Rachel Thomson
In this blog post Rachel Thomson locates our idea of ‘reanimating data’ within a wider methodological landscape and literature, twisting together three methodological threads: the vitality of data; an archival turn within the social sciences and creative approaches to working with time in the research process. The blog identifies the key components of a reanimating approach and points to further reading.
Data – dead and alive
One important element of contemporary social science
methodological discussion concerns how we engage with what Adkins and Lury (2009)
call a ‘post-empirical’ moment for sociology (see also McLure and others on a
post qualitative moment) – that involves stepping away from separating the
methods of documentation that we engage with and the data generate this data.
This moment is informed by a number of different strands of thought including
feminist methodologies which have critiqued the view from nowhere associated
with modern scientific paradigms understanding knowledge as situated and agency
as relational (for example Haraway 1988, Barad 2007); posthuman approaches
associated with science and technologies studies such as John Law’s 2004 After
Method which argues simply that methods produce the realities that they
seek to understand; and the embrace of a reinvigorated relationship with these
data that recognises their vitality and communicative possibilities as laid out
for example in Back and Puwar’s manifesto for ‘Live methods’ (2012).
The motif of ‘liveness’ as opposed to deadness is a recurring
theme in contemporary discussions of methods, denoting the need to remember
that research itself is an embodied social practice involving relationships,
feelings and collaborations. The motif of aliveness also connects us to the
posthuman notion that agency may not be simply the preserve of people, but for
example that documents, objects and data may have agency in their own right.
For example Les Back’s account of ‘live sociology’ uses the dead / alive binary
to counterpose intrusive empiricism, objectifying practices and zombie concepts
with vitalities that transcend human/ objects as captured by new materialism. Dead sociology is
objectifying, comfortable, disengaged and parochial. More recently, and in a
similar vein Ellingson and Sotorin (2020) call for a sense of academic
playfulness that has the capacity to inject new life into what might feel like
tired methodological debates. Key motifs in their account include
‘livelineness’, ‘messiness’, ‘data on the move and on the make’, ‘becoming with
data’ – which they oppose to notions of dead data and zombie methods.
This ‘re-enchantment’ of data also extends to discussions of data
linkage and working with data archives. So, for example Lisa Blackman works
with a notion of ‘haunted data’ as a way of exploring hybrid forms of aliveness
and deadness made possible by digital methods and transmedia data linkage,
suggesting that ‘It is through the connecting up of fragments across space and
time that a new collective story-telling machine can and could take form’ (2019:
177). In a Maryanne Dever’s collection on new feminist archive methodologies,
Marika Cifor uses the terms ‘animacy’ (‘a quality of agency, awareness,
mobility, and liveliness 2012:2) to argue for an understanding of archives as
‘vigorous and changeable’ rather than as ‘static, dusty, and the collectors of
dead things and past times’… a space, set of practices, site of intervention’ (2019:
18).
In our approach we use the idea of reanimation – in recognition
that there is and always was life in data but also, that in new encounters and
entanglements with these materials new things can happen.
The data are out there – an archival turn for the social sciences
The idea that data may already be ‘out there’ and that our
engagement with these data can be a site of creativity and novelty has taken
some time to evolve within the social sciences and is shaped by the divisions
between qualitative and quantitative paradigms that continue to structure the
field. Within qualitative approaches there has been considerable resistance to
practices of data archiving and re-use, despite official policy inciting these
approaches with the deposit and sharing of data sets becoming a condition of
public funding and the review of existing data sets a requirement for new
proposals. Encouraged by investments in longitudinal qualitative research, the
qualitative research community has engaged with what it might mean to work with
documents generated by others considering what it might mean to assemble
materials from different studies and rethinking the relationship between the
original context of a study and the new moments and contexts when such data may
be revisited (see for example Hughes et al. 2020). These discussions form part
of a wider interest in temporal methods within sociology, that includes
revisiting studies, longitudinal approaches and an engagement with archival
sources as part of a historical sociology (McLeod & Thomson 2009 for
overview). In an important intervention in the field ‘The Archive Project’
(2017) Niamh Moore explains that ‘social science struggles to imagine its own
archive’ (149) and this includes ‘the sometimes fraught debate over archiving
and (re)using data’ which has ‘compounded this ambivalent relationship’ with
archives (149). Moreover, ‘archival research does not appear as one of the
sites of innovation in the social sciences’ (149) – often more concerned with
questions of access and confidentiality that the potential for knowledge and
methodological renewal that they might promise.
Debates within sociology have felt removed from wider
interdisciplinary discussions associated with an archival turn, which itself
has been fuelled by new possibilities offered by digital methods including a
democratisation of collecting and sharing associated with community and
everyday archives (Bastian & Flinn 2019, Beer & Burrows 2013, Withers
2015, Eichhorn 2013). In fact, it is spaces where community and academic
interests coincide that much of the new wave of interest in archives can be
found, including exploring how the re-use of materials from the past might make
sense in the present – for example in areas such as black archives; queer
archives; feminist archives; and archives as a source of evidence in political
struggles. Importantly, archives may operate as effective points of shared
interest for different knowledge communities, what Moore (2016), drawing on the
writings of Susan Leigh Star, characterises as a ‘boundary object’, shared yet
understood in unique ways by different stakeholders, with academics brokering
essential access to the resources necessary for preservation and findability
for these resources. For DM Withers the feminist archive is our ‘already
there’, ‘a field of inheritance’ that demands care and keeping alive ‘through
practices of exchange across generations’ – in a way that recognises ‘psychic
links between generations’ and the potential of a continuous transgenerational
flow/imaginary that is concealed by metaphors of waves ( 20-21, 28). For Moore and colleagues,
this kind of work demands a new ‘inventive ethic of care-full risk’ that is
more responsive and less prescriptive than the kinds of approaches to ethical
practice in social science that have become institutionalised.
We see our work as an intergeneration sociological endeavour,
connecting feminist researcher-activists over time within a tradition which is
porous and inclusive both in the past and the present.
Rewilding methods – unleashing creativity and unleashing time
The question of how we might engage with archived materials is
perhaps one of the main stumbling blocks to social researchers interested in
the re-use of the rich data sources that are available to them. Approaches
range from large scale data mining approaches that connect data sets (Edwards
et al 2021 to smaller scale (often place based) initiatives in which the
specificity of data fragments operates as a starting point for engagement with
new communities of interest (Lyon & Crow 2012, Moore et al 2022 forthcoming).
Questions of how data might be matched across samples, or what it might mean to
compare data from the past and present rattle the cage of social science
methodologies still reliant on underpinning epistemologies of sampling.
In thinking through how we might work with archived materials we
have turned to work in the field of queer temporalities, in particular Beth
Freeman’s Time Binds which points to the potential or creative and
imaginative methods for exploring thinking about the materiality of archival
documents and the ways that they can connect past and present. The idea of the ‘time bind’ provides a way
into a rich vein of creative methodology. Drawing on the work of Walter
Benjamin, Freeman conceptualises the time bind as ‘achronic correspondences’ (2010:
126) connections between past and present that facilitate antinarrative leaps
across time achronic correspondences’. Time binds involve mimetic connections
with affective resonance – and when staged within meaningful intergenerational
relations these can conjure a sense of ‘afterwardness’ – belated understanding,
potential to relive a past she could not live at the time’. Although focused on
the past such methods ask us to imagine the future ‘in terms of experiences that
discourse has not yet caught up with, rather than as a legacy passed on between
generations’ (84). For Freeman Time Binds are found in literary and cinematic
works, in the form of homage, pastiche and other kinds of ‘temporal drag’. The
perfect match imagined by the social sciences is not a focus, instead the
impossibility of matching like with like is understood as generative through an
embrace of anachronism – variously conceptualised as ‘habitus out of joint’ and
‘chronotopic disjunctiveness’ (6) that ‘unsituate viewers from the present
tense they think they know.’ (61). Freeman seeks a ‘method of literally feeling
the historical’ (93), focusing on allegory as a literary form that allows ‘the
telling of an older story through a new one’, ‘suturing two times but leaving
both visible’ (69).
The methods through which such encounters are possible are
participatory and creative. Here we might point to Lyon and Carabelli’s work
with contemporary youth on the Isle of Dogs, encountering the archives of Ray
Pahl and the imagined futures of their predecessors (Lyon & Carabelli 2016).
We might also take up Ellingston and Sorotins (2020) idea of ‘palpating data’
and ‘following data’s lead’ through the staging of data engagement or sense
events. The evocation of time itself through an encounter with archival traces
is something also suggested by Adkins in her discussion of archives as a site
of speculative research. While such sources can attune us to ‘the pastness of
data’ they also attune us to ‘the capacities of recorded data itself’, allowing
‘time to emerge as a key object of investigation’, ‘a form of time .. [that] is
incomplete, not-yet known, and stands in a possible or not yet relationship to
the future and the present it inhabits.’ (Adkins 2017:117). In a similar vein Kate
Eichhorn suggests that archives can ‘produce a space to imagine an encounter
that otherwise may have remained unimaginable’ (61), offering the idea of
‘archival proximity … the uncanny ability to occupy different temporalities and
to occupy temporalities differently, thereby collapsing the rigidly defined
generational and historical logics that continue to be used to make sense of
feminist politics and theory’ (61). By inviting research participants and
audiences to encounter, engage with, revoice and rework words, ideas and
feeling captured in research encounters of the past we can open new spaces
which allow something new to be experienced and articulated, in ways that
escape the well-worn narratives generally available to us (McGeeney et al. 2018,
Perrier & Withers 2016).
In our approach the idea of the time-bind – the meaningful
connection between past and present is important, as is a playful and
irreverent approach to ‘data’ enabling the opening of spaces through which
authentic connections can be made, and through the ‘cover’ of this kind of
temporal drag, new insights may be forged.
The What, How and Who of Reanimating Data
WHAT: Re-animation as a term which captures the liveness of the original data and the possibilities of making this available to new audiences in new contexts to be animated in new ways.
HOW: The archive as a shared boundary object with the potential
for critical pedagogy. Time-binds as ways of feeling history and connect
past-present-future
WHO: Working with an intergenerational tradition/community –
feminist activist researchers. Playful approaches to working with data with
contemporary audiences
References and further reading
Adkins, L.
(2017) ‘Sociology’s archive: mass observation as a site of speculative
research’, in A. Wilkie, M. Savransky, & M. Rosengarten (eds) Speculative
Research: The Lure of Possible Futures, Routledge.
Adkins L.
& Lury C. Introduction: What Is the Empirical? European Journal of
Social Theory. 2009;12(1):5-20.
Back, L. &
Puwar, N. (2012) Live Methods, Wiley Blackwell/ The Sociological Review.
Barad, K. (2007)
Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter
and Meaning. Durham, North Carolina:Duke University Press.
Bastian, J., Flinn,
A. (eds.) (2019) Community Archives, Community Spaces: Heritage, Memory and Identity
, 2nd edition, Facet
Beer D. & Burrows
R. (2013) Popular Culture, Digital Archives and the New Social Life of Data. Theory,
Culture & Society. 30(4):47-71.
Blackman,
L. (2019) Haunted Data: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science. London: Bloomsbury.
Crow, G.
& Ellis, J. (eds) (2017) Revisiting Divisions of Labour: The Impacts and
Legacies of a Modern Sociological Classic, Manchester University Press.
Dever, M.
Ed (2019) Archives and New Modes of Feminist Research, Routledge
Edwards, R.,
Davidson, E., Jamieson, L. (2021) Theory and the breadth-and-depth
method of analysing large amounts of qualitative data: a research note. Qual
Quant 55,1275–128.
Eichhorn,
K. (2013) The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press.
Ellingson,
L. & Sotorin, P. (2020) Making Data in Qualitative Research:
Engagements, Ethics & Entanglement. London: Routledge .
Freeman,
Elizabeth (2010) Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Duke
University Press.
Haraway, D. (1988) Situated
Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Perspectives”, Feminist Studies 14: 575–599.
Hughes, K.
& Tarrant, A. (eds) (2020) Qualitative Secondary Analysis, London: Sage.
Law, J.
(2004) After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, London: Routledge.
Lyon, D. and Crow,
G. (2012) The challenges and opportunities of re-studying community on Sheppey:
Young people’s imagined futures. Sociological Review. Blackwell, pp.
498-517
Lyon, D. and
Carabelli, G. (2015) Researching Young People’s Orientations to the Future: The
Methodological Challenges of Using Arts Practice. Qualitative Research.
Sage, pp. 1-16.
McGeeney, E, Robinson, L, Thomson, R and Thurschwell, P
(2018) The cover version: researching sexuality through
ventriloquism. In: Boyce, P, Cornwall, A, Frith, H, Harvey, L, Yingying, H
and Morris, C (eds.) Sex and Sexualities: Reflections
on Methodology. Zed Publishing, pp150-172. McLeod, J. & Thomson, R. Researching
Social Change: Qualitative Approaches, London: Sage.
Moore, N.,
Dunne, N., Karels, M. & Hanlon, M. (2021) Towards an Inventive Ethics of
Carefull Risk: Unsettling Research Through DIY Academic Archiving. Australian
Feminist Studies, vol 36. DO –
10.1080/08164649.2021.2018991-
Moore, N;
Salter, A, Stanley, L and Tamboukou, M (2017) The Archive Project: Archival
research in the Social Sciences. Routledge.
Moore, N.,
Thomson, R. & McGeeney, E. (2022 forthcoming) ‘Putting place back into the
patriarchy through rematriating feminist research: the WRAP Project, feminist
webs and reanimating data’ In J McLeod, K O’Connor, A McKernan (eds.), Temporality
and Place in Educational Research (Routledge, forthcoming 2022).
Perrier, M. &
Withers, D.M. (2016) An archival feminist pedagogy: unlearning and objects as
affective knowledge companions, Continuum, 30:3, 355-366
Withers,
D. M. (2015) Feminism, Digital Culture and Politics of Transmission: Theory,
Practice and Cultural Heritage, Rowman & Littlefield