Methodological Cyborg as Black Feminist Technology: Constructing the Social Self Using Computational Digital Autoethnography and Social Media

Abstract

This article reimagines the quantified self within the context of Black feminist technologies. Bringing computation and autoethnographic methods together using a methodology I call computational digital autoethnography, I harvest my social media data to create a corpus for analysis. I apply topic modeling to these data to uncover themes that are connected with broader societal issues affecting African American women. Applying a computational autoethnographic approach to a researcher’s own digitized data allows for yet another dimension of mixed-methods research. This radical intervention has the potential to transform the social sciences by bringing together two seemingly divergent methodological approaches in service to Black feminist ways of knowing.