Towards more-than-human digital data studies: developing research-creation methods

Abstract

As the number of digital technologies expands, entering more domains of everyday life, people’s activities, bodies and preferences are rendered into constantly changing flows of digitised information. The interdisciplinary field of critical data studies has emerged in response. In this article, we outline the design and development of methods employed in our new project ‘Living with Personal Data’ as a move towards expanding the knowledge base and methodological approaches of critical data studies. Our approach takes up more-than-human theoretical perspectives and research-creation methods to elicit the affective and multisensory contexts of people’s feelings, practices and imaginaries concerning their digital data. We describe a set of workshops established to experiment with some new methods we have devised for our project’s fieldwork. The article ends with some reflections on what these theories and methods can offer for a reimagined digital data studies that can acknowledge and surface more-than-human dimensions.