of digitally recorded interactions, along with image captions, all of which are embed­ ded within the context of transcribed spoken language (Dicks et al., 2006). In traditional forms of video-recording transcription, the descriptions of images contained in captions textualize the images. In this form of transcript “[b]oth forms of communication, (heard) language and (seen) gaze, are transferred to a different medium, one different medium. Transcripts of visual data thus provide a double translation and reduction of the recording” (Ayaß, 2015, p. 514; emphasis in original). The notion of doubling trans­ lation reflects a powerful data agency; transcribed data reduce what was both heard and seen down to what can be read in written form. However, the doubling effect may become generative rather than reductive when complex relationships and capacities for navigating are established among hyperlinked text, textualizations, images, and sound(s)—“In hyperlinking, we are no longer talking simply about the juxtaposition of image, text and sound, but the creation of multiple interconnections and pathways (or tra­ versals) among them, both potential and explicit” (Dicks et al., 2006, p. 94). We term this re-doubling; the multiplicity of the translations provides rich insights into how much could be taken for granted, as reflected in “the insurmountable logocentrism of transcription” in which written language appears as evidence for the reality it translates (Ayaß, 2015, p. 512). Multi­ media transcript data re-double the translation and reduction of not just spoken words but all other nonverbal signals, actions, and objects. Tradi­ tionally these not only get reduced to language but get reduced to the status of secondary materials that serve to re-center the written translation of the spoken words: “first comes the transcription of the spoken word, then, whatever is ‘there’ is added on,” explains Ayaß (p. 515). Yet multi­ media and multimodal transcripts can push back against such reduction to transform it. The reconfigured transcripts offer a re-doubled multiplicity of agential linkages among modes and genres. Co-locating Environmental context can spark flows of data agency through locating the spoken word not only in written form but through incorporation of qualitative geographic information systems (GIS) into transcription processes. In this way, researchers produce spatial transcripts that bring together the rich narrative data of the mobile interview with the capacity of qualitative GIS to analyze the role of space in shaping those data … . The essence of the technique we developed is in matching the words participants

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speak while moving to their GPS location in order to produce a spatial tran­ script. A key advantage of this automated technique … is that it allows the location of apparently ephemeral comments to be recorded. (Jones & Evans, 2012, p. 95) This study of bicycle commuters asked participants to narrate their ride home using a microphone, audio recorder, and GPS system. The resulting map links 10 seconds’ worth of text to each location of talking. This is a powerful data agency that on one hand claims to be capturing “ephemeral comments” within fairly specific geographic contexts, fixing them in place and rendering them static (Jones & Evans, 2012). A more exciting and critical materialist interpretation, however, is that the (transcribed) data escape domestication within a standard transcript that locates all comments only within the linguistic space of the printed or electronic transcript file. Through the agency of GIS, the transcribed data remain on the move; the data are made via mobility, and some degree of that motion is retained through the 10-second intervals of space embedded from outside the transcript and indeed, outside of language and word-processing files. We understand qualitative GIS processes to hold tremendous potential for energizing transcription, based on creative work currently undertaken primarily by critical geographers but increasingly within a variety of disciplines (Pavlovs­ kaya, 2017; see also O’Rourke, 2018; Teixeira, 2018). Embodied (word)-processing People have long used (including earlier, far more primitive versions) voicerecognition software as an accommodation to adapt computer use to their dis/ abilities (Goodley & Runswick-Cole, 2013; McRuer, 2004). Exponential improvement in effectiveness of voice-recognition processes since their incep­ tion has led to far wider experimentation with possibilities of voice-to-text software for making transcripts of research recordings. Some researchers advocate listening to recordings of interviews or other interactions and then repeating what is heard using the researcher’s voice into a microphone for transformation via “embodied transcription” through the use of voice-recognition software (Brooks, 2010; Hawkins, 2017; Perrier & Kirkby, 2013). Moreover, Brooks (2010) suggests that researchers engage in embodied transcription involving three cycles of revisit and repeat, revision, and refinement and reflection. This method is intended to have researchers “engaging multiple embodied channels—audi­ tory, vocal, physical, and creative—in the pursuit of deeper understanding of collected data … . [through] the conscious awareness of the embodied aspect of the act of speaking the words of others” (p. 1229). This awareness facilitates an active engagement with the data and participants and creates a state of actively listening, of being embodied and involved with the material. Embodied Transcription allowed me to become acutely aware of how the cadence of a voice, the pacing of speech, and the

68 Engaging transcripts emphasis on particular words reveals information within an interview that is often lost in translation from spoken word to written text. (p. 1230) Sounds are felt as well as heard by researchers when replaying recordings: “the sonic constantly informs our everyday ways of being and knowing. Sounds resonate in our bodies. They do so not only in our ears but also as something that is felt” (Gershon, 2013, p. 258). Playing with transcription process con­ ventions this way harnesses an embodied mode of producing transcripts. The recorded data resonate through the body of the researcher, who then speaks embodied words into the text-producing technology, which the researcher then edits, typically using fingers but also potentially [b]y mimicking speech, we found we dwelled on the words our participants dwelled on. Moreover, it was easier to engage with the other non-verbal aspects of the interview, such as pauses and sighs, which may become lost when they are quickly transcribed. (Perrier & Kirkby, 2013, p. 104) Because listening to sound is part of most people’s everyday experience, it fol­ lows that Perrier and Kirkby felt more engaged with participants’ embodied signals when they listened to the recording and repeated their words. From a critical materialist perspective, the data actively move through the researchers’ bodies in this spoken transcription process, dynamically re/constructing, deconstructing, and intertwining voices of participants and researchers. This serious play may enrich transcripts and inspire researchers to further creative engagement with data. Punctuating Punctuation is largely taken for granted as automatic in writing about transcription processes; while we admit interpretation and translation are taking place, where to place a comma or how to decide between a semi­ colon and a period does not always appear to raise to a level of significance. Yet punctuation is powerful and can be employed in writing with great style and wit, abysmal clunkiness, and everything in between (see Thomas, 1979). Punctuation is also potentially political. This point is demonstrated in many feminist classes (and probably others as well) by asking students to punctuate a set of words (listed on a board or slide), which most students do by simply adding a period at the end. Yet at least one other way to punctuate the sentence presents itself and radically alters the meaning of the (same) words: A woman without her man is nothing [no punctuation] A woman without her man is nothing. A woman: without her, man is nothing.

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The political implications of punctuation in the second and third iterations is undeniable. This powerful resource from written language conventions func­ tions within transcription processes as a way of interpreting the pauses, tones, and rhythms of spoken speech using commas, periods, question marks, and so on (Bezemer & Mavers, 2011). We previously discussed issues surrounding making choices in transcription elements; here we want to encourage readers to engage in serious play with punctuation in order to explore the multiplicity of potential meanings. Brooks (2010) does not use punctuation at all as she does her first cycle of embodied transcription, for example; this provides a different way of being with the flow of words. Those who use voice-recognition software point out that one must speak the punctuation into the microphone when repeating participants’ words; the software does not punctuate, so the choice is actively made to choose and vocalize commas, periods, etc. which becomes part of the researcher’s resonating with the data that they speak (Per­ rier & Kirkby, 2013). Wonderfully creative is Scott’s (2015) choice to play with punctuation to create multiple refigurations of transcribed speech. To be mindful of the embodied interaction that creates meanings to be struggled over, I remove punctuation that organizes sentences grammatically (e.g., commas, periods) in my transcriptions. Instead, I move to the next line at narrators’ pauses so that the texts resemble verse, and the reader can access storytellers’ unique speech patterns by reading the texts aloud … Attending to the embodied communicative act of telling and listening to a story serves as a reminder that communication allows cultural meanings, identities, and understandings that are always open to reinterpretation in future interactions to surface and resurface. (Scott, 2015, pp. 229–230) These are only a few of many possibilities for playing with punctuation to generate a multiplicity of transcripts of a single recording, experiencing it anew with each configuration. Rich possibilities for making meaningful transcriptions with and without punctuation abound in these inventive approaches to keep­ ing transcript data lively. The researcher’s “I” Transcripts often include the researcher as interviewer or conversational colla­ borator and therefore include the researcher’s spoken “I” as part of the interaction. A generative strategy to disrupt the taken-for-grantedness of this fixed researcher-I (first person) is to switch to third-person voice (“the researcher”) at some points in a transcript to show the interplay between a past researcher self (who made the original transcript data) and a current self who now encounters the same data at a different point in time. Skukauskaite (2012) used third-person voice to make evi­ dent the “assumptions which guided my transcription work at different moments in data history and my development as a researcher” (para. 15), and first-person voice to indicate current understandings and reflexive considerations of the past.

70 Engaging transcripts She advocates “embracing researcher subjectivity, bracketing it, and following the data to construct representations grounded in empirical evidence” and in the understanding of the researcher perspective as continually changing (para. 15). In this way, the empirical evidence—words from the transcript—grounds the researcher’s claims and yet is unsettled by marking both the researcher’s dynamic self and, by implication, the dynamic self of the participant. Not mentioned by Skukauskaite is the further possibility of incorporating second-person voice, that is, addressing the presumed audience as “you.” You could be the audience for the research findings (e.g., peers at a conference) to whom the researcher speaks or it could be aimed at the participant (at that time in the past) with whom the current researcher-self could be in conversation for reflection. Other iterations of voices and pronouns are also possibilities for playing with transcription processes to do data differently and in a multiplicity of forms. Tracing wondering Individuals each have their own rhythm of speaking that is part of the nonverbal layer of meaning (including tone, rate, pitch) that co-constructs meaning with the verbal content of a person’s spoken words. Rhythm and cadence are notoriously difficult to capture. As I listened to Shelia’s voice, that didn’t seem right. It didn’t match the cadence, the rhythm of the talk, so I started using the enter key to break up the text along with her rhythms, her pauses, her enunciations. It began to look like poetry instead of transcription. It came alive and seemed more resonant of her … . I decided to let the transcript remain messy, to think of it as a tracing of my wondering. (Cannon, 2018, p. 575; emphasis added) Poetic transcription occurs at the fault lines between making data and moving further through the data history toward analysis, along with other forms of research poetry (Faulkner, 2019). Many researchers, Laura included (Ellingson, 2011b), present poetic transcriptions (or data poems) as tracings of their wonderings in which the researcher–participant collaboration in story­ telling becomes evident (Hawkins, 2015). Speaking further of wonder, MacLure (2013b) suggests: “Perhaps we could think of engagements with data, then, as experiments with order and disorder, in which provisional and partial taxonomies are formed, but are always subject to metamorphosis, as new connections spark among words, bodies, objects, and ideas” (p. 229). Poetic play with transcription traces researcher wondering as participants’ words, voices, bodies, and identities spark new connections among the multiplicities of meanings in the data and beyond, opening new possibilities. Within these multiplicities are possible researcher-selves. Henderson (2018) momentarily sets aside concern about representation of participants’ voices to turn the lens on the researcher who enlivens transcripts poetically—in our words, turning transcript-zombies into transcript-poems.

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In using poetic transcription, and particularly in challenging poetic transcription’s focus on the participant, I create myself as a researcher who disrupts and challenges traditional representations of research. However, in order to do so, I allow the new, challenging form of the words on the page the capacity to represent a truth that I have deemed not possible to capture in traditional ways. (Henderson, 2018, p. 154) Truths that resist capture in traditional forms of analysis may fit more com­ fortably within arts-based research approaches (Leavy, 2018), of which poetry is certainly one (Faulkner, 2019). Here is how another researcher disrupts and challenges transcript data by wondering and engaging the poetic. I wonder. I freeze, incompetent. I resort to poetry. There, it is always a failure and always a truth. Multiplicity lives there, of interpretations, of meanings. In the multiplicity, I am moving, yet still, stammering to say what is true, and knowing that is an impossible task. (Cannon, 2018, p. 574) Poetic multiplicity generates data liveliness. Within a data assemblage, wonder­ ing and becoming flow together into possibilities that can complement the apparent stubborn realism of transcripts (as modernist data-zombies, Duhn, 2017) with the aesthetic power of poetry. This move can keep transcripts from feeling static—and potentially transform them into the lively transcript-zombies we reimagined earlier in this chapter roaming with great vitality and animation.

5

Engaging digital data

Tangling with digital data This chapter focuses on digital data and the myriad ways in which we connect, interact, and are present/ed online. While digital data might be reduced to bits, bytes, codes, and algorithms, in social usage these data are heterogeneous and multiform. Myriad qualitative studies report finding, collecting, storing, and analyzing online data: for example, online patient forums (Coulson, Buchanan, & Aubeeluck, 2007); blogs (Banyai & Glover, 2012; Hookway, 2008; Xun & Reynolds, 2010); Facebook postings (Baker, 2013; Cook & Hasmath, 2014; Greene, Choudhry, Kilabuk, & Shrank, 2011); YouTube videos (Hillyer et al., 2018); streaming video (e.g., Netflix) (Jenney & Exner-Cortens, 2018); tweets (Rui, Chen, & Damiano, 2013); Instagram posts (Eagle, 2019); Yik Yak threads (Draper, 2019); or Wikipedia entries (Jemielniak, 2014). As Markham (2017) points out: “Digital” may be realized in mathematical coding but in popular parlance, it is a metonymic term standing in for a plethora of modes of interaction, types of information, platforms for interaction, and cultural formations. For the past two decades, we have been living on a planet where many social if not human processes are digitally saturated, Internet-mediated, and globally networked. (p. 513) We do not intend to catalog the ever-expanding possibilities for making digital data; rather, we highlight practices that illuminate issues or portend critical directions. Rather than focusing on what people do online, we focus on what digital data do. In this chapter, we highlight qualitative studies that scrutinize the data of our digital lives and environs as agentic, kinetic, voluptuous, and ever-transfiguring. In the background of a discussion of digital qualitative research is the contemporary fascination with Big Data, and we wish to acknowledge the critical issues that arise in this context even though our focus in this book is on qualitative data. Big Data refers to the massive data sets that are now possible thanks to online codes, algorithms, programs, platforms, processes, and intelligences. “Big Data is less about data that is big than it is about a capacity to search, aggregate, and cross­

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reference large data sets” (boyd & Crawford, 2012, p. 663). As a contemporary phenomenon, Big Data entails an interplay among computational technologies, analytic treatments of large data sets, and most chillingly “the widespread belief that large data sets offer a higher form of intelligence and knowledge that can generate insights that were previously impossible, with the aura of truth, objec­ tivity, and accuracy” (p. 663). In contrast, conventional qualitative data are often referred to as “small” data. Such data produce ethnographic portraits drawn on local, lived, and everyday understandings that are admittedly contextual, contingent, interpretively situated, and ultimately revisable. Yet this is not just a matter of Big and small data sets; instead, the differences have tremendous impli­ cations for research, governance, and life. Specifically, the rise of Big Data analytics and computational social science has ushered in a new era of digital positivism and methodolotry. boyd and Crawford (2012) point out that the attendant “computational” epistemological stance is becoming hegemonic (p. 666). Markham agrees that the real danger is the “revival and creeping spread of positivist procedures and frameworks” (2017, p. 513). Lather (2012) argues that neoliberal values now shape what counts as science— literally quantitative reductionism as an aim in itself. Charmaz and Belgrave (2019) concur that the contemporary valuation of evidence-based research, the logicaldeductive paradigm, and the demand for quantifiable data reflect neoliberal values. As boyd and Crawford (2012) maintain, there is a critical need for continuing to question the momentous intellectual, political, ethical, and pragmatic stakes involved in an unreflective turn to Big Data. Indeed, the implications of life with and through digital data include how we think (Hayles, 2012) and even humanness itself (Whitehead & Wesch, 2012). In his study of the virtual world Second Life, Boellstorff (2015) argues that: “in virtual worlds we are not quite human—our humanity is thrown off balance, considered anew, and reconfigured through transformed possibilities for placemaking, subjectivity, and community” (p. 5). In contrast, Couldry and van Dijck warn: Calling an algorithmically defined online configuration “social” has been one of the smartest semantic moves in the history of media institutions. Online sociality increasingly serves as a proxy for social interaction, whereas, in fact, this “social” comes as an effect of a new dominant techno-economic materiality. At the same time, this materiality makes itself virtually invisible and thus intractable to those analytical modes of interpretation conventionally used in the humanities and social sciences to interpret social interaction. (Couldry & van Dijck, 2015, p. 3) The crux of these differing perspectives is that qualitative researchers must be vigilant and reflexive in engaging with digital data as lively, material, con­ textual, and remediating lived realities in particular ways. These contextualizing dynamics should frame research rather than being obscured or ignored. If digital data are changing the ways we think, the values we live, and our

74 Engaging digital data possibilities, then it is qualitative researchers who are best positioned to engage with the lived implications and unanticipated consequences of these shifts. We turn now to ways of engaging with what digital data are doing: making, assembling, and becoming.

Making digital data Adapting research methods While there is general agreement on the fluidity of online/offline experiences, flows, and connections, how to engage those data remains under development. How to adapt conventions, criteria, and assumptions of ethnographic research to study digital data has been variously addressed (Baym, 2015; Boellstorff, 2015; Boellstorff et al., 2012; Hine, 2015; Kozinets, 2015; Markham & Baym, 2009). A continuum of adaptation spans approaches from preserving the conventions of ethnographic methods—see Boellstorff et al. (2012), who proclaim, “The suc­ cessful deployment of ethnographic methods in virtual worlds is, for us, a ringing endorsement of their enduring power to illuminate novel dimensions of human experience” (p. 4)—to arguments that the digital as a field of study entails rethinking the conventions of qualitative research (Gunkel, 2009; Markham, 2013a, 2017), developing new concepts (Baym, 2015), and focusing on flows and connections (Hine, 2015; Postill, 2015). Caliandro (2018) points out that adaptations of conventional qualitative research strategies such as face-to-face or digital interviewing to inquire into what is happening online assume an a priori meaningful social formation like an online community as the focus of research. In contrast, using “natively digital methods” drawn on the affordances, agencies, and metrics of platforms and applications themselves maps “the circulation of an empirical object (such as a topic of discussion, a political issue, or brand) within a given online environment or across different environments” in order to observe “the specific social formations emerging around it from the interactions of digital devices and users” (p. 570). The value of using digital tools to map digital data underscores an issue about the algorithmic liveliness of such data in qualitative research, to which we now turn. Making digital data algorithmically What digital data do has considerable import when we consider the agencies of making data. This is perhaps most readily recognized through the work of algorithms or coded recipes detailing computational operations, outcomes, and learning. Algorithmic data are algorithm-ready, already imagined through operations that allow flexible, relational databases to shape the character and flows of online traffic. An aggressive proceduralism is built into the work of algorithms that constitutes data and data collection on the basis of seemingly neutral yet largely invisible criteria. In turn, the use of such procedures makes and remakes algorithms themselves: data become autopoietic, algorithmic logic

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is both obscure and malleable, and our daily lives and information practices become recursively entangled with algorithmic logics. Through this circuitry of creating and recognizing what is knowable, algorithms assert and normalize a certain knowledge logic that constitutes our ways of knowing ourselves, our lives, and our worlds. What may seem to be “naturally occurring digital data” are inevitably culti­ vated and curated by surreptitious algorithms and other computational logics. Researchers often fail to recognize priorities and hierarchies embedded in the codes and algorithms that structure online data (Hine, 2015, p. 9). In the online attention economy, algorithms pursue what is trending, promoting an endlessly refreshable mode of cultural awareness. In studying digitized data, are we studying emergent forms of networked life or the self-fashioning of algorithmic culture itself? Is “making digital data” under the volition, expertise, and agency of a qualitative researcher obsolete in algorithmic culture? In our own study of websites using the figure of an aunt to brand their ser­ vices or products, we did a Google search on the keyword “aunt” that returned 33 million links (Sotirin & Ellingson, 2013, p. 117). Overwhelmed, we did screenshots of the first one hundred sites and took that to be our data. Our naivete reproduced the priorities of the search algorithm, as Introna (2007) warns: Search engines, through their undisclosed algorithms, constitute the conditions that make some websites/pages attractive or visible and others not. Users unwittingly contribute to this constitution by implicitly accepting this “as the way it works” and thereby reinforcing it through their search and linking behavior. Through this nexus of co-constitutive relations a particular world wide web is unwittingly being constructed that (in)excludes the interest of some and not others. (p. 19) Another way that researchers ignore the implicit structuring by digital codes, algorithms, software, and platforms is the frequent assumption that user-gener­ ated content is somehow spontaneous, unmediated, and authentic; as van Dijck (2013) observes: Analysts often treat content and user data as unmediated, spontaneous utterances from an actual public—results that they can aggregate and interpret; at the same time, the perennial stream of data can be interceded in by owners, advertisers, and if they make a concerted effort, users, all of whom try to exert influence on online sociality. (p. 162) Yet as Caliandro (2018) points out, “user-generated contents are also driven by the ‘behavior’ of social media, which not only self-organizes its own commu­ nicative fluxes, but also constantly ‘invites’ users to do the same through a complex array of likes, tags, hashtags, favorites, etc.” (p. 570). For example, Matamoros-Fernández (2017) mapped the way features and algorithms on

76 Engaging digital data Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook contributed to the circulation of overt and covert hate speech over a race-based sports controversy. He argues that the technical affordances and governing infrastructures produced “platformed racism” by both amplifying and obscuring the content of their data streams. Dragiewicz et al. (2018) examine the “multiple affordances and modes of governance of digital media platforms for amplifying and ameliorating abuse” (p. 609), suggesting that platforms are powerful actants in the perpetuation and governance of online abuse. Despite claims to neutrality, algorithms smuggle in assumptions, biases, and expectations in the guise of neutral, mathematical codes and operations (Gitelman, 2013; Kitchin, 2013). Benjamin (2019) details the operations of a “New Jim Code” or the way that digital codes amplify social inequities, enact discriminatory categorizations, affect insidious new forms of surveillance, and reproduce racisms even with codes designed to address them. Criado Perez (2019) demonstrates that Big Data frequently renders women—even white, cisgender women—invisible. Buolamwini and Gebru (2018) decry the bias toward skin color inherent in sur­ veillance algorithms—see the Algorithmic Justice League (2019) established to “fight algorithmic discrimination.” As Chun (2008) observes, “digital language makes control systems invisible: we no longer experience the visible yet unverifi­ able gaze but a network of nonvisualizable digital control” (p. 9). Summarily, the online “culture of connectivity” entangles human connectedness and automated connectivity (van Dijck, 2013, pp. 11–12). These entanglements implicate quali­ tative researchers in complicated ethical issues about making digital data. Making digital data ethically Making digital data is entangled in ethical complexities. The Association of Internet Researchers has acknowledged these ongoing dilemmas, issuing updates to its Ethical Guidelines (Ess & the AoIR Ethics Working Committee, 2002) twice. In version 2.0 (Markham & Buchanan, 2012), emergent issues related to mobile media and data, autonomy, and data management (storage, ownership, access rights, etc.) were addressed. Markham (2012) authored a useful chart detailing questions for Internet researchers about various aspects of research. Version 3.0 (franzke, Bechmann, Zimmer, Ess, & the Association of Internet Researchers, 2020) champions ethical pluralism given the transcultural reach of Internet research and the dominance of Western ethical perspectives. In addition, the guidelines express concerns over the politics of anonymity and confidentiality especially in working with marginalized groups; the commercialization of privacy; and the obligations to transparency and accuracy in the acquisition, use, and dissemination of digital data. Other researchers have deliberated these issues (Baym, 2015; Markham & Baym, 2009) including: how data can or should be sourced and responsibly documented when online content can be duplicated, stolen, and may disappear or change over time (Kozinets, 2015); intellectual property rights as they pertain to data (Lessig, 2002); and the capacities for online misrepresentation, manipulation, and identity exposure as well as intrusions into, restrictions on, or reframing of privacies (Fuchs, 2018; Gregory, 2018).

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The AoIR Guidelines 3.0 address emergent practices and risks including data sharing, digital privacy, archiving, and ownership. While data sharing is not a common practice among qualitative researchers, there are recent examples. For example, Kelsky (2017) has made publicly available the crowdsourced sexual harassment survey data elicited through her widely available site The Professor Is In. The hashtag #MeTooinAcademe is also a public source of data and inter­ pretive researchers are using these shared data (see Airey, 2018; Dykstra-Devette & Tarin, 2019; Molko, 2018; Smith & López, 2018). The AoIR Guidelines 3.0 address another issue that has emerged forcefully over the past two decades: the risk to researcher safety and well-being given online threats and retaliation through flaming or “doxing” (publishing personal information online) and the risk to the well-being of researchers working with violent or perverse materials. For example, Barratt and Maddox (2016) advocate a compassionate vigilance with regard to the personal vulnerability and digital security of researchers. Their study of the infamous Silk Road site was in process when that marketplace was seized and shut down, leaving them vulnerable to members who suspected them of betrayal and to the suspicions of law enforce­ ment. Our point is that for qualitative researchers, these remain thorny and entangling issues that challenge status quo data management practices and ethics, reveal the insinuation of digital data into everyday life, and create dilemmas for making digital data.

Assembling digital data We address assembling digital data in two ways. First, we consider how assem­ bling is central to digital data engagement: researchers are advised to map or follow the thing, the medium, the user, the content across multiple sites in an effort to engage with mobile, fluid, contingent, multiform data. As Caliandro puts it, the task is no longer to embed oneself into a community but “to map the practices through which users and devices construct social formations around an object on the move” (Caliandro, 2018, p. 570). The second way we address assembling is by engaging with data assemblages or the fluidly (re)configuring relations and dynamics that animate digital data and shape online/offline activ­ ities, identities, and possibilities. The “human–data assemblage” refigures agential vitalities (Lupton, 2020); Lupton (2016a) poses a “companion species” trope (based on Haraway, 2003) to highlight the vitality of data–human assemblages that “have a life of their own that is beyond our complete control” (p. 3). Following digital logics In his influential argument for multisited ethnographic research, Marcus (1995) advocated “following” as a methodological technique for engaging with the data of global flows and world systems. Decades later, the injunction to remain lively with the data is even more pertinent. Rogers (2015a, 2015b, 2018) advises “follow the medium”; that is, embrace the natural logic the Internet

78 Engaging digital data applies to itself, as with hashtags, hyperlinks, web “surfer pathways,” search engine results, Wikipedia page edit histories, social media profiles, web archives. These tools are themselves the data. For example, Twitter offers native social media devices such as mentions (@), retweets (RT), or hashtags (#). Rogers (2018) describes using Twitter posts and likes in order to follow/ reconstruct a story about distant events. He followed tweets about the 2016 U. S. presidential campaign to create a narrative pastiche of the unfolding event. Moors (2019) followed citizen hashtag campaigns in Flint, Michigan, arguing for emergent place-based platform activism through social media that coun­ tered dominant mainstream media accounts of Flint after the water crisis. The data evidenced affective hashtag storytelling as a critical logic of connectivity that claimed citizens’ authority over their own material offline existence, and implicated users in the Twitterverse as witnesses. In both studies, mapping hashtag formations casts Twitter as a storytelling machine and highlights composing alternative material-digital realities through the liveliness of digital data (see Figure 5.1). Drawing on Rogers, Caliandro (2018) argues that the Internet is in itself a source of methods, offering a “natural logic the Internet applies to itself in gathering, ordering, and analyzing data—as with tags, links, or hashtags” (p. 557). In other words, data and method are conjoined. For example, technical functions such as #s, RTs, and URLs can function both as devices for materializing social formations and methodological sources for measuring them; simultaneously, we acknowledge how users’ practices help researchers to better frame and interpret the nature of such social formations as well as the meaning of activities developing within them. (p. 560) Robitaille (2018) examines how the devices and aesthetic elements of a Reddit forum constituted a sociocultural space around psychostimulant use. Ciston (2019, p. 45) created ladymouth, “a chatbot that tries to explain feminism to misogynists on Reddit.” Her project enacts a queer feminist media praxis that she incorporates into writing, performance, and video art in order to trace and intervene in the social formation of misogyny. Also, the agential force of digital data is evident in two studies of Reddit forums in which the native devices of the site itself became both data and method using the tags, links, digitized descrip­ tions of content, and “native metrics” of content source, Redditor scores, links, and categories. Foeken and Roberts (2018) conducted a “virtual ethnography”

Figure 5.1 Composing lively digital data

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of a lesbian subreddit. Robards (2018) engaged the r/TotallyStraight subreddit, a forum for cisgender men who share/discuss gay porn. In both studies, the devi­ ces of the platform provided the logic of user activities. Assembling heterogeneities Digital data assemblages fluidly configure extensive networks of heterogeneous yet intra-acting elements. The following examples address such disparate topics as fieldwork, gambling, and gaming; yet each makes a convincing case for the territorializing force of digital data assemblages. Van Doorn (2013) argues that the digital capacities of his smartphone enable research practices that actively assemble an affective field. GPS navigation, notetaking, video recording, texting, emailing, and so forth are “integrated into one object-assemblage that organized a heterogeneous set of technosocial practices, arti­ facts, and research methods” (p. 393). The smartphone assemblage created a “process of composition” affecting logistical and affective research alignments (including per­ sonal/professional obligations and work/nonwork relations). The device “(in)con­ sistently modulated, folded, and translated my ethnographic fieldwork practice” (p. 394). The smartphone’s features re-mediated fieldwork encounters, objects, and the project itself especially through various accidents and surprises. For example, van Doorn recounts times when an incoming call changed his voice recorder to a phone, interrupting and often ending an interview; or when his smartphone “pocket dialed” a participant late at night. He admits: “My smartphone made my work messier on multiple occasions, although it also assisted in provisionally ‘cleaning up’ this mess by enabling me to recompose my activities in the wake of one of these accidents” (p. 394). He concludes that the “assembling power” of the device refigures qualitative knowledge production (p. 395); in our terms, this happens through the messy liveli­ ness of the data-researcher-device assemblage. Schüll (2014) reports on an extensive study of intertwined assemblages: gambling addiction and therapies, gambling machines and their designers, and the industry and its regulator. She tracks data pathways connecting seemingly incongruous and often contrary digital mediations. For example, she follows the affective intensities and machinic patterns that map “the architectural curves of casino floors to the ergonomic curves of machine consoles; the mathematical algorithms of game software to the patterns of gamblers’ play” (pp. 308–309). Seemingly heterogeneous elements thus connect, proliferate, and refigure activities and possibilities across machinic, digital, and social worlds. Likewise, Boellstorff et al. (2012) recognize the digital infra­ structures in virtual worlds as agentic assemblages that mediate and configure gameplay across time, location, and cultures. Server infrastructures may allow global play or segregate players by region; bandwidth quality shapes virtual cultures; important disjunctures occur among the design culture and locale of developers and the geo­ graphies of game marketing, distribution, and play (pp. 62–63). As they ethnographically immerse themselves in online worlds, these qualitative researchers caution us about the need to stay vigilant about machinic assemblages that constitute critical data shaping the experience of those worlds.

80 Engaging digital data Domesticating digital flows Researchers have also engaged data as sociomaterial assemblages responsive to the force of cultural habits and perspectives. Wajcman and Rose (2011) asked how people at work manage the incessant flow and demands of digital information during their workday. Against the argument that work­ ers are continually interrupted and distracted, they found that people used organizing strategies drawn on office and organizational culture priorities and values to manage this information flow, utilizing the storage and response capacities of different media to get things done and engaging in focused bursts of task productivity. Hence, a sociomaterial assemblage of actants, both human and technological, are reconfiguring the workday experience. This also provides an example of “domestication” or the imbrication of sociomaterial assemblages as unremarkable features of the everyday. Such a framework can facilitate feminist revisions of taken-for­ granted oppressions. In a long-term study of two slum neighborhoods in India, researchers observed the incorporation and appropriation of mobile technologies into daily life, and the data drew them to the sociocultural dynamics of women’s use of cellphones (Tacchi & Chandola, 2015). Data produced through interviews, participant observation, sensory recordings, and sound mapping tracked the incorporation of cellphone use into women’s management of their everyday lives and in the process, made underlying social structures of gender violence and marginalization visible as well as the agencies of women–device assemblages. Thus, the data of cell­ phone domestication in an Indian slum articulated contrary dynamics advancing a critical perspective on women’s lived experiences.

Becoming-with digital data Digital data offer myriad opportunities for becoming-with data: “Re-stories, manipulated images, deterritorialized spaces, virtual objects, molecular con­ nections, digital flows, and nonsignifying signs [are] among us to be explored” (Koro-Ljungberg, MacLure, & Ulmer, 2018, p. 473). These digital flows and counterhegemonic trajectories afford potential for becom­ ing-with data and becoming otherwise. We find examples in digital data that deterritorialize conventions and histories of racial and narrative sub­ jugation. Specifically, Lu and Steele (2019) cite posts on Twitter and Vine by Black users that affect joy as resistance: these users seized upon the interplay of the applications to not only express and foster joy, but to extend historic legacies of Black oral culture and further cultivate con­ temporary strategies that leveraged—but also transcended—the affordances of each platform (p. 823). Users engaged becoming-with data by deterri­ torializing the affordances of digital platforms to re-story contemporary relations and to perform the vitality of Black oral culture. Hinzo and Clark (2019) follow visual posts (GIFs, memes, emojis, selfies) circulated on

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various social media platforms among Indigenous communities and allies in relation to the #NoDAPL movement. They argue that this is Indigenous data articulating a Native American conception of survivance (survival and resistance) and the Trickster image. In these examples, digital data are joyful, playful, and a threshold to becoming otherwise. Condie, Lean, and James (2018) ask plaintively, “What are we becoming in times of technological entanglement?” (p. 112); more specifically, their research asks what do locational dating apps like Tinder portend for the conduct and significances of human intimacy? The research assemblage of Tinder, Tinder users, and researchers as Tinder users defies conventional research protocols: “When the ‘field’ is an app on your phone that is in your hand, in your home and every place else you go, the rules of research need rewriting” (p. 112). In short, becomingwith data entangles this qualitative research in a hybrid assemblage of Tinderers, digital devices, apps and affordances, affective capacities, mobilities, and discursivematerial situatedness that defies an answer to the questions about what we are becoming in favor of incessant, rhizomatic becomings.

Data-on-the-move We encourage qualitative researchers to follow digital data on the move, that is, the vitalities of data that lead to alternative practices of qualitative research. Accordingly, we offer examples of data engagement in digital research routines; the digital research principles advanced by Hine (2015) and Pink (2015); and emergent conceptions of digital social formations of community, crowd, and publics (boyd, 2010; Caliandro, 2018). Practicing digital research routines The injunction to “follow the medium” or use “native digital devices” includes fairly mundane practices. Postill reports five useful digital routines in his social media research: catching up, sharing, exploring, interacting, and archiving (Postill & Pink, 2012). He daily checked in with relevant users on Twitter, Facebook email, mailing lists, Google alerts, news feeds, and mobile phone exchanges. Arguing that “digital sharing is a skilled, embodied activity” critical to the “malleability and intensity” of digital socialities, he learned to recognize and add value to shared links (p. 128). Exploring took advantage of search engines and was often enabled by links in tweets, posts, news feeds, and the like (p. 129). Interacting entailed asynchronous and syn­ chronous exchanges as well as geographic and temporal adjustments. While archiving can be done on a personal device, Postill used the site Delicious.com, which allowed for public tagging, and also suggested “possible tags to the user based on other users’ digital trails—a form of indirect, algorithmic participation in the coding process by anonymous others” (p. 130). A final routine is archiving digital data. Postill warns that data archiving is both a temptation to save everything thanks to cloud platforms and portable hard drives (leading to “archival hubris”) and technical know-how using various retrievable tags, bookmarking, keywords, and blog entries (p. 130).

82 Engaging digital data Engaging digital data as embedded, embodied, everyday, and emplaced Hine (2015) iterates the principle we have posed as pragmatic when she notes that, given the self-altering quality of the digital itself and the ever-mutating nature of the Internet, qualitative research for the Internet must be “pragmatic, adaptive, agile—what works in practice” (pp. 21–22). She proposes three principles: the digital as embedded, embodied, and everyday. These principles overlap, offering critical insights into the liveliness of digital data and expanding on ways of making and assembling. The embeddedness of digital data defies online/offline demarcations. Digital data circulate and transmutate through and across such borders: Content from the internet continuously circulates and is extracted and reembedded, featuring in word-of-mouth conversations, in printed reports, and mass media … . One of the defining characteristics of the digital, after all, is the ease with which it can be moved, recombined, revisualized, recalculated, and repurposed. (Hine, 2015, pp. 39–40) boyd (2015) argues that Internet data cannot speak for themselves but must be set in the context of offline lives and cultural frameworks. She not only fol­ lowed teenagers through their Facebook, Snapchat, and other social media posts but conducted interviews with them in their schools and homes, attended their school and community events, and in other ways explored the mean­ ingfulness of their digital data in the context of their offline lives (boyd, 2007). She argues for research that articulates multisited, networked relations among spaces, people, and objects, assembling through her own mobilities fluid data configurations that defy stable meanings and boundaries. Embodied data disavow the notion of disembodied “virtual” selves; instead, research entails a “focus on embodied, sensual, and emotional engagement” (Hine, 2015, p. 45). Hine argues that moving around the Internet and reflect­ ing on the properties of such movement across platforms, programs, and sites “is a sensory ethnography” in itself (p. 51); the “properties of such movement” entail the agencies of digital data as co-actants in sensory ensembles. She advocates “a form of slow search” that “retains the embodied ethnographer, focuses on ‘movement as a form of experience’,” and reflects on the expecta­ tions/assumptions of moving and staying in place: Big data approaches can be useful in their ability to generalize and aggregate on a large scale, but this does not substitute for the active observation of a mobile ethnographer moving across different platforms and using observations in one place to interrogate the assumptions in another. (p. 168) From a very different perspective, van Doorn (2011) argues that gender, sexu­ ality, and embodiment are actualized in digital space; sociotechnical assemblages of “media technologies, cultural/discursive practices, and embodied users all

Engaging digital data

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figure as actors that shape one another within a network that extends from physical into digital space and back again” (p. 536), performatively incorporat­ ing, refashioning, and disciplining embodied experience. Digital data refashion everyday life, again through the constant circulation across lived materialities, sensicalities, affects, and cultural formations, as in the digital circulation of popular culture, taste, style, and fashion (Beer, 2008). Beyond transmitting messages or facilitating human exchange, digital data engage with the commonplace refashioning of lived/embodied experiences, events, and relationships in the interfaces of digital devices (for example, cell­ phones, streaming audio/video, computers) and/or online/Internet-based applications, activities, and connections (cf. Bolter & Grusin, 2016). For example, Kim (2016) argues that the affordances of digital tools enabled users of a transcultural forum to remix cultural elements, play with self-repre­ sentations, and realize fluidity in the context of pre-existing geocultural boundaries. Withaeckx, Schrooten, and Geldof (2015) considered the use of social media applications by Moroccan and Brazilian transmigrants in Belgium to shape affective connections with their families and friends. Tenhunen (2018) documented the changes in local life in a rural village in India with the arrival of cellphones, arguing that cellphone use refigured traditional intersectional relations and identities. Golan and Babis (2019) studied Filipino temporary migrant workers employed as caregivers in Israel; their data suggested the potential of social networking sites like Facebook to facilitate grassroots online self-educating communities. Pink et al. (2016) have done extensive ethnographic studies into the ways people in particular locales assimilate the affordances of digital devices into their embodied practices and social worlds. Considering media devices, they contend that digital media have become integrated into all aspects of everyday life, as objects, places and spaces that we use not only to communicate through but also to dwell … discover who we are, what it means to be connected to and in relationship with others and the consequences of the digital form for our understanding of the body and other forms of materiality. (p. 65) In one study, Tacchi (2009) explored domestic soundscapes constituted through streaming radio, arguing that these soundscapes constitute affective rhythms in users’ everyday lives. In a qualitative study of mobile gameplay, Hjorth and Richardson (2014) advanced a conception of “ambient game assemblage” to describe the multiple, often parallel modes of gameplay that their participants were engaging in as a featured practice of everyday life. Ambient play taps the “embodied, sensory and affective texture of mobile gaming” and the “messy logic of mobile games as they move across physi­ cal, geographic, electronic, technological and emotional spaces and across human and animal species” as family cats became gamers (in Pink et al., 2016, pp. 36–37).

84 Engaging digital data We add one more alliteration to Hine’s principles of qualitative digital research: emplacement. Markham (2017) and Pink et al. (2016) argue that what is traditionally circumscribed as the “field” becomes in digital research about movement, refigurations, and place-making. Pink argues that ethnographic places are not bounded localities (although physical localities might be part of or associated with them), but “emergent relations between things and processes … clusters or intensities of things of which both localities and socialities are ele­ ments…. They traverse online/offline contexts and are collaborative, participa­ tory, open and public” (Pink, 2015, p. 124). For example, in their study of a protest movement, Monterde and Postill (2014) found that the “field” was reconfiguring dynamically, drawing them into the “mobile ensemble” of online and physical protest spaces articulated through Twitter and livestreaming on smartphones. According to Postill and Pink (2012), place-making thus entails movements and agents that “criss-cross a range of platforms through aggregators, search engines, hyperlinks and other devices … [and traverse] interrelated digital and copresent contexts” (p. 131). They explain that: “We leave our own digital traces … thus weaving a digital ethnographic place that is inextricable from both the materiality of being online and the offline encounters that are intertwined in its narratives” (p. 127). The embeddedness of digital data thus implicates agentic engagements constituting place-making though not under the volition of the researcher alone. Place-making across digital contexts complicates making and assembling data; qualitative researchers engage data through mobilities, inten­ sities, unstable connections, and by “weaving” digital traces. Constituting concepts: digital communities, crowds, and publics The digital research concepts of community, crowd, and publics demonstrate how the actions of data constitute the research concepts that we then use to recognize the data. While an online community has been a standard object of analysis, Caliandro (2018) argues that the fluid and dispersed sociocultural con­ text of the contemporary web unsettles the coherence and allegiances implied by the concept of a community. He distinguishes online communities from crowds: whereas communities entail interactivity, emplacement (through URLs and hashtags, for example), and sustained membership, crowds are ephemeral, affec­ tive, and based on publicity and visibility. An online crowd is the “affective unification and relative synchronization of a public in relation to a specific online site” constituting a social formation of individuals who “gather virtually, behave and act collectively and produce effects and phenomena which would not be possible without the Internet” (p. 562). Crowds are affectively propagated, emerging through (1) convergence on a certain digital device (like a hashtag), (2) coordination through the same digital device in order to achieve a common goal (reposting that hashtag), and (3) shared affective intensities (as in adding phatic expressions for excitement—!!) (p. 562). For example, the crowdsourcing site KickStarter illustrates the collective convergence, coordination around an object, and affective dynamics of such online crowds (p. 563).

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boyd (2010, p. 39) defines a networked public as both a digitally constructed space and an imagined collective at the juncture of users, technologies, and practices (see also boyd, 2011; boyd & Ellison, 2008). Airoldi (2018) expands on this idea of a networked public to consider how networked publics occur in two fields: contextual fields and metafields. Contextual fields are those digital sites assembled around particular topics or interests—the kind of public described by boyd and exemplified by the Uniform Resource Locators (URL) that invoke a sense of digital place through the affordances of features that show presence and interactivities such as “likes,” sent and received notices, or threaded comments. In contrast, metafields are temporary assemblages of often heterogeneous con­ tents that are aggregated on the basis of metadata or data about digital sites. Airoldi argues that whereas more conventional ethnographic methods are adaptable to contextual fields, metafields compose “a stream of de-con­ textualized communicative traces” organized around metadata, thus an “uns­ ited” fieldsite (p. 667). An online public as a metafield is the social aggregation and interaction of heterogeneous actors around a particular object (a brand) or device (a hashtag) that then recreates and circulates the discourse of those actors within that public (Caliandro, 2018, pp. 564–565). For example, Marwick and Caplan (2018) trace the harassment language constituting the “manosphere” as an online public formation across blogs, podcasts, and forums comprised of pickup artists, men’s rights activists, anti-feminists, and fringe groups. Similarly, Brand publics are constituted not through actors’ interaction as in a community but in terms of affective intensities toward the object or brand that is itself “valuable as a medium” of publicizing identity as in the hashtag #LouisVuitton on Twitter (Arvidsson & Caliandro, 2016, p. 727). In contrast, calculated publics are “algorithmically generated groups” that invoke and claim to know “a public with which we are invited to feel an affinity”—as when Amazon recommends books that “customers like you” have purchased, or Facebook creates “friends of friends” audiences (Crawford, 2016). The networked publics in these metafields differ from publics that are established by users rather than algorithms. Remaining mindful of emergent distinctions proves useful as qua­ litative researchers stay vigilant about making data in online environments. Remixing We have commented on Markham’s (2013b) “remix methodology” (see Chapter 1); here we elaborate the practices of this digital data approach. Remix involves “sampling, borrowing, and creatively re-assembling units of cultural information” into temporary, unstable, fluid assemblages (p. 7). Algorithmic assemblages engage in such remixes, as do other digital devices such as memes or tweets in which information/data is sampled, remixed, and recirculated. Markham advocates framing digital qualitative research in terms of a remix metaphor in order to follow the flows and connections of data in a way that retains rather than reduces complexities. She advocates adopting mundane online practices like “copy/cut & paste, collage, pastiche, and mashup” as

86 Engaging digital data “adaptive modes of inquiry” (p. 8). Markham offers five “activities of inquiry” to activate a remix methodology: generate, move, borrow, interrogate, and play (p. 10). These are iterative, generating layers of additional information and data; open-ended, experimental, and imaginative. The injunction to “follow” is expanded—follow the medium, devices, users, stories, and follow shifts in questions, dataflows, or gaps and absences (p. 13). We would add our own practices to Markham’s: making, assembling, becoming. Georgakopoulou (2015) adds “rescripting” to this ensemble of research practices responsive to digital data. He examines the sampling and remixing of stories, jokes, or images circulating online and enabled by the capacities for replicability and malleability in social media. Users can thus change posts and images, remixing with other elements, retaining some and adding others. The particular story he followed was a brawl between Greek politicians caught on television just before the 2012 national election. Not only was the video reposted, but memes, jokes, and video spoofs circulated that rescripted the original event thanks to the affordances of digital elements and infrastructures. For our purposes, it is the making, assembling, and becoming of rescripting and remixing that engage the liveliness of digital data.

6

Engaging participatory data

Tangling with participatory data Qualitative research has a long history of social activism, and contemporary quali­ tative researchers typically intend their projects to contribute in some way toward creating a more humane, just, and sustainable world (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011). Qualitative research is participatory in nature. Researchers may focus on working in partnership with members of marginalized and underserved communities and making direct interventions, while attempting to ameliorate colonizing effects of traditional (postpositivist) social scientific research, in which extractive research practices exploit participants (Gullion & Tilton, 2020). Researchers use umbrella terms such as participatory action research (Schlehofer, Parnell, & Ross, 2018), community-based participatory research (Horowitz, Robinson, & Seifer, 2009), and feminist participatory action research (Gatenby & Humphries, 2000; Manning & Denker, 2015)—and its variants critical participa­ tory action research (Fine & Torre, 2019) or postcolonial feminist participatory action research (Hayhurst, Giles, & Radforth, 2015)—which may overlap with other bodies of critical theory and praxis. Participatory approaches offer possibi­ lities for disenfranchised individuals to have voice in research design, data engage­ ment, and outcomes and may improve communities’ ability to address their own needs (Dempsey, 2010). Participatory frames for data engagement require compassionate, culturally centered research approaches and researchers’ ability (and willingness) to understand community values and priorities in order to “involve participants in the generation of their own data about their lives” (Whiting et al., 2018, p. 319). More contemporary and critical participatory research shares values with critical race theory and critical race feminism, with an emphasis on amplifying voices of community members, egalitarian collaboration with allies in the community, and increased emphasis on intersectionality as a key aspect of analyzing community needs and possible actions to take in response (Houh & Kalsem, 2015). “Scholars should recognize and value the community as a partner in the process, research should be comprehensively collaborative, and results should benefit all partners through continuous action and clear applica­ tions” (Stanton, 2014, p. 574). Marginalized community issues illuminated

88 Engaging participatory data through participatory research partnerships vary widely. We share just a few examples: people with disabilities’ experiences of sexuality (Rohleder et al., 2018); social exclusion and working conditions for undocumented workers (Gastaldo, Magalhães, Carrasco, & Davy, 2012, p. 8); homeless youths’ engagements with citizenship and democracy (Kennelly, 2018); and educa­ tional and cultural experiences of Native people who live on reservations and attend(ed) school in predominantly White border town school systems (Stanton, 2014). In this chapter we consider data engagement in participatory research projects that make explicit commitments to social change by making, assembling, and becoming data through community-based, action-oriented, frequently arts-based methods. Participatory approaches “disrupt and destabilize the characterization of traditional knowledge-production and social science research as objective, apolitical, and democratic” (Houh & Kalsem, 2015, p. 263; see also Brydon-Miller, Kral, Maguire, Noffke, & Sabhlok, 2011). We highlight participatory ethics that challenge taken-for-granted norms around qualitative data to decolonize methods, honor multiplicities of knowledges, and make explicit the inherent connections between power and knowledge. We promote production of lively data that address systemic inequities and work toward social justice. Further, participatory research approaches also overlap significantly with artsbased research practices (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2017; Coemans, Wang, Leysen, & Hannes, 2015; Leavy, 2018). Like other participatory approaches, artsbased research emphasizes the agency of participants (Tarr et al., 2018). Participatory and arts-based approaches share many common values and goals. Arts-based or arts-informed approaches to research involve multiple, creative ways of representing experiences and the different representational forms (medium) of expression that can effectively enhance the understanding of the human condition and experience. These creative genres include literary techniques (e.g., fiction, poetry and autoethnography), performance (e.g., dance, ethnodrama, and theater), visual art (e.g., painting, photographs, col­ lage, sculpture, and art installations), new media (e.g., video, blogs, and zines), and folk art (e.g., quilts). (Capous-Desyllas & Bromfield, 2018, p. 2) Arts-based research addresses challenges such as how to amplify the voices of people for whom language (particularly in written form) is an uncomfortable mode of expression. Artful data do different things than typical verbal qualitative data (Ellingson, 2011a). Explicitly embodying materiality, multiplicity, and ambiguity, artful data incorporate genres and mediums that are open to inter­ pretation, appropriation, or contestation (Faulkner, 2016; Leavy, 2018). For ease of discussion, the remainder of this chapter will use the term parti­ cipatory research to encompass the myriad participatory, action-oriented, community-based, social justice focused, and arts-based approaches to data. We respect the nuanced distinctions scholars make among these approaches. Yet our goal in this chapter—as in all of this book—remains to answer the

Engaging participatory data 89 question: What do data do? Thus we focus on the participatory, critical, and creative elements of participatory data engagement, while bracketing divergent details and perspectives.

Making participatory data Making participatory data typically involves three categories of data: first, par­ ticipants make artifacts in response to prompts and materials provided by researchers such as sculpture, drawings, photographs, video, or (audio, video, or written) diaries; second, participants and researchers co-construct verbal descrip­ tions that contextualize the artifacts in interviews, focus groups, or other types of discussions; and third, researchers document research contexts and processes by making layers of fieldnotes, photographs, maps or other sketches, and/or audio/video recordings. We discuss what data do in each of these categories and some of the ways in which they intersect. Materializing Artifacts are embodied data. Data materialize participants’ meanings through sensuous engagement. Participatory data may engage with embodiment in parti­ cipants’ daily lives more fully than researchers typically do (Ellingson, 2017, 2018). Creative participatory data involve “broadening the horizon of what counts as data in scientific and academic research” (Vacchelli, 2018, p. 175). Making data artifacts involves the use of the senses—tactile to sculpt, sound and vibration to make music, visual perceptions of color to paint, even the smell of glue to collage—and taps into participants’ bodies as sources of knowing, not merely as containers for the self. Participatory researchers “take methodological suggestions from multisensory and embodied research and add methodological possibilities through which to express the simultaneity and wholeness of the bodily experience” (Kriger, 2019, p. 2). This goes beyond perception to knowing in and through the body. Yet we specify that the participatory data are the artifacts produced by participants; as we previously noted with fieldnotes, recordings, and transcripts, the data are not the embodied knowing and sensory experiences but the records researchers and participants make to express them. Making artifacts also engages the materiality of objects and the interface of bodies, tools, and materials to make tangible objects. For example, the artful method of body mapping, in which participants’ bodies are traced on paper and the outlines are then filled using paint and other materials, complements research that is predominantly language oriented with more embodied sensemaking (Gastaldo, Rivas-Quarneti, & Magalhães, 2018). This method uses “drawing, painting, or other art-based techniques to visually represent aspects of people’s lives, their bodies, and the world they live in” (Gastaldo et al., 2012, p. 5). Body mapping is a way of telling stories, much like totems that contain symbols with different meanings, but whose significance can only be understood in relation to the creator’s overall story and experience.

90 Engaging participatory data This artful, participatory method has been used to delve into such topics as youth sexual health education (Lys, Gesink, Strike, & Larkin, 2018), embodied theology (Meiring & Müller, 2010), and physical and mental health for youth experiencing psychosis (Boydell et al., 2018; for comprehensive reviews of body mapping methodology see Coetzee, Roomaney, Willis, & Kagee, 2017; Jager, Tewson, Ludlow, & Boydell, 2016). In addition to being fun and creative, body mapping “increases the quality of participants’ description, makes the biological, emotional and social body vivid in their narratives and supports their visualization of problems faced and sources of strengths” (Gastaldo et al., 2012, p. 11). Some participatory researchers believe the process is “intrinsically connected to emancipatory research perspectives, social activism, and alternative media initiatives” (Gastaldo et al., 2018, para. 6; see also Tarr & Thomas, 2011), such that the data visualize marginalized experience in ways powerful enough to incite positive social change. Verbalizing Participatory researchers typically add to data artifacts (e.g., photos, sculpture, diaries)—a powerful form of data in their own right—verbal data, that is, description, stories, and reflections inspired by the participatory artifact (Vist, 2019). Participatory data artifacts, whether artful or documentation of everyday life, typically serve as the focus for reflection in a discussion that contextualizes the artifacts. Reflections on the meaning(s) of artifacts (and related experiences) generally take place through recorded interviews or focus groups, where participants are invited to talk about how the artifact they created embodies their identities, lived experiences, values, goals, and other meanings (Gullion & Tilton, 2020). This second layer of verbal data generated through interviews or focus groups can prove enormously generative. Audio or video recordings highlight participants’ voices and grant them rhetorical power to interpret their artifacts from their own embodied standpoints rather than cede interpretive authority to researchers. One participatory researcher contends that this interpretive “sub­ version of authority is particularly evident in collage-making where research participants have full control in the selection of the images and text they use to represent of their own reality”; participants exert agency in unpacking their collage’s meanings through interaction with other participants and researchers (Vacchelli, 2018, p. 176). The spoken and recorded data intertwine with participatory artifacts yet exceed them; recorded stories, memories, and insights cannot be traced in their entirety precisely to an artifact, nor can all potential meanings of the artifact be reduced and contained within a single telling. Thus participants’ agency and the recorded data’s agency build on each other. Parti­ cipants’ verbal data emerge from their position as co-producers of knowledge, embodying an agency of vibrant resistance to dominant discourses in which they are marginalized (Gullion & Tilton, 2020).

Engaging participatory data 91 Further, interviews focused on participatory data artifacts “allowed for the collaborative construction of data” (Rohleder et al., 2018, p. 3) with participants. For example, Rohleder et al. conducted individual interviews with people with disabilities who had used photovoice (taking photos of daily life experiences) to document aspects of their sexuality. Researchers interviewed participants indivi­ dually because of the vulnerability in asking about and speaking about sex. This choice reflected an ethic of care, compassion, and respect for participants. During interviews and later group discussions about how to use the data and findings, participants and researchers collaboratively constructed and voiced meanings as they viewed and discussed participants’ photos and opened up possibilities for understanding sexual experiences and disabilities. In this way, researchers and participants jointly created space for disabled voices to be heard and respected. They shared their vibrant, artful data (see Figure 6.1) and findings in a range of forms and venues to push back against the substantial social resistance to honoring the complexities of how sex and disability intersect.

Figure 6.1 Composing lively participatory data

92 Engaging participatory data Layering A third form of participatory data emerges in some projects as documentation of the processes of participants’ and researchers’ creativity and interaction in an imaginative data engagement with fieldnotes, audio/video recordings, photographs, and formal (e.g., evaluation forms) and informal participant feedback. One team of researchers described a sense of vibrant energy generated during a participatory art workshop. One of the most striking impressions left by the workshops was a sense of elation at a collaborative creative process … . Yet the “buzz” of improvisation itself was not recordable. While our notes remarked upon “the transformative sense of being part of a collectivity, and being surprised by the collective outcomes” (Flora, Sound workshop fieldnotes) some of this was inevitably lost in the things we traditionally identify as data. (Tarr et al., 2018, p. 43) This buzz reflects our ethical commitment to embrace joy, and it proves difficult to hold static: an always already failed attempt to capture the vitality of process. Tarr et al. (2018) also video-recorded their participatory data work­ shops using stationary video cameras. Together with the fieldnotes, these recordings complemented the participant-generated artifacts and the interview data. Recordings “provided a sense of timings, detailed interactions and whole group discussions” (p. 43). Moreover, they suggested an additional type of data hinted at but not explicitly included in fieldnotes. Specifically, things said to us during the breaks or at the end of the workshops; encounters we had observed or participated in during small group work; affective relations developed out of workshop participation; comments and discussions we had with participants outside the workshop context. These “headnotes” … provide a further… layer of data. (p. 44) Likewise, another participatory study created multiple forms of data in the collaborative process of making (and studying the making of) intergenerational digital stories of feminist activism among activists ranging in age from early 20s to 80s (Chazan & Macnab, 2018). The research team took observational (field) notes, recorded and transcribed participants as they interviewed one another and co-constructed digital stories, collected participant written reflections, wrote personal reflections, and viewed participants’ digital stories. In each of these studies, the participatory process data enrich the project through multiple, overlapping layers of meaning.

Assembling participatory data Participatory data exert agency within the “sticky web” of dominant culture (Rogers, 2003) as they challenge discourses and material realities of institutio­ nalized, intersecting oppressions and inequities. Participatory researchers bring

Engaging participatory data 93 useful skills and genuine good intentions to their work, and yet can become unwittingly entangled with colonialist legacies of violence, oppression, objectifica­ tion, and “charity” to conquered communities of Others (Bhattacharya & Kim, 2018). No innocent research processes exist, and researchers are routinely criticized for “helicoptering” in and out of underserved communities after obtaining the data for which they came (Mayan & Daum, 2016). Sincere efforts to conduct research through participatory and respectful engagements with marginalized groups can struggle or fail (Wagner, Ellingson, & Kunkel, 2016). The easier answer to the risk of data engagement with vulnerable social groups is to take our academic privi­ leges—education, socioeconomic class, and, for the most part, white, hetero­ normative, and able-bodied—and go back to our ivory towers and stop collaborating with marginalized communities. A more challenging and ethically sound way to rise to this challenge requires researchers to take responsibility and engage in reflexivity as active agents within participatory data assemblages. In this section we explore some of the sticky threads that weave throughout participatory research projects and share some decolonizing strategies for more ethical, equitable, and empowering practices. As we continue our focus on what the data (could) do, we call attention to possibilities for data assemblages in which entangled researchers more fully honor participants and their contributions. We explore participatory data agencies within assemblages which are enabled and constrained by three powerful, overlapping discourses: the politics of knowledge production; neoliberalism; and power, empowerment, and reciprocity. Politics of knowledge production Researchers inevitably bring the baggage of academic norms and values with them into participant communities, even when they endeavor not to do so. Researchers become so well socialized during graduate school that we come to take for granted what counts as valid evidence, how data are supposed to be collected, and who has earned the credentials necessary to analyze data and produce results. Hence, we may not even be conscious that we are imposing unstated rules on community members. “Grand narratives strive to make people ‘fit’ in the dominant epistemologies and theories, deny situated knowl­ edges, forcing adaption to the norm, while still excluding peoples” (Gullion & Tilton, 2020, p. 42; see also Bhattacharya & Kim, 2018). Researchers “assert epistemic dominance” over participants (Gullion & Tilton, 2020, p. 65) and employ “epistemic operations that assign particularity to the community knower and universality to the academic” (Janes, 2016, p. 77). Researchers may unwittingly reinforce stereotypes by essentializing community members, ignoring material complexities of their lives, or otherwise fostering “the pro­ duction of disembodied subjects. Community knowledge workers are assigned multiple, ambiguous subject positions” including participants, stakeholders, partners, or co-researchers that may be placeholders or a means of obscuring a lack of meaningful partnership (p. 81).

94 Engaging participatory data The risk of colonizing community knowledge and ignoring the multiplicity of knowledges involved continues to suffuse participatory projects. Researchers may “propos[e] a radical solidarity with communities,” in which knowledge is co-produced, and end up assimilating participants’ knowledge into academic frames rather than honoring local, indigenous, and situated knowledges on their own terms (Janes, 2016, p. 77). Researchers also run the risk of essentia­ lizing participants’ and their knowledge as pure and unaffected by dominant discourses (including internalized racism, capitalism, and so on). The notion of community participants as unproblematically “authentic” in their perspectives maps onto the rational, liberal individual inasmuch as it strips participants—and researchers—of their embodied and affective embeddedness in historical, political, and social contexts that obscure rela­ tions of inequality. In other words, participants are expected to “see through” conditions of systemic marginalization and oppression, rather than reproduce them. (Kennelly, 2018, p. 36) Neither academic nor community knowledges can be disentangled from dominant discourses, and researchers should avoid placing an unfair burden on community members by expecting them to understand their world through a critical theorizing lens. Their everyday lived experiences occur at the intersec­ tions of multiple identities, individual personalities, and dynamic contexts. Moreover, it is a mistake to understand participants as representing or offering up a singular, cohesive truth of a particular community; all communities—academia included—operate within systems of power and privilege, and hierarchies, absences, and exclusionary practices are part of marginalized communities. Researchers must “account for how power relations operate within, as well as across, research locations” (Janes, 2016, p. 79), developing accounts that feature multiplicity, dissent, and intersectionality. The Becoming section of this chapter delves further into crucial relational dynamics among researchers and community members. For now, we want to keep our focus on the politics of knowledge production processes and practices and offer some insights into how to form a workable epistemological and methodological foundation for co-constructing knowledge. First, researchers should be open to ways of knowing that are specific to community members, not only in terms of content but also structure, type of evidence and reasoning, and ways of communicating. As you embark on community-based action research, think about how research design complements the social structure of the people you are working with … . Remember that knowledge is fluid, non-linear, and spiraling. It is holistic, embodied, and not just cognitive. … Consider how cultural practices and norms shape the interventions you try to implement as well. (Gullion & Tilton, 2020, p. 44, 45)

Engaging participatory data 95 Official knowledge production in the academy tends to be anything but fluid, non-linear, and spiraling; linearity, deduction, and definitive results are rewarded. So participatory data engagement requires exceptional openness to change, to uncertainty and ambiguity, and to attending carefully to how dif­ ferent forms of knowledge emerge. Moreover, participatory research should emphasize the value of participants’ perspectives and knowledge that are grounded in their daily lives by inviting participants to create and engage data at their own discretion, rather than pri­ marily in response to researcher-designed questions or prompts (Horowitz et al., 2009; LeGreco, Leonard, & Ferrier, 2012). Thus community members may be invited to collaboratively design plans for producing data, and researchers should be responsive to how participants articulate their questions and to how they understand their strengths and define their problems, concerns, and desires. Researchers should offer key informants options for how they could engage in methods such as photovoice, focus groups, collaborative artwork, or other ways of making data grounded in community perspectives. We further suggest that participatory researchers embrace nonlinear, intentional approaches that aim “to effect social change. The research process, from this approach, is seen as a cyclical process … moving back and forth between collecting data, reflecting upon it, and taking action (which may involve collecting more data)” (Rohleder et al., 2018, p. 3). The cyclical process of data engagement highlights the importance of taking participant-directed action on the basis of collaboratively constructed data. This is a critical point because in participatory data engagement, making and doing do not happen in sequential order but often in a messy assemblage that may feel out of control to researchers who were trained to take a more patterned and predictable approach to making data. We urge creative surrender through embracing the vital energy that infuses messiness, even as we admit that taking up both surrender and ethical responsibility at the same time can be nerve-racking (Law, 2004). Neoliberalism Since the participants with whom participatory researchers collaborate are members of marginalized communities, researchers often try to empower the community members to make change, even if it is limited to supporting them in speaking out about issues affecting their community. In this way, researchers may reinforce community members as neoliberal citizens who can save them­ selves if only they cooperate with researchers. Neoliberalism structures con­ temporary Western universities with its emphasis on individuals as the locus of problems and solutions. Neoliberalist logic ignores systemic inequalities and highlights individual responsibility, competitiveness, and capitalist market forces while disparaging the role of government in alleviating systemic inequities and providing a social safety net (Kennelly, 2018). Even researchers and community collaborators who are aware of neoliberal ideologies may struggle to avoid imposing them. The desire to increase awareness of the issue being studied and

96 Engaging participatory data provide meaningful assistance in moving toward a community’s goals generally motivates participatory approaches but requires access to and the ability to persuade policymakers. Typically, participatory projects stop long before accomplishing large-scale social change and instead provide powerful data and representations that can be used to educate and sensitize general publics and to appeal to powerful policymakers. Researchers need to question and resist the “hegemonic notion of participatory research as inherently emancipatory, representative, and democratic” (Kennelly, 2018, p. 36), particularly since “the egalitarian discourse of the power adverse [participatory] scholars obscures the privilege of the academic researcher” (Janes, 2016, p. 75) and may exaggerate the amount and types of power held by community members. Speaking of a participatory project targeting homeless youth in Canada, a researcher explains how discourses of neoliberalism underlie assumptions of: a set of individualized and classed capacities that may not be accessible to [marginalized youth] … Although the notion of youth citizenship is culturally valorized … it is in fact a category with deeply classed, raced, and colonial histories. It presumes an ability, and a desire, to transform present circum­ stances into something better, the classic “pull-yourself-up-by-the-boot­ straps” neoliberal approach to poverty. It locates the impetus for such actions within individuals … rather than recognizing the decades-long collusion of state-driven policy shifts away from social safety nets. (Kennelly, 2018, p. 38) Moreover, universities that purport to champion participatory research and eagerly document examples of it on their websites, nonetheless often fail to accommodate the needs of researchers collaborating with communities and frequently do not value the products of such collaborations (Stanton, 2014). Neoliberal universities exert tremendous pressure on academics to follow narrow guidelines for research that stress high rates of publication, capacity to attract outside grant funding, and attractiveness to positive media coverage. Faced with such pressures, most social, natural, and applied scientists revert to positivist ideals about objectivity, competi­ tion, and hierarchy. Participatory projects encounter ongoing institutional and systemic barriers that continue to marginalize our research projects, from unfavourable responses by research ethics boards to pressure to publish faster and with single-authored pieces in the interests of attaining tenure and/or promotion—practices that are typically antithetical to the timelines and ethics of participatory community-engaged research. (Kennelly, 2018, p. 34) The negative material consequences of participatory research for researchers at many universities mean that many researchers cannot or will not devote the time and energy necessary for this meaningful but time- and energy-consuming form of data engagement.

Engaging participatory data 97 Power, empowerment, and reciprocity Power relations are always present and dynamic when making participatory data, in part due to the presence of academic prestige, credentials, and the system of rewards in academia which set researchers apart as acknowledged experts. “Decolonizing scholars emphasize that research relationships continue to reproduce, either overtly or in subtle ways, a power differential that posi­ tions the researcher above participant” (Stanton, 2014, p. 579). Participatory approaches should not ignore the ethics of unequal sharing of power among participants and researchers. The risks [participants] took were significantly greater than mine and no amount of acknowledgement, honoraria, good food, and other less tangi­ ble supports can begin to honor their contributions nor disrupt the power asymmetries that persisted in our work together, despite our best and worst efforts … [Therefore] working with community may be neither emanci­ patory or egalitarian but complicated and colonial. (Janes, 2016, p. 75) Some scholars acknowledge power is complex and relational but still “tend to hold out the possibility of a flattening that does not account for the struc­ tural forces that shape the historical, political and social conditions where knowledge work unfolds” (p. 76). Sharing control proves to be a challenging and ongoing process in data engagement (Wagner et al., 2016). Participatory researchers should be cautious about claims of empowering participants (Sanon, Evans-Agnew, & Boutain, 2014). Researchers in one study remained unconvinced that participatory video practices they utilized would be sufficient “to empower individuals and communities” (Lomax, Fink, Singh, & High, 2011, p. 232). Even the claim of empowering a group—often referred to as “capacity building”—implies that the group is lacking capacities according to an implicit set of criteria (Janes, 2016, p. 78). Of course, it is difficult to discern how much agency participants have in the midst of data engagement and how much their actions constitute meaningful participation—to “them,” to “us,” or to various funding sources, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations. Instead of holding up an arbitrary measure of participation by community members, consider that: “guilt over … not being ‘participatory enough’ articulates to blunt measurements of the quantity, rather than the quality, of participation,” and as a generative alternative, participatory researchers could “engag[e] the complementarity of different knowledges, skills, interests rather than the tyranny of everyone participating in everything” (p. 82). An intriguing videovoice project offers a compelling example of the complexity of power relationships between scholars and community members. Researchers provided video cameras and asked participants to use this material-technological means of narrating their weekly experiences to engage in reflexivity. Digital recording technology provided resources for the participants, who exerted their agency through the technologies in a variety of complex ways. “The [videocam’s]

98 Engaging participatory data affordances enabled participants to record, play back, edit, share, and review their digital video data; combined with the research design itself, this enhanced their opportunity for self reflexivity,” all of which happened without the immediate presence of the researcher (Whiting et al., 2018, p. 333). Yet at the same time the videocam also “enters into very personal parts of the participants’ lives so giving an unprecedented intimacy” to researchers (p. 332), who became “an absent presence” that was “implicated as a mirror for [participants] in [their] identity management” (p. 327). Participants made all the video data, and some participants developed co-researcher relationships with Whiting and colleagues. Reciprocity forms another key node in the complex network of power relations in participatory data engagement. Researchers can consider how to “work in reciprocity with people to generate mutually beneficial knowings” rather than seeing themselves as fixing a community problem (Gullion & Tilton, 2020, p. 52). Reciprocity “is a matter of making a fitting and proportional return for the good or ill we receive” (Becker, 2005, p. 18). Feminist methodologists (Falcón, 2016; Preissle, 2007), Africana feminist methodologists (Zerai, Perez, & Wang, 2017), and participatory researchers reflecting other traditions (Kirkness & Barnhardt, 2001; Wang, 1999) frame reciprocity as an ethical imperative that requires ongo­ ing, compassionate negotiation, including doing no harm to communities, collaborating with participants as equals, speaking with or to rather than for parti­ cipants and amplifying their voices, acknowledging embodied participants and their material circumstances, critiquing structural inequities, and developing solu­ tions to participant-identified problems. Reciprocity positions data generation as a dynamic process of giving and receiving. Reciprocity often requires long-term, sustained involvement in a community and the development of caring, trusting relationships (Falcón, 2016; Stanton, 2014). Gullion and Tilton (2020) recommend that researchers engage reciprocity in part through clarity; they urge participatory researchers to be clear on the spe­ cific skills we can offer a community organization so they can decide what would best serve their goals. These could include skills such as being able to facilitate meetings, collect and analyze different forms of data, write reports, or speak to large audiences. Many participatory projects produce a range of “deliverables,” which helps to maximize their reciprocity and ability to reach multiple community stakeholders. Exemplary in this regard is a study of how unbanked and underbanked people, primarily low-income women of color, use fringe banking enterprises such as “payday loans” and “car title loans” and other predatory lending services (Houh & Kalsem, 2015). The collaborating researchers and participants used their data to write a comprehensive manual detailing the group’s processes with feedback on what worked well and what could be improved and a “zine” that creatively represented an interview/story of a participant in comic book-style graphics. They also constructed a website that featured interviews, a map of the locations of payday lending facilities concentrated in communities of color, and photos of collaborative artwork, which they termed a “visual dropcloth.” The dropcloth was a large piece of blank canvas which collaborators took to several parks and other outdoor

Engaging participatory data 99 venues in unbanked and underbanked communities and asked people to draw their thoughts on topics related to money, including “payday lending” specifi­ cally (p. 269). The range of genres and mediums in their data assemblage exemplifies excellence in reciprocity. Of course, data assemblages always implicate sociopolitical discourses; yet participatory research practices present special opportunities and challenges to engaging with intersections of culture and data. We reviewed the politics of knowledge production, neoliberalism, and issues of power and reciprocity in order to proffer possibilities for enhanced reflexivity, reciprocity, power sharing, and decolonizing practices.

Becoming through relating Our discussion of making and assembling participatory data makes it abundantly evident that participatory research approaches center on the relationships between community members and academic researchers that are formed and sustained throughout collaborative projects (Falcón, 2016). Because researchers enjoy more power and privilege than community partners, we tend to focus on the imperative that researchers avoid committing to community-based work unless they are willing and able to invest the time, energy, and sheer determination necessary to sustain collaborative work. However, participatory research necessitates equally active and ongoing engagement of community members, and the lines between personal and professional may blur over time (Mayan & Daum, 2016). Both the local expertise of community members and the academic skills of the researchers are valued, and (ideally) everyone’s needs and expectations are continually nego­ tiated. The ongoingness of relationships makes them both process and product of participatory work; the collaborative relationships produce the data, and simulta­ neously they are produced by data agencies. No relationships are static, and relationships formed in the field inevitably change over time. Some end poorly, others end amicably or fade away slowly. Sometimes community members are hurt and disappointed when academics exit the field, and then researchers may feel guilt. Relationships are based in part on personal characteristics such as interpersonal communication skills, ability to express empathy and care, and also on perceived contributions. Researchers’ actions can enhance or undermine community members’ sense of being appreciated. Positive actions include getting into the community early on to set the groundwork for a project, becoming involved in community life, practicing reciprocity with community members, and creating an atmosphere of informality (Mayan & Daum, 2016, p. 71). Yet the notion that relationships can be held constant in a sustainable, mutually satisfying mode in order for researchers to act ethically is fallacious. Certainly researchers can make ongoing choices to be compassionate, kind, and reciprocal, but change will come as circumstances inevitably change—participants age, move away, or develop other priorities, funding sources dry up, new policies are instituted, and researchers shift their focus to other projects. Long-term, meaningful

100 Engaging participatory data commitments should be not be misconstrued as indefinite by researchers or participants. Even when researchers and community members go to great efforts to make mutual expectations clear, community members may still feel abandoned, disappointed, or exploited when projects end or researchers cut back on the amount of time and resources they can devote (Mayan & Daum, 2016). Moreover, expectations may be less clear than all parties anticipate. Researchers report feeling exploitive about “the process of turning stories into data” when they compiled participants’ experiences and used them as evidence in analyses, papers, and presentations, expressing discomfort about benefitting from others’ tragedies and suffering (Mallon & Elliott, 2019, p. 66). Some researchers endeavor to maintain long-term contact with (former) participants in order to embrace “the ethical imperatives for gaining ongoing consent” for new pub­ lications or presentations, when “the use of their data has continued beyond the lifetime” of the participatory project (Lovell & Akhurst, 2018, p. 377). Yet such periodic contact to request consent—while a laudable way to continue to honor participants’ agency—offers a reminder of a past relationship, rather than a continuation of one. Not much counsel is offered to participatory researchers on the process of leaving collaborative relationships behind. Critical researchers can become entangled in ethical dilemmas, guilt over career benefits, responsibilities to participants, and a myriad of practical limitations, including the material consequences of tenure clocks and the requirement to pursue a trajectory of research. We reflect on our tremendous class, educational, and typically white privilege and know that the very capacity to exit the field—which is, after all, participants’ home—is a privilege. And of course, that leads us to wrestle with the knowledge that acknowledging our privileges does not diminish them, and in fact, can reify them (B. J. Allen, 2010). For some, exhaustion, burnout, and secondary trauma from work with suffering people form even more threads in the entanglement (Gerstenblatt, Rhodes, & Holst, 2018). Researchers also might question the self-important assumption that our participants necessarily long for our continued presence, when this may not be the case. The com­ plexities of relating across difference do not dissipate simply because researchers embraced an ethic of care and compassion, reciprocity, decolonizing practices, or other meaningful commitments and actions. Whether we officially end collaborative relationships, allow them to linger ambiguously, or devote some of our limited time and energy to ongoing relational maintenance, we may remain ethically entangled in a feminized guilt, not sure we were ethical enough, participatory enough, or reciprocal enough (Kennelly, 2018). Although no easy fix or clear solution exists, we do offer a perspective on becoming-relational-data. Following Preissle (2007), we suggest “humility in our claims to benefit others and courage to continue research that is ethical enough without being ethically perfect” (p. 523). Resisting our socialization, researchers can pursue “a more humble knowledge project” (Janes, 2016, p. 83), not by dis­ paraging our efforts—and certainly not the efforts of our participants—or the value

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of our data engagements for supporting social change, but by decentering our­ selves as the crucial agency involved in participatory research. Researchers are but one element in a data assemblage. Acknowledging that truth cannot and should not let us off the hook—we are responsible for all we say and do—yet it can free us from the delusion that we are the only responsible party. We conclude with the words of critical ethnographer Madison (2005), who so eloquently enjoined researchers: “Your angst and guilt about your benefits [from representing Others] cannot eclipse or cloud your responsibility to do meaningful work” (p. 135; emphasis in original).

Data-on-the-move A plethora of options for data engagement abound in participatory research, and choices tend to be pragmatic within the dynamic community settings in which researchers and participants collaborate. Given the expressive and often artistic nature of much participatory data, participants and researchers may witness and participate in joyful acts of data creation. Visualize meanings Contemporary Western cultures are visually saturated, and particularly younger generations are deeply attuned to consuming information, entertainment, and managing practical life details through visual, digital interfaces. It is unsurprising then that processes of making qualitative data frequently include a visual com­ ponent. Participatory data may visualize participants’ experiences and meanings using materials, textures, sounds, and images. For example, participants engage in sketching and drawing (Greiner, 2012; Harris & Guillemin, 2012; Literat, 2013). One study explored children’s physical activity outside of school through children’s drawings in what they call “Write, draw, show and tell (WDST) groups” (Noonan, Boddy, Fairclough, & Knowles, 2016). The chil­ dren drew pictures to represent their physical activities with family, friends, or by themselves during nonschool hours. The pictures were considered data and also used as prompts for the children to “tell” about their experiences. Visual participatory data may use photovoice methods, in which participants explain their marginalized enactments of everyday life through taking photos. These visualizing techniques have been used to produce data on a wide variety of topics, including exploring sexuality for people with disabilities (Rohleder et al., 2018), to better understand the lives and service needs of sex workers (Capous-Desyllas & Bromfield, 2018; Oliveira & Vearey, 2015); and to inves­ tigate the development of sexuality within public schools (L. Allen, 2016). Cornell and Kessi (2017) used photovoice to explore Black students’ experi­ ences of the post-apartheid cultural “transformation” of a previously “white only” South African university, while Dougherty, Schraedley, Gist-Mackey, and Wickert (2018) examined food insecurity as it intersected with socio­ economic class (resource security) among unemployed people. In each of these

102 Engaging participatory data settings, the photo data were rich and evocative and also served as prompts in interviews or focus groups where participants reflected on and elaborated on experiences and meanings. Videovoice or participatory video offers a vital format for visual data making (Warren, Knight, Holl, & Gupta, 2014). In one participatory video project, underserved children living in poverty filmed (and edited) aspects of their everyday lives, evidencing agency among the children to make sense of their own lives. [B]y theorising children as competent social actors and moral agents and by recognising that they have valuable insights and knowledges about their social worlds, which they can choose to show us in ways which are meaningful to them, we have argued that [participatory video] also brings important insights into the dynamics and contexts of their everyday experiences. (Lomax et al., 2011, p. 239) The children’s video data did not capture their experience but instead offered points of entry through which researchers and wider publics (e.g., social service agencies, educational systems, nonprofit agencies) could access visually displayed moments of identities, experiences, and intuitions into how poverty and children are mutually constitutive. Another example addressing poverty and community is a videovoice project in post-Katrina New Orleans that aimed to conduct “community assessment and mobilization to act and advocate for rebuilding neighborhoods in a manner that supports community health and wellbeing” (Catalani et al., 2012, p. 18). And some participatory studies combine videovoice and photovoice, visualizing data in even more complex ways. This combined approach was used for exploring community pride and community-building in rural communities in British Columbia (Li et al., 2019) and for studying school-based asthma management among underserved children (Warren, Dyer, Blumenstock, & Gupta, 2016). Collages offer powerful visualizing agencies as well: “collage-making represents an embodied experience suggesting that how we feel, how we perceive, how we relate to our own bodies and the place they have in the order of things—is con­ textual, gendered, relational, historically and culturally situated” (Vacchelli, 2018, p. 173). Collage resists the linearity and rationality of spoken words and written texts and embraces ambiguity, partiality, and possibility (Butler-Kisber, 2019). Collage data typically complement more traditional forms of written and spoken data, rather than replacing them (Singhal & Rattine-Flaherty, 2006). The act of “doing” in the finding and selection of images followed by tearing, cutting and gluing arguably develops a sense of appropriation and ownership that can be experienced by participants as empowering, a sense not of being a passive recipient, but of being agentic in relation to one’s culture. (Flint et al., 2017, p. 13)

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Vacchelli engaged in collage-making with migrant, refugee, and asylumseeking women; another team explored health and body image among First Nation girls (Shea, Poudrier, Thomas, Jeffery, & Kiskotagan, 2013). Collaging agencies were also directed toward building leadership capacity with northern Canadian Inuit communities (Dutton et al., 2019) and a consideration of design, technology, and the misplacing of assistive devices in nursing homes (Oude Weernink, Sweegers, Relou, Van der Zijpp, & Van Hoof, 2017). Organize temporally Participatory data may exert agency to (re)organize participants’ experience temporally, which may yield insights that differ significantly from typically less linear approaches to making participatory data. One form this can take is timelining, which is a type of graphic elicitation that has been used to explore illness experiences, management of chronic conditions such as diabetes, and substance abuse (Chen, 2018). Another project made sense of body weight with timelining. For us the production of a timeline has a value far beyond simply plotting and recording participants’ weight. The timeline was used to encourage narratives and explore the content and dimensions of a participant’s memories about being fat and losing weight … . becoming not only a piece of data in its own right but a vehicle through which further data were produced. (Sheridan et al., 2011, p. 554) Timelining may spark memories and help participants remember details of their experiences (Chen, 2018). These data can also prompt reflection on causal relationships among participants’ embodied selves, relationships, and significant events, including the development of resiliencies (Kolar, Ahmad, Chan, & Erickson, 2015). Likewise, educational journey mapping (EJM) data provide a meaningful and productive visualization of experiences and reflections. EJMs were conceptualized to humanize research through centering the interactions, voice, and knowledge of students of color with dis/abilities (Paris, 2011). Therefore, collecting these counter-cartographies was not as simple as doing a drawing activity that could be added without thought or care, instead EJMs were a purposeful and rigorous method with concrete elements including (a) generating a constructive prompt, (b) creating con­ tinual access [to the prompt], (c) providing genuine reciprocation, (d) articulating complex positionality, and (e) expressing authentic gratitude. (Annamma, 2018, p. 23) Annamma conducted EJM with incarcerated girls of color with dis/abilities, creating opportunities for them to explore complex intersections of identities, education, incarceration, and their life goals. Highlighting temporal dimensions

104 Engaging participatory data of experience reflects the powerful agency of data to frame events in ways that illuminate their interrelatedness. Another temporal organizing agency is embo­ died by the life story boarding method, which was used in a participatory study with Native men in Canada who are HIV positive (Chongo, Chase, Lavoie, Harder, & Mignone, 2018; Mignone, Chase, & Roger, 2019). Encountering the material-aesthetic Engaging the material-aesthetic through tactile and other sensory-rich datamaking activities embodies a generative participatory data agency. Participants intra-act with powerful material actants, provoking data to embody aesthetic meaning through activities as diverse as gardening, sculpting, or craft projects. Gardening actively engages tactile, olfactory, visual, and gustatory senses to construct (and consume) lively data. Fresh tomatoes and sunflowers, as well as the work done to plant, nurture, and harvest them, and all of the talk, fieldnotes, participant journals, and so on weave throughout the rows of gardens, becoming sensuous data for a variety purposes, including: a participatory school garden curriculum for underserved children (Thorp, 2006); a program for coping with grief and bereavement through community gardens (Marsh, Gartrell, Egg, Nolan, & Cross, 2017); urban home gardens (London et al., 2018) and programs to promote home compositing for gardens (Manomaivibool, Srivichai, Unroj, & Dokmaingam, 2018) as enactments of environmental justice; and bridging ethnic/racial divides through community gardening (Datta, 2019). Sculpting as data harnesses the power of the tactile manipulation of a malle­ able substance to embody meaning. Sculpting has been used to investigate topics such as health issues of Cambodian immigrant women (Lee et al., 2016); organizational leadership and management (Hughes, 2009); and health risks for underserved communities (Kriger, 2019). The physical malleability of sculpting and conceptual malleability of imagina­ tion open up the potential for understanding complex, simultaneous, and uncertain phenomena … Sculpting makes the unreal, an inarticulate ima­ gination, sensible. The pun on sensibility is not lost here: “sense” exists both as an intangible organization of thought (e.g., having a general sense or idea) and as a material representation perceptible through sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste … . The third dimension facilitates the possibility of literally multidimensional responses. (Kriger, 2019, pp. 2, 3) In Kriger’s study, participants’ sculptures connected deeply embodied experiences, their own understandings of health and health risks, and their identities. In another participatory project, parents who had experienced the death of a baby were welcomed at workshops in which they engaged in creative craft projects that portrayed their lost baby’s presence as part of their family’s ongoing identity and history (Willer, 2019). These workshops were grounded in research on art and storytelling for processing and coping with trauma and loss. Projects

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included: “scrapbooking, assemblage art, card making, working with an animalassisted therapy dog, jewelry making, writing, yoga … collaging, poetry, comic book making, painting, music making” (The Scraps of the Heart Project, 2017, n.p.). Each of these varied projects produced data (in the form of individual expressions based on a standardized set of crafting instructions) as well as tactile and visual engagement for parents (and children) coping with grief. The crafty data then materialized grief, loss, hope, love, and other emotions that enabled visitors to a gallery (and later an online photo gallery) to view these data artifacts and the verbal stories that accompanied (some of) them in order to glimpse the radical specificity of baby loss (Sotirin, 2010). Provoke reflections Participatory studies that focus on everyday details of life frequently provoke participants’ reflections through journals or diaries, typically centered around a specific behavior or topic (R. Bartlett, 2012; Beckers et al., 2016), in written (Waskul & Vannini, 2008), email (Jones & Woolley, 2015), or audio format. In particular, audio diaries may have the advantage of “accessing sense-making in periods of change and flux, and allowing the researcher to capture phenomena as they unfold” for participants (Crozier & Cassell, 2016, p. 396). One study employed the “repeat question diary” method to examine “the role of social meanings in everyday transport practices in Christchurch, New Zealand” through audio-recorded responses to the same question at multiple points as participants moved through the city (Fitt, 2018, p. 656), while another utilized audio diaries to reflect on work stress and affective experience at work for tem­ porary workers (Crozier & Cassell, 2016). Audio diaries vocalized the thoughts and experiences of disabled young men transitioning to adulthood (Gibson et al., 2013), first-time mothers encountering breastfeeding difficulties (Williamson, Leeming, Lyttle, & Johnson, 2012), medical students forming professional iden­ tities (Monrouxe, 2009), and people in Serbia coping with HIV (Bernays et al., 2014). In a similar but of course more visual manner, video diaries or video journals illuminate everyday experiences (Bates, 2013; Cherrington & Watson, 2010); one study invited video journals from Pacific Island immigrants in New Zealand (Brown, Costley, Friend, & Varey, 2010). In addition, participatory data provoke reflection through poetry. Qualitative researchers typically think of poetry as a form of data analysis or representation of findings (Faulkner, 2019), but it can also constitute data. Data doing poetry invite interpretive frameworks; make intelligible people’s experiences; reflect hegemonic norms or marginalized ways of being; or even convey incoherent or unmanageable meanings within poetic chaos narratives (Frank, 1995). Data poetry trades in words that have a certain type of reverberation. Poetry taps into what cannot be said straight out; it exceeds normal discourse and invites affective and discursive resonances. “When poetry becomes data, we see that the binary opposition between poetry and science is an arbitrary one … The boundaries delineating worlds are more porous than we expected” (Shapiro,

106 Engaging participatory data 2004, p. 177). For example, a collection of poems written by young people from Tasmania, Australia was part of the Tree of Hope project, which utilized multiple, arts-based methods to provide insights into what young people hope for in their future and the role of hope in their lives (Bishop & Willis, 2014). Poetry is always a becoming; it opens new points of connection. In another mode, participants made “found poems” as they reviewed their own interview transcripts and highlighted key words and phrases as a creative mode of member checking, which then provided further data (Reilly, 2013). Still another researcher explored friendship loss by using autobiographical poetry as data that both provoked and were provoked by reflection on this painful topic (Furman, 2004). In each of these cases, poetic data became the medium for participants’ reflections that formed and expressed important insights about complex lived experiences. Finally, researchers also reflect through data poetry on their experiences and emotions about their own agency in participatory research (Gerstenblatt et al., 2018). Organize space Participatory data agency organizes space through mapping with an explicitly critical edge. For example, community mapping, a decolonizing method in which researchers “explore factors such as the locations of businesses and ser­ vices relative to the [research] population. Where are the schools, food deserts, medically underserved areas? Are there green spaces, parks, and walkable areas people feel safe using?” (Gullion & Tilton, 2020, p. 57) Furthermore, researchers can incorporate a social map of your stakeholders. Think about what groups you want to engage … . This includes gender, race and ethnicity, social class, religion, language, ability, sexuality, and any other variables that are important to ensure representativeness of your community. … . Dismantle demographic categories and pay attention to what is uniquely happening in your com­ munity. Community mapping is important because there is so much internal variation. (p. 57) Community-mapping data organize not just spaces but axes of inequality and crucial aspects of variability within communities that should not be rendered as homogenous but as including diverse constituencies that exist not only dis­ cursively but take up space in particular places while being excluded from other places. In a similar vein, critical reflection mapping is a participatory method rooted in critical GIS methods that joins two techniques—qualitative sketch mapping and critical reflection—in a productive way to Documen[t] the sociospatial perceptions of individuals as they interact with the environment. Written critical reflection and journaling allows an

Engaging participatory data 107 individual to examine and question multiple issues as he or she interacts with new people and spaces. At the same time, qualitative sketch mapping can visually display an individual’s perceptions of the environment and landscape as well as material observations. (Hawthorne, Solís, Terry, Price, & Atchison, 2015, p. 29) Each of these mapping methods produces lively data that constitute a critical intervention by organizing space in particular ways that illuminate inequalities, exclusions, and resiliencies. Scholars in critical geography, digital humanities, and critical data visualization lead the way in creative, participatory approaches to cartography that reimagine and reorganize spaces through various forms of (re)mapping that particularly lend themselves to participatory data engagement focused on understanding particular places and spaces (see D’Ignazio & Klein, 2016; Elwood, 2006; Walker, Nost, Lemelin, Lave, & Dillon, 2018).

7

Engaging self-as-data

Tangling with self-as-data Many conceptions of the self appear in contemporary research: the social self (Blumer, 1969; Blumer, 1950; Mead, 1934); dramaturgical self (Burke, 1969; Goffman, 1975; Turner, 1974); socially constructed self (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Gergen, 1991); narrative self (Bochner, 1997; & Ochberg, 1992); disciplined self (Foucault & Rabinow, 1997; Rose, 1990); fragmented postmodern self (Hall, 1990; Weedon, 1997); situated self (Coffey, 1999); performative self (Butler, 1990); and self-digitalized self (Lupton, 2016c, 2020). All trouble the idea of an authentic, intact self and acknowledge/initiate the politics of self-representation. These conceptualizations of selfhood have been influential in methodological moves away from a distanced, objectified persona and toward the situated ethnographic self (Coffey, 1999). In this chapter, we consider the various ways that personal life has become the focus of research, and we designate this focus throughout as self-as-data. Thus, the researcher self-as-data includes whatever becomes significant in the researcher’s lived experience: thoughts, memories, perceptions, dreams, emo­ tions, behaviors, relationships, identities, events, situations, stories, discourses, and larger social, cultural, and historical contexts. We explore what the self-as­ data does within autoethnographic, performative, and self-digitalization approaches. We also explore what the digital self-as-data might do without the burdens of traditional humanist assumptions. We contend that self-as-data has not been subsumed into narrative or performance, and neither has it been solely datified into bytes or algorithms. Rather, we find making, assembling, and becoming practices to be particularly creative, anguished, and under revision in regard to self-as-data. The centrality of ethical commitments to (self)compassion and the awe/fulness of joy are especially relevant to self-as-data. To be clear, our focus is on self-as-data and not on self-report data. Selfreport data or anecdotal data are both prevalent in social science research and excoriated by postpositivist critics. Chan (2009) argues that the value of selfreport data is often overshadowed by myths about its fallibility that are taken at face value rather than recognized as aspects that can be addressed through methodological practices. While we are concerned that the denigration of self­

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data has professional, political, and policy implications, we are focused in this chapter on data that are not based on the self-report of research participants but on the personal narratives of the researcher or the experiences of the datified researcher self. Turning to self-as-data The crises of legitimation, authority, and representation that undermined postpositivist practices of qualitative research precipitated scrutiny of the researcher self (Lincoln & Denzin, 2003). From a recessed figure watching at a distance, the researcher self came to the fore not only as the (self-reflexive) “instrument” of data gathering but as a source of qualitative data. Methodological shifts have ensued: from the recognition that field data are necessarily a subjective experience of the researcher (Clifford & Marcus, 1986) to a requisite admission of the researcher’s situatedness and attendant vulnerabilities and biases (Coffey, 1999; Coffey, 1990) to the life of the self as a fieldsite for data (Bochner, 2017; Ellis, 2004; Ellis & Bochner, 2000) to the material entanglements of self data (Haraway, 2003). Moreover, a turn to self-as-data reflects as an intense “datification” of the per­ sonal in digital environments. It may seem contrary to include such data in the same chapter where we focus on autoethnography and performative writing. After all, the desire for more human, less alienating, and more life-engaged research impelled the move into introspective, narrational forms (Bochner, 2014; Bochner & Riggs, 2014). In contrast, self-digitization negotiates neoliberal commodifica­ tion and postmodern ephemerality of self. The self-as-data we discuss below entails affective flows, mediated affordances, and technocultural dynamics (Slack & Wise, 2014). Yet, we hold that self-as-data animates these seemingly disparate lines of qualitative research—differently, surely, but as a critical preoccupation. Thus, we consider the issues of writing the self-as-data and digitizing the self-as-data sepa­ rately at first, but we intermingle them later in the chapter in order to highlight the wonder and liveliness of self-as-data. The following section offers brief introductions to narrated, performed, and digital self-as-data. We begin by addressing the argument that the narrated and performed self obviates data. Instead, we hold that self-as-data emerges through and as writing/performing. Narrating and performing self(-as-data) The turn to self-narration and performance has in effect dismissed the need for data as evidence. Instead of objectively verifiable assertions, the epistemological grounding for research is acknowledged as subjective, experiential, and inter­ pretive (Ellingson, 2009). It is not verifiable facts, objective truths, or universal laws but the lived realities, felt truths, and collective understandings—“inexact knowledges” (Lather, 2007)—that narrative and performative introspection, interpretation, and performance engage and enact. In this sense, the self cannot be reduced to data. Yet, while we understand this perspective, we take issue

110 Engaging self-as-data with the dismissal of self-as-data. We contend that autoethnographic and performative researchers do rely on self-as-data, even as they blur distinctions among researcher, process, and product of research. As Denzin (2017) puts it in his case for a performative turn: “There is no longer any pure presence description becomes inscription erases collection becomes performance erases analysis becomes interpretation” (p. 82). Self-as-data is not described but inscribed, not collected but performed, not separately analyzed but incessantly interpreted. It is this conceptualization of self-as-data that we encourage qualitative researchers to engage. Turning to autoethnographic approaches, we find the self-as-data to be integral to such research. Autoethnography is “an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural” (Ellis & Bochner, 2000, p. 733), conducting “cultural analysis through personal narrative” (Boylorn & Orbe, 2016, p. 17; Ellis, 2004; Goodall, 2000). Pelias (2018, p. 31) takes autoethnography as an organizing term for a set of assumptions and strategies that characterize research approaches relying on self-as-data including personal narrative, poetic inquiry, performative enactment, research confessionals, and reflexivity. Multiple varia­ tions on autoethnographic writing have emerged, among them postpositivist analytic autoethnography (L. Anderson, 2006; Chang, 2016), interpretive autoethnography (Denzin, 2014); critical autoethnography (Boylorn & Orbe, 2016; Hughes & Pennington, 2017); collaborative autoethnography (Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez, 2013; Rinehart & Earl, 2016); co-constructed autoethnography (Davis & Ellis, 2008) evocative autoethnography (Bochner & Ellis, 2016); and more (see the helpful table of terms and variations in Denzin, 2018, p. 8). Across these variations, self-as-data appears centrally as processual, dynamic, often surprising, and irreverent. While it is beyond our purposes here to discuss distinctions among these variants, we will highlight a major epistemological difference regarding self-as­ data among analytic, evocative, and poststructural perspectives. In analytic autoethnography, self-as-data is constructed on the basis of a conventional use of data as verifiable evidence of experience. Thus, researchers distinguish between internal (subjective) and external (corroborative) data and gather self­ as-data through materialized (triangulated) sources: fieldnotes/diaries, personal documents and artifacts (letters, medical records, transcripts, emails, life jour­ nals), and interviews (Anderson & Glass, 2013; Chang, 2016). In contrast, evocative autoethnographers merge process and product, composing self-as­ data through self-introspection, emotional reconstructions, and poignant, affectively resonant writing (Ellingson & Ellis, 2008). Whereas analytic autoethnography strives for rigorous data-gathering and analysis, evocative ethno­ graphy privileges writing with emotion, eloquence, and narrative imagination. Critical self-reflexivity, relational ethics, and (self)compassion are commitments that make the evocative self-as-data vulnerable, vigilantly self-conscious, and intimately, culturally, and historically accountable (Berry, 2013; Bochner & Ellis, 2016; Ellis, 2007). From a poststructural perspective, the self-knowing self

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is under erasure in favor of “textual strategies that evoke fractured, fragmented subjectivities and provoke discontinuity, displacement, and estrangement … . the writing writes the writer as a complex (im)possible subject in a world where (self) knowledge can only ever be tentative, contingent, and situated” (Gannon, 2006, p. 474); strategies of writing expose “the limits and fragilities of self-knowledge” (p. 492). In other words, writing the self-as-data becomes impossible regardless of the writer’s vulnerability, self-reflexivity, or account­ ability and this becoming of impossibilities animates the vitalities of self-as-data that “write the writer.” These vitalities also run through contemporary performative studies: self-as-data is inscribed in scripts, bodies, and the visceral joys/anguish of the performed moment. Conquergood’s classic statement about critical performance research articulates the commitments; such research “privileges particular, participatory, dynamic, intimate, precarious, embodied experience grounded in historical pro­ cess, contingency, and ideology” (1991, p. 187) and counters linguistic and textual bias in favor of the rhetorical and praxiological power of embodied cultural per­ formance. The performative self-as-data is “a story of the body told through the body” that turns “the internally somatic into the externally semantic” (Spry, 2001, p. 713; emphasis in original). The performative turn has generated a plethora of qualitative research forms: performative ethnography, performative autoethnography, ethnodrama, performative pedagogy, performative writing (Pelias, 2018; Schechner, 2012). While these differ substantively, we focus more specifi­ cally on qualitative performance studies that trouble both the presence of a knowledgeable “I” who acts and the primacy of a narrative that seeks coherence, veracity, and closure. Performance articulates the destabilizing contingencies of social life in ways that call forth possibilities and “what ifs” but often in dis­ concerting, discomforting, and provocative, as much as evocative, ways. The performative “I” does not pre-exist its performance and is not engaged in performing a knowing self; self-as-data emerges as fluid, contradictory, and incomplete. Turning to digital self-as-data Qualitative research into the digital self-as-data has burgeoned. That “we are data” is a truism of contemporary social life in which our digital data traces across fluid associative networks are incessantly algorithmically reassembled into “an aggrega­ tion of membership in different modulating measurable types” (Cheney-Lippold, 2017, p. 173). This goes on with or without us, although self-digitalization forms both the currency and project of online social and commercial activity: In addition to commercial participation, users of social networking platforms tend to actively disclose personal information in order to clarify personal identities, manage relationships, receive social validation, control social out­ comes with others, express feelings, share event information for the benefit of others, and for self-entertainment. (Bazarova & Choi, 2014, p. 645)

112 Engaging self-as-data The ubiquity of lifelogging devices, social media applications, and surveillance technologies contributes to intensive self-digitization that creates long histories of quantified self-presentations, self-observations, and self-archiving (Beer, 2017; Lupton, 2016c; Rettberg, 2014; Selke, 2016a, b). Qualitative researchers have been eager to explore digital forms of social life and the digital mediation of personal life (see Chapter 5). The extensive digi­ tization of self-as-data meshes with governance of the Quantified Self and neoliberal anxieties over and strategies of security, privacy, surveillance, sous­ veillance (that is, digital self-monitoring) and resistance (Lupton, 2016b). Gitelman and Jackson (2013) ask: What are the logics and the ethics of “dataveillance,” now that we appear to be moving so rapidly from an era of expanding data resources into an era in which we have become the resource for data collection that vampirically feeds off of our identities, our “likes,” and our everyday habits? (p. 10) Whether self-generated in social apps, culled as data traces of our online activ­ ities, constructed through Big Data profiles, or calculated in statistical norma­ tivities, the ubiquity of digital data suggests that there is much at stake in engaging with the digital self-as-data. Lupton (2018, 2020) draws on feminist materialism to discuss the liveliness of self-as-data: “Personal data can have agentive capacities that shape people’s embodied responses and actions, their sense of selfhood and their relationships with other people and with other things” (2018, p. 6). Self-as-data has “bio­ value” that circulates through the assemblages constituting material-human­ digital life. She argues that self-tracking or lifelogging data generate “agential capacities suffused with affect” (2018, pp. 6–7). The digitized self is emplaced and embodied, responsive to data about itself within dynamic material, sensory, and social, and technological contexts. Researchers are themselves articulated into self-as-data within the technocultural research assemblages formed in the emergent, contingent, and rampant connections across technological processes and infrastructures, cultural domains, social activities, and research disciplines and practices (Slack & Wise, 2014). We turn to making, assembling, and becoming of both the narrated/ performed and digital self-as-data. When we ask “what are self-as-data doing?” we return to our point that these data are autopoietic, emerging, changing, and re-forming as they emerge. The self as the narrative/perfor­ mative “I” and/as digitized self-as-data are not pre-existing entities but emerge in the process of their (self)composition. In addition, just as writing inscribes the autoethnographic self and performing actualizes the performa­ tive “I,” digital self-as-data emerge in digital affordances and formations. Across their admittedly significant differences, we hold that making, assem­ bling, and becoming engage self-as-data in ways responsive to the issues we have discussed.

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Making self-as-data Writing as (self)making If we consider the narrative and performative self to be an inscribed self, writ­ ing becomes critical to making the self-as-data. In conventional research, data are confined to a particular stage of research; writing up the data probes and interprets the significances hidden within or underneath the primordial tex­ tualizations of collected data. In contrast, rather than writing about the data, in autoethnographic and performative research, writing is both the data and the interpretation (Gariglio, 2018, p. 566). Further, as Goodall (2000) points out, writing vulnerably, reflexively, and well—writing compelling dialogue, scenes, and stories—is the crux of autoethnographic and performative accounts. In a classic essay about writing as inquiry (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005), Richardson extols a creative, hermeneutic process of research writing that affects jouissance and compassion for and about self and others: “when I move deeply into my writing, both my compassion for others and my actions on their behalf increase” (p. 967). For Richardson, writing as qualitative inquiry is a compassionately ethical and creative process of hermeneutic self-as-data. St. Pierre (2018) argues for writing as a nomadic, rhizomatic process of becoming. Rather than writing the self, she advocates “thinking-writing” that is not rig­ orous or reflective but risky, experimental, playful, and poetic (p. 605). Writing self-as-data is about learning to trust in the movement of writing—“I learned to trust writing to take me somewhere I couldn’t go without writing” (p. 606)—and to distrust representational logics, “official data” (fieldnotes, inter­ views) and the writing self. Yet, it is not necessary to adopt a postqualitative rejection of data to depose the self-composing autoethnographic narrator in favor of writing in itself. Indeed, Adams and Holman Jones (2008, 2011) explain that in evocative, queer, feminist, and performative writing, it is not the first-person narra­ tor—self-referential, self-composed, and often self-contained—that is the self-as-data but the “I” that emerges in the performance of writing. This emergent self-as-data makes these accounts generative, impactful, and inspiring by disrupting (research and social) traditions and conventions; creating novel and innovative perspectives on experiences, identities, dis­ courses, practices, and cultural formations; remaining open, revisable, and fluid; and “making ideological and discursive trouble” leading to humane, transformative revisions of self, lives, and worlds (p. 110). Whether the performative “I” proves to be a reliable, honest, and authentic narrator or not is part of the process and performance since once again, it is not objective truth that matters but compassion as affective connection, joy as intensities, and a pragmatic approach to living or the lessons encountered. Thus the ethical commitments that we have advocated for data engagement prove critical to the emergence of self-as-data in performative writing.

114 Engaging self-as-data Making digital self-as-data The digital self-as-data is similarly emergent as process and product of techno­ cultural research assemblages. Here researcher, user, devices, and data flows are “hyperreflexive” as strategic agents within online social formations. Caliandro (2018) advises addressing self-as-data through available digital tools and devices (see Chapter 5). For example, both the system management of communicative “fluxes” as well as self-as-data emerge through the use of hashtags, likes, com­ ments, and other user traces afforded by particular online systems. The ongoing self-categorizing provoked by such ready devices “derives from a form of hyperreflexivity driven by the affordances of social media, which continuously make users aware of acting in front of an invisible audience” (Caliandro, 2018, p. 570). Hyperreflexivity is critical to the relentless economy of social evaluation; as Bratich (2017) observes, “Online performances of self depend on a hope and an expecta­ tion that an Other is observing and will react with (positive) evaluations (BanetWeiser, 2014)” (p. 528). For example, Lovelock (2019) examined how the affor­ dances of YouTube as a medium along with broader norms of selfhood shaped the ways YouTube coming-out videos by lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth become intelligible in the digital arena. Lovelock shows how hyperreflexivity sets self-as­ data in a co-constitutive relation with a digital collective imaginary.

Assembling self-as-data Layering juxtapositions An oft-repeated injunction about self-as-data in autoethnographic and performative research is that self-narratives must be self-consciously and reflexively responsive to their material, sensory, institutional, cultural, political, geographical, temporal, and historical contexts and discourses. Self-as-data must be constantly questioned, recomposed, reset, and resituated out of familiar routines and taken-for-granted reassurances; there must be reckonings, witnessings, and transformations. Assembling such accounts entails layering juxtaposed perspectives, tracing memories along sensory and material pathways, assembling metonymic traces, comingling human/ nonhuman sensory and material elements, and tapping into and resisting cultural formations. For example, Russell (2017) assembles a reflective dialogue by layering disturbing childhood memories, embodied emotions especially deeply rooted pain, established sense-making routines, and reimagined meanings that include “appre­ hending possibilities for forgiveness” (p. 183). Layered accounts refract the self-as-data through the prisms of different epistemological/genre/multimodal perspectives, among them: academic research, popular prescriptions, autoethnographic vignettes, and visual descrip­ tions in order to complexify the emergent account (Lather & Smithies, 1997; Rambo, 2005; Richards, 2008; Ronai, 1995). Denshire and Lee (2013) suggest that autoethnographic self-as-data is relational and constituted in and through practices understood as spaces of multiplicity “composed of a contingent and

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constantly metamorphosing mesh of actions, relations, and material orders” (p. 224). They urge a layered account of material artifacts, texts, and memories: “juxtaposing multiple accounts one against the other, an uneasy, unstable rela­ tionship between the writer and the self she writes about” (p. 224). Layered accounts thus destabilize and decenter the self-as-data “through multiple modalities of representation” within a data assemblage (p. 233). Comingling Comingling includes practices of inter- and intra-acting across organic/inor­ ganic, virtual/actual, and human/nonhuman relationalities and even kinships (Haraway, 2016). Banerjee and Blaise (2013) hold that such practices acknowledge “the agency of data” and allow it “to take us in unforeseen directions” (p. 241). Comingling of researchers’ bodies with human/nonhu­ man phenomena may incite surprise or unanticipated moves and connections with sounds, smells, sensations, sights. The injunction is to make self-as-data by “[b]eing attentive to silences, noises, movements, temperatures, and smells; sometimes slowing down attentiveness to avoid defining, gathering, categor­ izing data in order to make room for data by allowing an encounter to happen” (p. 242). For example, Allen-Collinson, Vaittinen, Jennings, and Owton (2018) explore thermoceptive somatic self-learning, taking their own bodies’ registering of heat and corporeal temperature as an element in embodied learning across physical-cultural settings, including distance run­ ning, martial arts, and boxing. Their performances of self-as-data are entan­ gled in organic and inorganic intra-actions. Lifelogging and sousveillance Two digital activities that have garnered research attention assemble self-as­ data through self-monitoring apps and devices (see Figure 7.1). Lifelogging is digital self-tracking on personal devices with software transmitting to cloudbased archives (Selke, 2016a). Along with lifelogging, sousveillance has emerged as a more intentful form of recording and publishing data of personal experience (Mann & Ferenbok, 2013). Both offer first-person perspectives on lived experience using mobile, often wearable digital devices and engage self­ as-data in continually refiguring assemblages of data, activities, devices, networks, governing agencies, risk, and resistance (Andrejevic, 2004; Hagg­ erty & Ericson, 2000). Selke (2016b) calls lifelogging a form of self-observation, self-documentation, and self-archiving that can involve tracking “data on health, locations, productivity, finances, hormone levels, or moods” (p. 3). The relentless cloudbased “dataveillance” of digital self-data assembles the self-as-data as responsi­ bilized, normalized, consumable, and commodifiable. Lifelogging is not merely self-quantification: “This digitalized process of life (re-)assembles itself with each and every log, constantly and precariously” (Gertenbach & Mönkeberg,

116 Engaging self-as-data

Figure 7.1 Composing the monitored self-as-data

2016, pp. 39–40) and amounts to “a recursive datification of life” (p. 26; emphasis in original). Unobtrusively recorded self-data is reassembled into digital displays and norm-based comparisons which then shape ongoing choices, behaviors, meanings, practices, and so forth. Moreover, these practices of self-tracking participate in expansive “data assemblages [that] are configured via systems of thought, forms of knowledge, business or government models, human users, practices, devices and software, and also sometimes by networks of other users and agents other than the self-tracker” (Lupton, 2016c, p. 63). These assem­ blages may extend to “deathlogging” or the online afterlife (Bourdeloie & Julier-Costes, 2016), animating the life of self-as-data well beyond death.

Becoming self-as-data Embracing incommunicability Rather than understanding the autoethnographic self as a way of representing a shared condition or underlying nature—whether that be a shared humanity, the human condition, or whatever—a more radical form of data engagement informed by Deleuzian theory might focus on the specificity and indeterminacy of life itself—what we have called radical specificity (see Chapter 1). The point is not recognized through pre-existing (share-able) categories but as encountered

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flows, multiplicities, and provisional moments and events. The goal is not to tame the particularities of a life by parsing the recognizable elements of experiences and emotions into discrete bits of data but to prompt research­ ers to (un)know and (un)do the representational potential of life itself. The power of autoethnographic and performance narratives may well be in what cannot be communicated rather than in the reassurances of comprehensi­ bility and transparency, because it is in this way that we can begin to think differently about what we know and what we might become (GingrichPhilbrook, 2005; Sotirin, 2010). Stewart (2013) advises composing worlds by honing in “on the singularities in which things actually take place”—reactions, qualities, trajectories, durations, accruals, lines of flight. These might be “a tone of voice, a form of labor, a sleepless night, unsignified intensities” (p. 661). For Stewart, autoethnographers are engaged in “a composing that attunes to forces coming into form,” and she wonders about “the perfect detail,” just “one of the countless materialities, jumps, and strands of thought that constitute links between self and world” (p. 667). She describes with exquisitely drawn details her mother’s death, funeral, the last days, the last years. After the funeral, I sleep hard. I am awakened by bad dreams every few minutes. But then, as if drugged, I have fallen asleep again and have had another dream. My mouth is dry as sand. I get up to pee again, then fall back into the bed like an animal. I snap my stiff neck back into alignment with a quick, careless gesture like a neck headache is nothing, and a neck is nothing, maybe it will just snap off and that will be the end of this. It’s like everything is just a gesture now. (p. 664) The details are just details; not significant, meaningful, symbolic. Instead, their radical specificity is part of the “tactile compositions of the living out of things” (p. 668). For Wyatt (2008), brief stories and interludes of wishful thinking explore the experience of loss through Deleuzian stammering. His autoethnographic self­ as-data is not a narrative character but “an attempt at flight” and “an endeavor to deterritorialize and not reterritorialize” (p. 966) absence and loss. As he notes, Deleuze “proposes that the answer to the question ‘what is it to write?’ is closest to life itself (Deleuze & Parnet, 2007)” (p. 966). Another example is reflexive caring as a queer recursive ethical practice (Harris & Fortney, 2017): “Predominantly straight discourses—ones that have neither posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) nor hearing aids—shape cognition, memory, testimony, and muteness. Reflexivity begs for direct reference, but reference crumbles under trauma and disability” (p. 24). Rather than rendering experience as referential, Harris and Fortney call for a reflexivity that denies the referential injunction in an ethical act of care based in incommunicability, thus illuminating the unstable, ethically fraught becoming of self-as-data.

118 Engaging self-as-data Becoming “I” The performative “I” is a vulnerable, emergent, and ultimately unfinished process and product marked by imagination, joy, and vulnerability. In a classic essay about the performative “I,” Pollock (2007) warns against the performance of a “transparently revealed self” for a voyeuristic audience/reader. Further, she argues that: “Voice, self-confessions and owning one’s story (story as property) comport with democracy as rugged individualism and free market economies” (p. 241). Instead she argues for a performative becoming: Performance propels us forward into a future perfect world, a world full of dangerous and fantastic possibilities. What I am imagining here is doing the thing done so vigorously as to undo it and simultaneously to call down the gaping grace of what else might be done. (p. 243) Joy infuses such a performance, as the example of a student subsumed in her own audacious performance attests: Acting far beyond intentionality, Kate became subject to her own perfor­ mance. Overtaken by invention, she was reinvented. The ego-“I” who planned all kinds of things was displaced by a becoming-“I” (on the verge of [a] becoming “we”) who traveled on the currents of improvisation and reinvention into a place of strange joy and greater grief than most of us had ever dared imagine. (pp. 245–246) Kate’s joy opens up the “gaping grace of what else might be done” by others who engage with self-as-data. Becoming-with datasense Digital becoming-with practices include datasense and playful experimentation with self-as-data. Lupton’s (2018, 2020) research investigates how agential data affect and are affected in the human–data intra-action. She explores the liveliness of data/human assemblages and becoming-with-data as vital and fluid encounters. Making data matter and what she calls “datasense” engages data as intelligible and relatable, “sometimes involving affective responses to the vibrancy of data that cannot be easily described” (Lupton, 2018, p. 8). Generating and reading/acting upon lifelogging data is a symbiotic process of mattering and valuing that can have transformative potential. Gardner and Jenkins (2016) explore the affective labor of the human/data assemblage by encouraging research participants to engage data in “playful experimentation” by challenging the “truths” of self-as-biodata to “re­ embody” their biometric data and re-narrate their human/data intra-actions. They conclude that, despite the alienating experience of “collapsed, fragmented, dis­ embodied” biodata, “we humans will, if given time to pause, create complex narratives of human-machine interaction in the hesitations and absences inherent

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in digital code and digital process” (p. 27). Kienle (2019) describes a project of resistance to the prevailing conventions and information quantification privileged by data visualization designers. The arts-based “Dear Data” project was a postcard exchange between two information designers featuring hand-drawn visualizations of self-tracking data each week: rather than calories, sleep, or miles, they tracked felt emotions, secret thoughts, mundane activities, bodily processes, and contact with others, exploring the sensuality, ephemerality, and affective connections of the data they recorded. The project resists even as it engages in self-quantification.

Data-on-the-move We bring forward a number of suggestions for engaging self-as-data, among them: writing collaboratively, mapping formations, performative stunting, foregoing bedazzlement in favor of frustration, and submitting to data-wants. We offer these suggestions as invitations to identify still other practices that engage data-on-the-move. Writing collaboratively In what is ostensibly an “auto” ethnographic tradition, collaborative writing may seem contrary, yet it has been extolled as an important direction for autoethno­ graphic development (Chang et al., 2013; Holman Jones et al., 2013) whether as dialogue (Diversi & Moreira, 2018), relational witnessing (Ellis & Rawicki, 2013), duoethnography (Norris & Sawyer, 2016; Tlale & Romm, 2019), a nomadic “between” (Gale & Wyatt, 2009), or shared stories (Zapata-Sepúlveda, Stanley, Ramírez-Pereira, & Espinoza-Lobos, 2016). The data in such experiments are the writing itself as it maps relational contours and the generativity of shared energies, what Roth (2009) calls “co-generative dialogue” and Kidd and Finlayson (2017) describe as the deferral of a final resolution/truth in the juxtaposition of multiple views of the same event/experience. In introducing their “betweener” autoethographies, Diversi and Moreira (2009) clearly mark their writing as the data of “life in-between”: It is a textual collage of Marcelo’s short stories and Cláudio’s autoethno­ graphic texts offered as instantiations of representations that attempt to be authorially self-reflexive and situated while also bringing visceral knowl­ edge of oppression from the periphery to the center of decolonizing knowledge production. (p. 29) Similarly, a “triple autoethnographic text” by Alexander, Moreira, and Kumar (2012) uses performative writing to craft and maneuver through a “narrative gestalt” of shared reflections, memories, and conversational vignettes about men and their fathers. They characterize their writing as rhythmic resistance, song, debate; writing that brings possibility into being, “modulates between feeling and critical thought,” and grounds scholarship in “the practicalities of

120 Engaging self-as-data our daily living that gives truth to experience and possibility to the imagined” (p. 131). As they put it, writing between-the-three that is a method of inquiry, embodied experience, and a performative venture (Gale & Wyatt, 2009, p. 5). For surely in this terzetto, we—an African American man, a Brazilian man, and an Indian man have taken turns singing and sometimes even wailing, vying with each other in wordplay, poetic riffs of each other, tongue-twisters, and witty (and not so witty) comments on experiences with our fathers. (p. 131) The description of their collaborative engagements—as they wail, vie, riff, joke—conveys an affective warmth that we take to be a movement of com­ passion and even joy (see also Alexander, Moreira, & Kumar, 2015). Similarly, Crawley and Husakouskaya (2013) describe writing as jouissance in their “co­ autoethnography” of teaching, practicing, and literally embodying queer theory in Ukraine and the U.S. (p. 336). The power of collaborative writing is also evident in a shared autoethno­ graphic account of life and death from the vantage of the last year of a life and a marriage (Vande Berg & Trujillo, 2008). The writing—excerpts from diaries, notes, emails, retrospections—is introspective, vulnerable, and powerfully moving, and ultimately an “undisciplined” (Richardson, 1997) engagement with love, fear, loss, and grief. This collaboration reveals how writing together can perform the intimacies and intensities of life lived together. Mapping formations of self-as-data Treating online self-presentations as data about not individual identities but the online/offline social formations in which they circulate adheres to the injunc­ tion to “follow the medium.” Caliandro (2018) argues for treating digital selfpresentations as data about online social formations: All these self-presentation strategies, rather than telling us something about the personal identities of the actors who develop them, help us to better under­ stand the structure of the online social formation in which they are situated, as well as the cultural values circulating within that ecosystem. (p. 566) For example, Dobson (2014, 2015) explores girls’ digitized self-representations and media production practices in postfeminist digital cultures, focusing on those that are “problematic”: sexual self-representations on social network sites; sexting; self-profiles as highly confident, “out there” feminine selves; “Am I Pretty or Ugly” videos; and video-blogs (vlogs) describing pain or suffering. She argues that these self-presentations negotiate the conditions of postfeminism and femininity in contemporary technosocial mediascapes, notably contradictions between being sexy but not sexualized; confident but not narcissistic; visible and exposed but not

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(self) exploited. In essence, Dobson’s data map the paradoxical injunctions of the mediascape in which they circulate. Selfies engaged as self-as-data are not reducible to narcissistic self-expressions or dating/mating game tokens; more intriguingly, they map fluid paths of circulation across technocultural assemblages. The selfie (self-portraits taken with digital cameras or smartphones) has become a ubiquitous element of self-documentation and a common form of qualitative data (Gannon & Prothero, 2016; Highfield & Leaver, 2016; Khamis, Ang, & Welling, 2017; Manovich et al., 2015; Manovich et al., 2015; Rokka & Canniford, 2016; Tildenberg, 2016; Van der Meulen & Heynen, 2016). Mirzoeff (2016) argues for the selfie as an embodied interface between the aesthetic of the postmodern photograph, the technology of digital cameras, and the performance of the self-photographer. Selfies engage within an assemblage linking a historical politics of self-portraiture, technological innovations in cameras and smartphones (and their merger), a neoliberal reconstitution of the self as public and visible, a digitized vocabulary of self-imaging, and a global community serving as visual producers and consumers. He argues that selfies are global conversational data, visual rather than textual, and remixing desire, perfor­ mance, and the banal to make up a conversation about how to see the self as becoming: “The selfie and its other forms like Snapchat have given the first visual form to the new global majority’s conversation with itself. This conversation is fast, intense, and visual” (p. 69). Warfield (2016) takes an alternative perspective on selfies, eschewing representationalism to argue that selfie production is a materialdiscursive complex of intra-acts that seeks “touch” that materializes the boundaries of self. She draws on her interviews with young women making selfies to argue that the images that did not “make the cut” in relation to those that were posted are critical data about complex material-discursive intra-acts (among technologies, bodies, images, material environs, discourses) engaging gendered apparatuses of bodily production (such as visual tropes of femininity, cultural body aesthetics and standards, and normative feminine personality cues). Making the cut and mapping visual conversational flows are intriguing ways of engaging with selfies as data-on­ the-move. Lifestreaming refers to the digital self-documentation of everyday moments through social media blogs, vlogs, e-journals, and various visual forms. As data, lifestreaming and selfies draw qualitative researchers into complex assemblages. For example, Wargo (2017) “follows the medium” by observing how LGBTQ youth curate lifestreams using the multimodal “authoring affordances” of lifestreaming practices and tools to “enact a construction of indexed and sedi­ mented ‘selves’ across contexts” (p. 561). As we noted above, much is at stake in engaging with the emergent, contingent, complexities of self-as-data. Stunting Pollock (2007) suggested the practice of “stunting” in the becoming of the performative “I.” Stunting is a performative practice, improvisational and imbued with the possibility of failure (pp. 246–247); it entails an “uncompromising … embrace

122 Engaging self-as-data of what might otherwise make us cringe” that in its disruption of what was expec­ ted “renews our contract with possibility” (p. 252). Such discomforts and disrup­ tions can create “new alliances of embodied subjectivities” through “a becoming I/ we, that may then be full of surprises” (p. 247). Stunting enacts “an ethical space: a space of mobilizing the difference between imagined and entrenched realities; and it is a performance space: a space of mobilizing the difference in repetition for ethical ends” (p. 247). Along with Pollock’s suggestion for stunting, Jackson and Mazzei (2008) offer provocations for “evocative, ethical, and failed practices” in the becoming of the performative “I.” They urge performative scholars and teachers to be on the look-out for openings that displace truth, comfort, and recognition in voice, story, others, and self-as-data; and to be vigilant about how “truth-telling, subjectivity, and experience are obligated and accountable in the context of hege­ monic relations of power and discursive constraints on interpretive sense” (pp. 309– 311). Confronted by the limits to knowing, truth, and authenticity, this “I” will yet “present complicated voices and create new ways of understanding for those who read and listen to these performative accounts” (p. 314). Both Santoro (2014) and Berry (2007) engage self-data through what arguably is autoethnographic perfor­ mative stunting. Both evoke cringeworthy performative accounts of gay embodi­ ment, desire, and sanction: Patrick as a large, hairy gay male “Bear” and Berry as a large, self-consciously hopeful visitor in a gay steamhouse. Their performative self­ as-data are imbued with the possibility of failure and the limits of authenticity and truth-telling; these self-as-data surprise, discomfort, and move into possibilities of what might be otherwise. Bedazzling and frustration To engage with data-as-self is risky and not only because there is vulnerability, retraumatization, and a struggle over the very possibility of writing self/selves. Just as dangerous is the bedazzlement of self-as-data, the evidence of what is known, felt, and remembered. The narrative seductiveness of “my story” can compromise self-reflexivity and introspection, limit compassion, and bedazzle the researcher into ignoring, marginalizing, or deferring some narrative elements in favor of writing a good story or a story “true” from a particular vantage. Among the modes of self-critical interrogation that respond to the seductiveness of self-as-data, Goltz (2011, 2013) and Scott (2013) propose “critical frustration,” a stance that “seeks to render intelligible the invisibilities we may not, and per­ haps cannot, know or narrate. It’s a temporal interruption, a potentialized moment of reflection, contemplation, and invention that disrupts the linear momentum of intelligible and sedimented patterns” (Goltz, 2011, p. 399). Recognizing that any narrative is complicit with hegemonic logics if it is to be intelligible to others, Goltz restories a “bar story” from his undergraduate life, first to question his own victimization, then to interrogate his marginalization by conference respondents, while Scott offers vignettes of unsettling and reforming her identity through her interviews with professionals with similar disabilities. Their studies illustrate the power of self-as-data to tell such a good story that the

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researcher is seduced into deferring narrative absences and ambiguities. In addi­ tion, Goltz emphasizes that readers/audiences can be just as readily bedazzled into ignoring their own narrative complicities and adopting what Madison (2005) calls “arrogant” perception. Goltz contends that: “The ethical practice of critical frustration places the ‘I’ in perpetual quotes, suspicion, and contempla­ tion, yet it must not eclipse empathy, generous engagement, and a willingness to know the other (without the arrogance to assume one fully can)” (2011, p. 401). Thus from a data engagement perspective, the seductiveness of self-as-data can be bedazzling and requires critical introspective vigilance. Submitting to data-wants Koro-Ljungberg (2016) urges that, rather than trying to control, know, reduce, or possess (my) data, researchers should play with the possibilities of what data want. This creates a “knowledge-reversal” in which researchers, data, and (un)knowing become entangled, and the researcher is decentered and humbled in the realization that what data want is never certain and always open to reinterpretation (p. 54). Such engagement with data is fraught: Data are heterogeneous, inventive, multisited, often ephemeral, and shape-shifting. However, “by creating an opening for escape, room for uncertainty, and respect for humbleness, data could become more than an object of possession or a sleeping signifier for reality” (p. 75). For example, in an innovative autoethnographic account of a life-threatening, drugresistant infection, P. Anderson (2017) articulates data-desires through the human– nonhuman intra-actions of a body and an anthropomorphized bacterium in the context of family relations, medical institutions and interventions, and epochal histories. Ehrenreich (2018) confronts agency at the cellular level of the body, casting the corporeal self as an assemblage of nonhuman forces and molecular choices in the context of aging physically, as a social being, and in resistance to institutionalized medicine. Haraway (2003) revels in the intertwining of herself and the dog Cayenne Pepper in a performative approach that dismisses binaries, disrespects disciplinary boundaries, and seeks a conjoining at the level of DNA; she also explores what counters a full engagement with companion species—histories, governances, science, and human-centered assumptions about genes, property, and kinship. All of these studies submit to “what data want” by opening their inquiries to possibilities posed by the data and engaging those possibilities with humility, inventiveness, and data joy.

Postscript Inviting data possibilities

We wrote this book in order to play with some of the possibilities that data engagement holds for qualitative researchers. Now at the end, we find ourselves wanting to continue to open up lines of engagement rather than conclude with certainties or definitive directions. We urge researchers to resist moving past data too quickly in order to engage in analysis, representation, and application—all of which are also critical points that occur later in data’s his­ tory. Lingering with data liveliness leaves us energized and attentive to poten­ tialities for doing qualitative research amid the constraints of today’s neoliberal academic climate. Our affective signature—and the motivating force behind this whole work—is pragmatism. Play with data engagement until it works in the worlds in which you study, collaborate, and strive for social justice. Our future-oriented pragmatism is about what is work-able. Experiment and play and try new things—just stay with the data before moving on to analysis or thinking through theory. MacLure (2013b) continues to inspire us to embrace wonder, and we have wondered data with delight and frustration, clarity and elusiveness, and often outside of our comfort zones. We have decontextualized concepts, ideas, and practices, combining and reframing them to offer our own insights on how researchers are, or could be, engaging data differently—creatively, compas­ sionately, joyfully, generously, moving in and out of bounds, defying boundaries, eschewing easy ends (see Figure 8.1). Now it is your turn. Data engagement is becoming over time; it will morph and mold to others’ (and our future selves’) purposes, commitments, and creativity. We welcome the pathways that will emerge as others intra-act with our initial model of data engagement and configure new ways of making, assembling, and becoming data. We asked at the beginning of this book: what do data do? And we provided some jumping-off points and openings for engaging with what various data forms do in each chapter. Now we ask you: What else might data do? We invite you to engage the vitality of data, with wonder and a sense of possibility.

Figure 8.1 Inviting data joy

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Index

Adams, T. E. 4, 23, 50, 113 algorithmic data making 74–76 Arts-based research, definition 140 Ashmore, M. 43, 53, 61 Association of Internet Researchers 76–77 big data 72–74 Boellstorff, T. 18, 20, 22, 24, 73, 74, 79 boyd, d. 73, 82, 85 Caliandro, A. 74, 75, 77, 78, 84, 85, 114, 120 Cannon, S. O. 53, 61, 62, 65, 70, 71 Clifford, J. 15, 17–18, 23, 63 data: as dead 4, 5, 25, 45, 55; as material see materialism; messiness 3, 7, 8, 19, 65, 79, 95; postpositivist 2, 16–17, 34; postqualitative, 1, 4–5, 41 data engagement 1, 5, 14: as agential 7, 9, 10, 18, 24, 30, 45, 78–79, 112, 118; as making 6–7, 19–23, 35–39, 55–60, 74–77, 89–92, 113–114; as assembling 7–9, 23–25, 39–43, 60–63, 77–80, 92–99, 114–116; as becoming 9–11, 25–28, 43–47, 63–65, 80–81, 99–101, 116–119; as imp of fieldwork 31–32 data assemblage 7–10, 24–25, 27, 40–41, 45, 61, 77, 79, 80, 81, 112, 114, 115–116; as remixing 85–86; and selfies 121 data, digital: assembling heterogeneities 8, 79; following digital logics 77–78, 81–82, 86, 120–121; as becoming-with 80–81; and algorithms 72–76, 85, 111; as embedded 82; as emplacement 84; as everyday 83; and remixing 85–86; and research routines 81; and self-as-data 114 data history 53, 54, 69–70, 124

data-zombies 5, 45, 63–64, 70–71, 105 Denzin, N. K. 4, 109, 110 digital communities, crowds, publics 84–85 Ellingson, L. L. 1, 21, 31–32, 42, 46, 60, 70, 110 Ellis, C. 4, 13, 110 embodiment: in digital data 81–83, 132–33; and fieldnotes 20–21; and mobilities 47–48; and participatory research 89–90, 102–103; and photography 51; in recordings 37–38; and self-as-data 111; as sensory learning 36–38; in transcripts 59, 66–69; and wonder 42, 71 Emerson, R. M. 16, 18, 20 ethics: of compassion 12–13, 25, 30, 39, 50, 76–77, 91, 108, 110–111; and critical frustration 122–123; and digital data 76–77; institutional review board 16–17; of joy 13–14, 25, 32, 42, 45, 57, 65, 80–81, 92, 108, 113, 118, 120, 121–122; and participatory research 92–101; of pragmatism 11–12, 19, 28, 36, 82, 124; and reflexivity 19, 57, 93, 97–98, 113, 117, 119–120 event memories 62 Faulkner, S. L. 10, 70 fieldnotes: agential 16, 18, 23–24, 30–31; choreographies of assembling 29–30; digitized 22–23; history 16–17; memory 18, 21, 26; multimodal 28–29; as nomadic writing 26–28; politics of organizing and classifying 23–24; postpostivist 16–17; in research-assemblage 24–25; textualization 20; three moments 18 Fox, N. J. 7, 24

156 Index Geertz, C. 1 Gitelman, L. 2, 5, 6, 76, 112 Gullion, J. S. 87, 90, 93, 94, 98–99, 106 Hine, C. 74, 75, 81–83 Holman Jones, S. 4, 113 Jackson, A. Y. 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 112, 122 Koro-Ljungberg, M. 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 24, 26, 27, 30, 80, 123 Lather, P. 7, 19, 73, 110, 114 Lupton, D. 77, 112, 116, 118 materialism: of data 6, 7, 10, 13, 25–26, 30–31, 44, 60–61, 67, 68, 104, 112, 123; of language 22, 42; and recording technologies 40, 44 MacLure, M. 4, 6, 22, 42, 59, 70, 124 Markham, A. 2, 5, 19, 23, 72–73, 76, 84, 85–86 Mondada, L. 34, 35, 37, 40, 48, 54, 60 Nordstrom, S. N. 7, 8, 36, 42, 43, 44 participatory data: body mapping 89–90; collage 90, 102–103; community mapping 106; critical reflection mapping 106–07; data artifacts 89–91; diaries 105; digital stories 92; educational journey mapping 103; poetry 70–71, 105–06; Scraps of the Heart 105; sculpting 104; timelining 103; videovoice 97–98, 102 participatory research: and community relationships 99–101; as embodied 89–90; and ethics 97–99; and joy 92; and messiness 95; and neoliberalism 95–96; and politics of knowledge production 93–95; and reciprocity 97–99; as sensory 104; as visual 101–102, 105 Pink, S. 20–21, 28, 29, 30, 49, 51, 52, 81, 83, 84 Postill, J. 81, 84 radical specificity 11, 116–117 recordings: as artistic 36; as embodied 36–37; and fieldnotes 28; and data

liveliness 44–45; internet 50; and mobilities 47–48; mundane 52; as political 37–38; and privacy 39; and replayability 43–44; remix 5–6; and “stubborn realism” 43–44; technological affordances 39–41; as transporting 46–47; and visual ethnography 33, 38; and workplaces 48 Richardson, L. 113 Rogers, R. 77–78 Selke, S. 115 St. Pierre, E. 4, 26, 113 Sotirin, P. 11, 46, 60, 105 soundscapes 83–84 self-as-data: autoethnography 110; and becoming “I” 118; as commingling 115; and critical frustration 122–123; as datasense 118–119; and data-wants 123; as layering juxtapositions 114–115; lifelogging and sousveillance 115–116, 118–119; as mapping digital formations 120–121; methodological turn to 109; as narrating and performing 109–110; and the performative “I” 113; 118; as performative stunting 121–122; performative turn 111; and radical specificity 116–117; and self-digitalization 111–112, 114; selfies 121 Tilton, A. 90, 93, 94, 98, 106 transcripts: accuracy 57–58; as constructed 57–58, 60; and data history 53–54, 61, 69, 70; and data liveliness 59, 63, 64, 71; as embodied 55, 58, 67–68; and GIS 66–67; and liminality 60–62; as mapping 55–57; multimodal/multimedia 65, 66; as poetic transcription 70–71; and punctuation 69–69; and recordings 53; as tracing 54–55, 70; and technology 61; as translating 57–59; and wonder 70 transcript-zombies 63–64, 70, 71 Vannini, P. 25, 26 writing: as nomadic 26–28; as (self)making 113, 119–120; as textualization 20–21 wonder 41–43, 70–71, 124