Making data in qualitative research laura l ellingson, patty sotirin, routledge, 2020 scan

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, Univer

‘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 dis­rupting 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Making Data in Qualitative Research offers a generative alternative to outdated approaches to data collection By reimagining methods through a model of data engagement, qualitative researchers consider what is at stake—ethically,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 frame­work 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 stu­dents 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 Commu­nication 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

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Laura, For Glenn

Patty, For my parents

Figures

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 encour­agement 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 com­piling references, Chloe along with Tavis Sotirin-Miller for their graphic design work on the figures that grace this book, Elwood Mills for his technical assis­tance 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 Com­munication, 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 Huma­nities 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, espe­cially 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 pull­out 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 qualita­tive 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-step­ping 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 metho­dological 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 organiza­tional 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

3Doing data engagement Partial and partisan: the social and critical construction of data

Critical and interpretive scholars have long resisted objectifying research sub­jects 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 partici­pants’ 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) Inter­pretive 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 con­sideration 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 methodol­ogy—postqualitative and narrative/performative—provide somewhat differing justifications for their rejection of data as a sustainable concept for con­temporary qualitative inquiry

A general distrust of data (and data analysis) as inescapably modernist, formulaic, nạve, 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 immer­sion 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 inter­views, focus groups, and dialogues, producing recordings and transcriptions,

5Doing data engagement 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 navigat­ing 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 invent­ing, 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.)

6 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 tech­nologies 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 re-visioned 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

7Doing data engagement 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 messi­ness, 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) illus­trates this rhizomatic complexity in her data from family historians in which material objects such as documents, photographs, and family heirlooms entan­gle 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

8 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 intra-acts 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” (Shil­drick 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, qualita­tive 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

9Doing data engagement 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 medica­tions, 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: scho­lars, 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 trans­form 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 art­work, 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, rela­tionships, identity, and values, resisting rigid mind–body and emotion–ration­ality dichotomies By assembling and reassembling dynamic data relations, Faulkner evokes a compelling and multiplicitous engagement with the embo­died 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 affec­tivity, 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, field-notes, 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 econo­mies 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, mascu­linities, and global capitalism (among others) are woven throughout the people and technologies of global poker “The interaction of these technol­ogies 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

Doing data engagement 11 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-present­ing a given reality or experience “grounded in the data”; instead, our engage­ments 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 ethnographic 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 think­ing about miscarriage” (n.p.) In other words, intensities and desires are the data

auto-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 co­authors 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 prag­matism 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 13 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: recog­nizing (witnessing), relating (connecting with), and (re)acting (acting kindly) to others An excellent example of embodied compassion in practice is compas­sionate 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) compassio­nate communication is valuable but privileges human participants Our com­mitment 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 recog­nized 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, over­whelming, 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 self­as-data respectively Admittedly, the dividing lines we drew among forms of qualitative data blurred and shifted continuously, as data exceeded our cate­gorizations 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 Inter­net, 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 nonhu­man 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 ever-expanding 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 & All­dred, 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 material-discursive 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 performa­tively “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 17

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 quanti­tative, 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 knowl­edges, 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 conven­tional 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 field-note 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, unrepre­sentable 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 19 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 mea­sures 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 ethno­grapher 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, start-overs; 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 21 (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 embo­died 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 inade­quacies 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 liveli­ness 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, render­ing 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 textuali­zations 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 screen-captures, 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 non-neutral 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–tech­nology 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 remark­able—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 chron­ologies, 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,

built-in systems of organizing seems both counter-intuitive yet can be potentially productive—we need to “explore what is left dark” and invisible by the work­ings 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 episte­mological flows—that is, knowledge from data shaping researchers and research, knowledge from research shaping data, and/or knowledge within the data-researcher 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-reconfi­guring 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 refigura­tions going on in meshwork, entanglements, and assemblages work on and through these data bodies (bodies understood as effected in intra-actions and not as pre­existing 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 tem­porally 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 notes The concreteness of fieldnotes and the way that words appear to sta­bilize 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

field-to data-wants and desires, she advocates “bend[ing] methodological norma­tivity,” 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 becoming-with 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 experi­ence; politics of efficiency and waste; and class differences:

Just as the open passageway from an air-conditioned space to the out­doors 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 27 with the research participants, nor is it a systematic inquiry into the mean­ingfulness 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 impover­ished 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 serendipi­tous 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 quali­tative 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