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.

Keywords

Creative methods personal data critical data studies affect imaginaries digital media more-than-human theory

Introduction

Vast volumes of digitised information are generated each day as part of people’s engagements online, their use of mobile devices and as they move around in sensor-embedded spaces. In this context of the rapidly increasing datafication of human life and the use of digitised personal information for dataveillance (watching people using flows of digitised information; van Dijck, 2014), it is important to understand how people engage with, make sense of and feel about their personal digital data (Lupton, 2019; Kennedy, 2018). A body of literature has begun to develop that may be loosely described as ‘critical data studies’ (Kitchin and Lauriault, 2014), focused on how digital data are configured via human decision-making and the role played by the Internet corporations and other digital developers in shaping how these data are gathered and analysed. There is a growing interest in using qualitative methods for analysing digital datasets generated from online and app interactions and researching people’s interaction with digital devices (Housley et al., 2017; Kennedy, 2018) and an apparent creative methods ‘turn’ in other areas of social inquiry (Mannay, 2015). However, until very recently, the field of critical data studies – and indeed, media and communication studies more broadly – had yet to fully engage with innovative approaches that can surface and elucidate the multisensory and affective dimensions of personal data assemblages and enactments.

In this article, we outline the design and development of methods employed in fieldwork for our new project ‘Living with Personal Data’¹ as a move towards expanding the knowledge base and methodological approaches of critical data studies. Positioning digital data as assemblages of humans and nonhumans (Lupton, 2019) and based on our experiences with the experimentation methods used in the preliminary stages of this project, we present both a theoretical framework and a set of ideas for creative approaches for exploring the sociomaterial and affective dimensions of personal digital data. We discuss how and why we chose the creative methods we describe here as part of our preparations prior to embarking on our fieldwork.

In the project under development, we seek to investigate Australians’ understandings, imaginaries and practices related to their digital data by bringing together more-than-human theory with arts- and design-based methods. More-than-human theory (also known as new materialism or the posthumanities) is distinctive in highlighting the material and affective dimensions of human life. As we wanted to devote attention to these dimensions of personal data, we engaged with this theoretical approach at all stages of the project, including the generation of research materials. We have found perspectives from the vital materialism theory offered by feminist new materialism and Indigenous and First Nation cosmologies to be particularly fruitful to think and work with. In what follows, we discuss the earliest phase of getting the project underway post-funding, in which we experimented with our methods in a series of workshops designed as ‘testing grounds’. We view these workshops as fulfilling two roles: first, as preparation for our fieldwork in the project and second, as a way of introducing other academics and students to these innovative methods and training them in using them, with the possibility that they might be inspired to take them up in their own research or teaching. We eventually plan to create a methods toolkit based on the approaches we are using in our project that will be available as a resource for open access for other researchers interested in experimenting with them. Our project website (https://livingwithpersonal.data.blog/) has begun to offer these resources, including reflections on our methods.

We begin with providing an overview of our theoretical and methodological approaches, starting with a discussion of the more-than-human theoretical concepts with which we are thinking in designing the project and analysing the research materials we will generate. Building on and extending Lupton’s initial work in developing a more-than-human approach to personal data, in the project we are exploring the conceptual potential of this scholarship for researching and theorising personal digital data. We then move to a review of the recent studies by other researchers in which creative methods have been employed to research personal digital data, as a way of siting our project’s methods. We then discuss the creative activities we have used in a series of five workshops conducted at UNSW Sydney involving the ‘Algorithmic Micropolitics’ zine-making activity and the ‘Re/imagining Personal Data’ creative writing tasks. We designed these methods to elicit and probe participants’ practices, feelings and imaginaries related to their personal data and third-party use of these data. We end with discussion of and reflections on these innovative methods and the kinds of research materials they can generate, and more broadly, how research-creation methods can further contribute to understanding how personal digital data ‘come to matter’ (Barad, 2003) in people’s lives.

More-than-human theory and research-creation

Scholarship within the more-than-human literature that is termed ‘vital materialism’ (Bennett, 2010) positions humans and nonhumans as interrelated and co-productive of the interactions which comprise vitality or life. The notion of distributed relationality is at the centre of vital materialism, which disrupts Western binary dualisms and is valuable for thinking with the historical and cultural contingencies of more-than-human perspectives. While an arguably radical contemporary conception within the Western philosophical tradition, animist and relational ontological understandings have longstanding antecedents in Indigenous and First Nation cosmologies (Bawaka Country et al., 2015; Rosiek et al., 2020; Todd, 2016).

In recent times, the works of four scholars leading feminist new materialist research – Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett and Donna Haraway – have been influential in developing vital materialism. Donna Haraway is a major figure in feminist technoscience. Her work on the cyborg (Haraway, 1991) and on companion species (Haraway, 2003) explores the multiple, dynamic and mutable boundaries of humans, animals, technologies and other matter, and the co-evolving relationships which connect and densely integrate these things. Karen Barad’s philosophy (Barad, 2007, 2014) has been particularly influential in science and technology studies. Her concept of ‘intra-action’ (as distinct from ‘interaction’) underpins her analysis of the agential capacities that are generated when humans come together with nonhumans. Barad emphasises that agency is not a possession of human actors. Instead, it is distributed between human and nonhuman agents when they assemble and disassemble.

Political scientist Jane Bennett’s (2004) notion of ‘thing-power’ also contributes to this perspective on the distributed vitalities generated by human–nonhuman encounters. Drawing attention to the enchanting and ‘curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle’, Bennett argues that ‘thing-power is a force exercised by that which is not specifically human (or even organic) upon humans’ (2004: 31). The scholarship of continental philosopher Rosi Braidotti works towards an emphasis on affirmative ethics to analyse changing notions of the ‘human’ (Braidotti, 2019a, b). In her recent overview of what she characterises as ‘the critical posthumanities’, Braidotti (2019b) argues for the importance of drawing up cartographies of power relations as they contribute to figurations of the human, showing how they are ‘operational in and immanent to the production and circulation of knowledge’ (2019b: 2). These critical cartographies help us to see ourselves differently and creatively. Because they are dynamic and contextual, these cartographies of subjects do not make universal claims. They are directed at identifying configurations of emerging subjects.

The perspective we are adopting positions personal data as lively human–data assemblages that are constantly changing as humans move through their everyday worlds, coming into contact with things such as mobile and wearable devices, online software, apps and sensor-embedded environments (Lupton, 2019). Taking up these ideas, we want to direct attention to the embodied experiential qualities and affordances of materiality of digital data use (practices, habits, routines, tactics, sensory engagements) and its discursive, imagined and symbolic elements, attempting to surface unexpected and less-taken-for-granted meanings, understandings and practices. Our methods are directed at digitised processes such as digital data generation and processing, but we bring non-digital methods to bear to understand these processes in the conviction that these approaches can be generative in highlighting their more-than-representational elements. Furthermore, all digitised experiences take place in more-than-digital worlds; and the entanglements of the objects in these worlds require elucidation.

To think with vital materialism in the context of critical data studies is to centre the affective forces, relational connections and agential capacities of human–data assemblages and enactments (Lupton, 2019). This approach can help us understand the relationality and vibrancies of these intra-actions and bring into focus the developmental trajectories of such assemblages and their productive potentials. This is a very different perspective on personal digital data from that generally espoused in critical data studies. Some researchers have positioned digital data in sociomaterial ways (Beer, 2013; Kitchin and Lauriault, 2014). However, very few have attempted to theorise personal data using more-than-human scholarship (exceptions are Bucher, 2018; Li, 2019; Lupton, 2019). We contend that recognising the sociocultural contexts and affective and relational dimensions within and through which digitised information about humans is generated and used and the many ways in which people imagine, interpret and incorporate personal data into their lives is critical to understanding the meaning and complexity of personal data use and misuse.

We are interested in exploring the slippery vibrant materialities – the ‘thing-power’ – of human–data assemblages with our creative methods. We are particularly interested in experimenting with methods to help us understand how to invite people to go beyond taken-for-granted assumptions about personal data and include more-than-representational and speculative dimensions. This includes a focus on ‘prehensions’ or knowledges, affects and feelings that inform future anticipations in ways that can be difficult to articulate (Renold and Ivinson, 2019). This approach is important in the context of representations and practices that are often suffused with vivid imaginaries and affective forces. Consider, for example, the dark imaginaries of dataveillance that have been appearing not only in news media reporting of scandals such as the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica event and popular culture such as the Black Mirror television series (Lupton, 2019), but also in academic accounts such as Zuboff’s (2019) highly publicised book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

The approach to social inquiry that has been dubbed ‘post-qualitative’ (Lather and St Pierre, 2013) has been strongly influenced by these more-than-human theoretical positions. In adopting their approach to social inquiry, post-qualitative researchers call into question fixed notions of selfhood and the human. Rather than focus on what humans are, it directs attention to how humanness is performed and practised in entanglements with nonhumans (Fullagar, 2017) – including digital technologies and data (Lupton, 2019; Jewitt et al., 2016). Indeed, a key attribute of this scholarship is the awareness that theory and methods are always inextricably entangled, generating research assemblages (Fox and Alldred, 2018). Researchers, like other humans, ‘are embedded and embodied, relational and affective subjects’ (Braidotti, 2019b: 12).

The term ‘research-creation’ is used by some researchers adopting creative and post-qualitative methods. We draw from the notion of research-creation in incorporating ‘a hybrid form of artistic practice between the arts and science, or social science research’ (Truman and Springgay, 2015: 153) to creatively explore people’s entanglements with and in personal data assemblages and to generate the critical cartographies to which Braidotti refers. The act of creative making is not simply a medium to facilitate or communicate research findings: it is a research generation practice in itself. According to Springgay and Truman (2018: 204), research-creation methods are not about data-gathering processes, but instead are viewed as ‘becoming entangled in relations’. Research-creations are directed towards creating different worlds and imagining novel futures. They describe qualitative inquiry as a way of being in the world that is ‘a thinking–making–doing’ (Springgay and Truman, 2018: 205). Research events that centre creative practice, designed by (and for) thinking with the more-than-human concepts outlined here are at the heart of our ‘Living with Personal Data’ project.

Creative methods for researching personal data: previous research

Our project’s methods respond to a growing interest in the social sciences in interdisciplinary, multimodal, creative, sensory and inventive methods (Jewitt et al., 2016; Mannay, 2015; Watson, 2020), drawing from the arts (Leavy, 2017; Pelias, 2019), crafting and making (Grant et al., 2020; McGovern, 2019), play materials such as Lego blocks (Heath et al., 2019), walking and other physical movement methods (Reinhold et al., 2018; Springgay and Truman, 2017), design methods (Michael, 2016; Wilkie et al., 2017), sensory ethnography (Dicks, 2013; Jewitt and Leder Mackley, 2018; Pink, 2015) and more-than-representational inquiry (Vannini and Vannini, 2019; Zembylas, 2017).

Human–computer interaction studies and design researchers have led the way in applying creative research methods to understand how people engage in multisensory ways with their digital data. Some of these approaches have experimented with inviting people to touch, taste and consume materialisations of their personal data. For example, Khot et al. (2014, 2015) explored the possibilities of generating personal data materialisations in chocolate or customised flavoured drinks that could then be consumed by their research participants. A small number of researchers have explored the creation of material objects using people’s personal data that can be touched, held or displayed as a decoration. These include data things (Nissen and Bowers, 2015), data souvenirs (Petrelli et al., 2017), data patinas (Lee et al., 2016), digital ceramics (Desjardins and Tihanyi, 2019) and data craft (Thudt et al., 2017). Using crafted artefacts such as maps, knitted objects, necklaces, modelling clay sculptures, lamps, postcards, stamps, broaches, beads, wristbands, bags and coffee cups, these creative projects focus attention on the relationship between aesthetics, craft, tactility and meaning. They seek to relate processes of visualising data to self-reflection, representation and shared experiences. For example, in their study using ceramics made from personal data, Desjardins and Tihanyi (2019: 148) consider how ‘tactile data artifacts hold many narrative layers’.

Another group of design researchers highlight the importance of storytelling in data visualisation and creatively attend to narrative in their work. In attempting to elicit people’s understandings of personal data privacy and security to better design protection technologies, Dunphy et al. (2014) used methods of collaborative collaging, the linking of ethnography with co-design methods involving concept cards, and digital storytelling involving prompted photography, sound and video recording. Some researchers have used comics and graphic storyboards to explore issues of visualising personal data and data privacy and to engage in creative data-driven storytelling (Bach et al., 2018a, b; Lewis and Coles-Kemp, 2014).

Other studies have considered personal data materiality through experimenting with objects that highlight the processes of visibility and transparency. In a speculative design project, Gross et al. (2017) critically explore the processes that are typically made invisible in self-tracking. This includes attention to the sensing capabilities of particular devices that are designed to be minimally disruptive or identifiable, as well as what such devices cannot capture – the ‘gap between what sensors sense and what actually happened’ (Gross et al., 2017: 330). Heath et al. (2019) bring a future orientation to the narrative frame in their research. They engaged participants in creative scenario building using Lego modelling, inviting participants to use the blocks to think through and respond to prompts about smart technologies, personal data vulnerabilities and security issues, incorporating questions about potential and alternative futures.

These innovative approaches to exploring the lively meaning-making capacities of personal data make clear the significance of understanding the multiple contexts and biographies of research participants when aiming for generative creative outcomes. Similar approaches are beginning to emerge in a small number of social research studies focused on digital technologies and digital data. For example, Lee (2019) employed a scenario-based story completion method to explore datafication and dataveillance in the context of China’s social credit system, using a story opening that invited participants to complete the narrative. Markham and Pereira’s (Markham, 2020; Markham and Pereira, 2019) participatory installations in the Museum of Random Memory involves interactive performative arts-based interventions. These include asking participants to donate a memory in the form of a random material artefact or representative digital artefact for display. Researchers act as ‘uncurators’, framing the activities as working with visitors to develop memory archives for future archaeologists, with a particular focus on prompting them to reflect on processes of digital datafication of people’s lives. This work explores multimodal digitalisation and the significance of the experiential in developing critical approaches to personal data understandings.

Methods using human bodily movement have also been taken up in social research on digital data. The movements of lively data themselves have also received attention in creative research. Focused on addressing the ‘geographic and temporal scale of emerging knowledge infrastructures’ and better capturing the ‘life of data’ via innovative methodologies, Bates et al. (2016) employ what they term a ‘data journeys’ methodology, involving design-based mapping, oral histories and digital ethnography. Powell (2018) explored ‘data walks’ as a form of research creation for breaking down knowledge hierarchies and directing attention towards issues of space. In this method, a small group of participants, following discussion about ways of understanding and defining data, walk through a local area and collectively observe and document data flows using maps, written notes and collected physical materials (Powell, 2018: 213). Jarke (2019) similarly used data walks as a co-design method for addressing the digital divide among non-tech savvy older adult participants. A sensory ethnography project involving using a Go-Pro action camera to record self-tracking commuting cyclists’ journeys in the context of Australian cities and interviewing them about their responses to their data surfaced the complexities of sociospatial and embodied processes of personal data sense-making, including elements such as traffic and weather conditions, experience in using the self-tracking devices on previous rides, the presence or absence of physical injuries and interactions with other road or cycle path users (Lupton et al., 2018).

These ethnographic and arts- and design-based methods have generated intriguing insights into people’s relationships with their personal data. However, few of these studies have brought together these types of methods with more-than-human theory and post-qualitative approaches in relation to personal data. Building on these previous studies by incorporating all these elements is where our project’s fieldwork offers a novel approach.

Our methods

In this section, we describe three creative workshop events in which we experimented with our project’s methods. These events were held in Sydney in 2019 and were convened by the co-authors. Attendees at the workshops were mainly drawn from the academic staff and postgraduate students of UNSW Sydney who were interested in learning about the methods. The exception is one of the ‘Re/imagining Personal Data’ workshops, which was more widely advertised as a satellite event of the Association of Internet Researchers 2019 conference and attracted participants from other Australian universities as well as some international academics and postgraduate students.²

‘Algorithmic Micropolitics’ zine making

The first experimental workshop which members of the project team facilitated conceptually explored algorithmic micropolitics using the method of zine making. The collaborative creation of a single zine was the focus of the workshop, and participants also made individual mini zines to take home. Conceptually, this workshop drew on recent research by Bucher (2018) and Lupton (2019). This conceptual focus was brought together with this selected creative process as zines are a propagative form for considering issues such as micropolitics. Zines are an intimate creative form which affectively and materially draws the personal and political together on the page (Chidgey, 2006; Duncombe, 2014). This highly visual medium has a long history in offering an alternative to mainstream voices, representations, topics and issues, including for political activism and in punk cultures (Piepmeier, 2008).

The ‘Algorithmic Micropolitics’ workshop facilitated creative collaboration and cultivated a space within which attendees critically considered the experience of algorithmic processing of personal data in everyday life. The aim of the event was to use zine making to think about (and do) different explorations of the felt presence of algorithms in everyday life. We drew on this tactile, hands-on and collaborative method to challenge and disrupt common ways of imagining the impact of algorithms as (only) screen-based and individual in nature. The workshop practically explored zine making as a lively method for thinking with and against digital technologies and data – for processing the layered, messy and complex ‘felt presence of algorithms in everyday life’ (Bucher, 2018: 99). Bucher refers to ‘the barely perceived transitions in power that occur when algorithms and people meet’ (2018: 93). To initiate discussions, before moving to the hands-on zine making, attendees were prompted to consider Bucher’s question: ‘When do people encounter algorithms, and what responses and imaginations do these encounters generate?’ (2018: 93). Led by Watson (an experienced zine maker), the six workshop participants talked, sketched, mapped, listened and wrote together in response. Lupton’s (2019: 19) focus on ‘what personal data assemblages allow bodies to do, and how they come to matter in people’s lives’ was then used as a linked provocation to transition the workshop into the making component, to support attendees to work with zines to ‘think more seriously and deeply about what is at stake when human-data assemblages are de-personalized and de-humanized’ (Lupton, 2019: 20).

Working with art paper, magazines, excerpts from the noted scholarly research and initial writing and mapping they completed, attendees experimented with collaging, creative writing, illustration, visual editing and layering text and pictures to query and think through various digital data processes. With regards to our ‘Living with Personal Data’ project, this workshop served as an experimental event via which the research team could assess the collaborative ways participants iteratively create throughout a session and later tinker with the prompts and ways of framing personal data issues central to the generative design activities. Figure 1 shows some of the pages that were made for the collaborative zine. The zine was published online and can be found at this link (https://livingwithpersonaldata.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/am-zine-print.pdf).

Figure 1.

Some of the pages made by participants for the collaborative zine.

‘Re/imagining Personal Data’ creative writing prompts

‘Re/imagining Personal Data’ was the focus and aim of two workshops which engaged participants in thinking imaginatively about personal data and data futures through creative writing activities. These activities were inspired by previous work on the value of creative writing responses (Leavy, 2015) and cultural probes (Gaver et al., 2004) as a research-creation approach for generating insights into lived experiences, sense-making, relational connections and affective forces when humans gather with nonhumans. Responding to creative writing prompts can inspire co-researchers to surface unexpected thoughts, relationships and feelings. For example, Vickers (2010: 562) refers to the ‘fictive’ and ‘empathic’ imaginings such activities can generate, which ‘can help us see issues, nuances, social exchanges, and phenomena that may be unfamiliar, out of reach, or in some other way unseen’.

The activities in these workshops focused on different aspects of the social life of personal data – the networks and more-than-human relationships which make up, change and shape personal data in varying scales and contexts (Beer, 2013; Lupton, 2019) – and the affective forces and relational connections that are part of human–nonhuman intra-actions (Lupton, 2019). Key questions about personal data were used in each workshop to frame the activities in which the participants took part. All the creative writing prompts used in these activities, with one exception, were created by Lupton. The exception is the Data Letters prompt, which was inspired by a method presented in Universal Methods of Design (Hanington and Martin, 2012).

The first workshop, involving 25 participants working in three groups, was designed around the questions: How are your data generated, where do they go and who can access them? How do humans come together with ‘smart’ objects and algorithms in generating data? What happens to our data after we die? Responding to these questions, participants in the first workshop were led through three activities: (1) Smart Object Life Histories: crafting a life history of a smart object or algorithm using either future or past tense; (2) Data Afterlives: writing a brief story imagining what happens to a person’s personal data after they die and (3) Mapping Data Journeys: writing and drawing a device/platform/app that the participant uses regularly, which generates personal data, and using words and images to sketch the journey of these data to map where they go.

These creative artefacts were generated in small groups. Participants responded to the prompts on individual worksheets, writing and drawing their responses (see Figure 2 for an example). Each activity was collaboratively discussed and further developed in groups of 7–12 people before they moved on to the next table to start the next activity. Participants were given reflections sheets to complete following all the activities and then a group discussion was conducted, during which they were invited to discuss their reflections.

Figure 2.

Participant with her personal data mapping activity.

The second workshop used creative writing tasks to focus participants on the questions: How do we feel about our personal data and how do we curate our personal data, deciding what to keep and what to discard? In the Data Letters activity, participants were invited to write a love letter or breakup letter to their personal data. In the Data Kondo activity, participants were asked to respond to the following prompt:

Imagine that you are clearing out and de-cluttering your digital device, as you would your house or apartment, based on Marie Kondo’s principles. You are getting rid of data clutter (your images, videos, music, documents, steps taken and any other information about you). What personal data would ‘spark joy’ for you? What data wouldn’t, so that you are happy to get rid of them? Who would you give your discarded data to – and why? Or would you just delete your data permanently?

Here again, once both tasks were completed, participants were asked to share with the group their experiences and reflections of engaging in them.

Discussion: towards critical cartographies of personal data

In more-than-human and post-qualitative inquiry, research materials are considered co-produced human–nonhuman assemblages – gatherings of human researchers and participants or co-researchers with things such as words, recording devices, pen and paper that together generate vitalities such as affective forces, relational connections and agential capacities (MacLure, 2013; Renold, 2018; Springgay and Truman, 2018; St Pierre et al., 2016). From this perspective, the embodied role of the researcher in configuring and selecting research materials is foregrounded (MacLure, 2013). The artefacts that are created with research participants can be described as ‘da(rt)a’: entanglements of research data and arts-based methodologies (Renold, 2018). Post-qualitative researchers often take up Barad’s (2014) concept of ‘agential cuts’, foregrounding that an analytical decision will always be contingent: a way of ‘cutting’ the research materials in certain ways that is situated and strategic, but the only ever one alternative from boundless others.

Some researchers highlight the embodied and affective role of researchers in the research assemblage. For Vannini and Vannini (2019), the research-creation and more-than-representational approach inspires vibrancies, generated between human participants (including researchers) and the materials with which they are working. Others refer to a ‘becoming with data’ (Malone, 2018) or finding the ‘glow’ in aspects of the situation they are researching (MacLure, 2013), trying to think otherwise. Given the boundless possibilities of ways to engage with these vibrant research assemblages, Schadler’s (2019) approach is to think with Barad’s concept of the ‘exteriority within’, in which an outside position is taken from within a research assemblage. Schadler argues that researchers make agential cuts to enact new boundaries in the research material of which they are part. More-than-human theories are part of the tools used by the researcher to enact boundaries, entangled with other research tools/methods. Schadler uses the term ‘rebuilding worlds’ to describe the process of assembling insights from research materials and making agential cuts to present them as written academic texts.

This is the approach that we will adopt when we are engaging analytically with the research-creations generated by our methods, once we begin our fieldwork. We will consider the materials that participants created in response to our prompts and instructions, together with the participants’ discussions, responses to and reflections on the process of creating them and the thoughts and feelings that generating the creative artefacts inspired for them. In our experimental workshops, in the spirit of ‘making alongside’ (Carr and Gibson, 2017) or ‘walking with’ (Springgay and Truman, 2017) our participants, we engaged in the activities with them as they created artefacts in response to our prompts.

These acts of participation helped us to foreground our involvement as part of the research assemblage together with the other humans in the room as well as with the nonhuman things with which we were working: written and spoken words, drawings and images. We were able to make with the workshop attendees and engage in casual conversation as we made together, as well as inviting the participants to provide us with feedback at the end of the workshops in more formal ways (involving written or spoken reflections and group discussions in response to the activities). Our embodied and spontaneous verbal interactions throughout the workshop comprised one form of research-creation, while the material artefacts/da(r)ta generated by our participants (zine pages, creative writing pieces, written and spoken reflections on and responses to the activities) were another contribution to the research assemblage. We noticed that as they responded to our prompts, the process of research-creation for our participants, and ourselves, inspired ways of thinking otherwise. There were lively reflections and discussions with other group members as we worked or as we shared our creations with others.

These activities generated valuable processual insights about the contemporary ways of understanding personal data. Issues raised in group discussion and generated via the creative writing and mapping activities were fruitful for examining common assumptions about social and technological power relations and for exploring the potentials and limitations of personal data technologies. This included some possible implications which the artefacts participants (re)imagined might have for future technological design and data use – or prehensions (Renold and Ivinson, 2019). The future orientation of some activities was particularly valuable for the central project, for assessing what kinds of insights might be generated using these techniques that can help us interrogate and reimagine the role of personal data for the near and more distant future.

We found that the extended and lively discussions emerging during and following the making events have been particularly valuable as research resources. During discussions reflecting on the workshops, the attendees commented on how engaging, interesting and creative they found the activities and tasks to which we had introduced them. They often referred to the affective forces which their participation in making things had roused in them: excitement, the pleasure of making things, viewing and hearing about other people’s creations, heightened interest in and awareness of issues around personal data and their emotional investments in their data. In discussions about the artefacts created in the workshops, several people commented how the activities worked to rehumanise personal data, that is, to underscore that these digitised forms of information are suffused with feelings and memories.

These activities worked towards making the role of personal data in people’s everyday lives and emotional worlds more visible, bringing prehensions and other more-than-representational aspects to the fore and stimulating ways of thinking otherwise. The ‘Algorithmic Micropolitics’ collaborative zine example featured words and images collected on each page made by the participants that highlighted their feelings about personal data. Words and phrases such as ‘speed’, ‘touch sensitive’, ‘screen dancing’, ‘can you hear me?’, ‘real community’, ‘how it works’, ‘force’, ‘answers’, ‘food for thought’, ‘flight of fancy’, ‘who owns my data?’, ‘risk’, ‘the dark side’, ‘disguise’, ‘Big Brother’, ‘digital’, ‘secrets’, ‘temptation’ and ‘We will not lie. We will tell the truth’ as well as short excerpts from the readings and books we provided were cut from the magazines and books provided and combined with images from fairy tales stories, science books and mainstream advertising to generate colourful zine pages. One participant hand-wrote a narrative about her experiences as a librarian and helping people to search online, while another took an excerpt from Lupton’s book (2019) that was provided as a print-out and made a found poem from it by blackening out some of the words with a pen.

The written reflections about the creative writing and mapping activities we collected from the ‘Re/imagining Personal Data’ workshop participants included statements such as:

I like the connective way of reimagining data through the lenses of mapping, death and speculation, which in a way are all intersections of each other in a multitude of ways. (Smart Object Life Histories, Data Afterlives, Mapping Data Journeys prompts)

I particularly enjoyed the idea of what personal data was meaningful or sparked joy for me. I don’t think people reflect often on all the ways data is personal in ways that are intimate, meaningful etc. without necessarily being negative/invasive. (Data Kondo prompt)

For me, it opened up a broader range of topics to be addressed: What is data. How do I relate with it? How complex are the ways by which I relate with it? (Data Letters prompt)

I really appreciated how the breakup letter format made me respond emotionally rather than rationally to the prompt. For example, I found myself making a distinction between ‘real’ data (embarrassing, potentially useless things on the Internet) and a second category which would cover my ‘offline’ and curated information that is private, useful, and inaccessible to others. (Data Letters prompt)

Made me think more deeply and carefully about how data travels in ways I don’t necessarily agree with. (Data Mapping prompt)

Considering the affective dimensions and relational connections generated with and through the research assemblages of these workshops is another way to think about the ‘glow’ to which Maclure (2013) refers when discussing how research materials ‘call out’ to researchers during analysis. Her explanation of ‘glow’ describes the affective force that observations can give off, drawing researchers’ attention to particular elements and inspiring them to think creatively because they tend to resist interpretation or explanation. The glow that our creative methods inspired in our participants was felt not just by us as researchers as we worked with our participants in creating things, but also by the participants. Their participation resonated at a personal affective level as well as at the level of intellectual curiosity.

Conclusion

In this article, we have sought to bring together innovative research-creation methods with more-than-human and post-qualitative perspectives to expand critical data studies research in new directions. In describing the processes of our workshops and our participants’ feedback to our experimental methods, we have been able to provide some ideas for how to go beyond taken-for-granted approaches for understanding how people think, feel and do in relation to their personal digital data. The workshops were designed with a methodological pedagogical purpose – to introduce other researchers to these methods, and to learn ourselves as we worked together with the workshop participants and methods with the objective of developing and refining our research toolkit for our future fieldwork. Notably, another pedagogical dimension emerged in the workshop participants’ feedback, which suggested they felt the activities in which they engaged had not only taught them how to apply these methods in their own research or teaching, but also gave them a greater depth of insight into their own thoughts, feelings, imaginaries and practices concerning their personal digital data.

This feedback suggests that the types of generative activities we have outlined can offer the affirmative ethical approach which Braidotti (2019b) suggests should be central to a more-than-human orientation towards social inquiry. The kinds of activities we propose are not simply about critique, but offer the potential to work collectively to highlight the relational dimensions of digital data and the ways these data are key elements in the ways we think about ourselves and others, including nonhuman agents. We think that generating glow and other vital affective forces is at the crux of why and how creative methods can ‘come to matter’ that extends well beyond our initial intention to experiment with how they can be taken up in critical data studies. These kinds of methods offer many exciting possibilities not only for social researchers interested in novel ways of researching in the area of critical data studies and related topics, but also for those interested in creative pedagogies for engaging publics in considering the micropolitics of their personal data and working towards generating critical cartographies that work towards doing, feeling and thinking differently.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the workshop participants who put their energy and passion into thinking with us to develop our methods.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors received funding from the Australian Research Council for this project (DP1901100959).

ORCID iDs

Deborah Lupton

Ash Watson

Notes

Author biographies

Deborah Lupton is a SHARP professor in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW Sydney, working in the Centre for Social Research in Health and the Social Policy Research Centre and leading the Vitalities Lab. Professor Lupton is a chief investigator and leader of the UNSW Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Automated Decision-Making and Society (2020–2026). She is a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and holds an honorary doctor of social science degree awarded by the University of Copenhagen.

Ash Watson is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Vitalities Lab, Social Policy Research Centre and Centre for Social Research in Health, UNSW Sydney. She works with Professor Deborah Lupton (UNSW) and Professor Mike Michael (Exeter) on the ARC Discovery Project ‘Living with Personal Data: Australians’ Understandings and Practices’. She is a former postgraduate Endeavour Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, and her PhD was awarded by Griffith University in late 2018.

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