A fourth publication from the ‘Living with Personal Data’ project has been published in Visual Studies. This article authored by Ash Watson, Deborah Lupton and Mike Michael is titled ‘The presence and perceptibility of personal digital data: Findings from a participant map drawing method‘. In this, we discuss findings from the map-making component of our project, where we asked participants to hand draw maps of the digital devices located within their homes. These maps represented the devices people have, where these devices usually live and move to, how and by whom they are used, and the flows of digital data emitting from them. Due especially to the COVID lockdowns which impacted our project, the map-making afforded rich and interesting insights into the contexts and materialities of personal data generation which were otherwise hard to get a sense of when we could not visit participants’ homes in person.

The abstract reads:

Personal digital data are often imagined and experienced as invisible and immaterial phenomena, albeit with increasingly powerful impacts on people’s lives. In this article we discuss findings from an ethnographic project involving 30 participants in Sydney, Australia, directed at identifying their practices and understandings concerning their home-based digital device use and the personal data generated with and through engagements with these technologies. As well as engaging in a video-recorded home tour, we asked participants to hand draw maps of the digital devices located within their homes and the flows of digital data emitting from the devices. These maps mark the presence, interconnections and mobilities of digital technologies and the digitised details generated by their sociomaterial entanglements. The maps were also used to spark further discussion with the participants about their devices and data, seeking to understand their sense-making practices. Working with our concept of ‘digital scaffolding’, we explore what these participant-generated maps can reveal and make visible about digital technologies and data in relation to the domestic environment as well as the world outside the home. We consider what the maps themselves show in terms of digital presence, and what the mapping activity made perceptible within the research encounter.

The fifth publication from our project has also been published in International Journal of Qualitative Methods. Titled ‘Remote Fieldwork in Homes During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Video-Call Ethnography and Map Drawing Methods‘ and authored by Ash Watson and Deborah Lupton, this open access methodological article reflects on the challenges and opportunities that arose when we shifted the in-person ethnographic part of the study online. It details the adjusted video ‘home tour’ method we employed, and discusses how this approach was designed to (and amended to still) elicit the sensory, affective and relational elements of people’s digital device and personal data use at home.

The abstract for this article reads:

Restrictions on physical movements and in-person encounters during the COVID-19 crisis confronted many qualitative researchers with challenges in conducting and completing projects requiring face-to-face fieldwork. An exploration of engaging in what we term ‘agile research’ in such circumstances can offer novel methodological insights for researching the social world. In this article, we discuss the changes we made to our ethnographic fieldwork in response to the introduction of a national lockdown to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus. The ‘Living with Personal Data’ project, based in Sydney, Australia, and designed well before the advent of COVID-19, explores a diverse range of people’s feelings, practices and understandings concerning home-based digital devices and the personal digital data generated with their use. Using a video ethnography ‘home tour’ and an elicitation technique involving hand-drawn maps of people’s homes, digital devices and the personal data generated with and through these devices, this approach was designed to elicit the sensory, affective and relational elements of people’s digital device and personal data use at home. The fieldwork had just commenced when stay-at-home and physical distancing orders were suddenly introduced. Our article builds on and extends a growing body of literature on conducting fieldwork in the difficult conditions of the extended COVID-19 crisis by detailing our experiences of very quickly converting an ethnographic study that was planned to be in-person to a remote approach. We describe the adaptations we made to the project using video-call software and discuss the limits and opportunities presented by this significant modification.

As with all publications, please do email us if you cannot access a copy via the links above.

The third publication from the ‘Living with Personal Data’ project, entitled ‘The COVID digital home assemblage: Transforming the home into a work space during the crisis‘ (authored by Ash Watson, Deborah Lupton and Mike Michael) has been published in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. In this article, we discuss some of the ways that people’s homes changed in the first months of COVID lockdown. As our project fieldwork began in early 2020 and continued throughout Australia’s first lockdown, we were able to document how people tried to work from home during the first year of the pandemic.

The abstract reads:

Major changes to home life and work practices globally have been brought about by the COVID-19 crisis. Periods of strict restrictions placed on people’s movements outside their homes, aimed at curbing the spread of the novel coronavirus, have meant that the home was requisitioned as a primary site for work for many people. In this article, we draw on case studies from an ethnographic project that explored how people living in Sydney use digital technologies in the home setting. Our fieldwork commenced in early 2020, just prior to the national COVID lockdown period in Australia, and continued throughout the lockdown and the months following. As a result, we were able to document people’s experiences of transitioning to working from home during the first year of the pandemic. In this article, we adopt a sociomaterial approach together with domestication theory to analyse the complexities of the changed COVID home in the context of digitised working arrangements. We surface and theorise the tensions and leaky boundaries between workplaces and family/domestic life that are brought about by, through and beyond the digital. By addressing the sociomaterial choreographies and modalities of presence involved, we attempt to capture the processes through which the COVID digital home assemblage is continuously configured and the more or less simultaneous presence and absence of people in both domestic and work domains.

As with all publications, please do email us if you cannot access a copy via the link above.

The second publication from the ‘Living with Personal Data’ project, entitled ‘Enacting intimacy and sociality at a distance in the COVID-19 crisis: the sociomaterialities of home-based communication technologies‘ (authored by Ash Watson, Deborah Lupton and Mike Michael) has now been published in Media International Australia in an extraordinary issue on “Coronavirus, crisis and communication”. In this article, we discuss some of the ways people used digital technologies to stay in touch – and care for – their loved ones during the early months of COVID lockdown.

The abstract reads:

Significant restrictions on movement outside the home due to the global COVID-19 pandemic have intensified the importance of everyday digital technologies for communicating remotely with intimate others. In this article, we draw on findings from a home-based video ethnography project in Sydney to identify the ways that digital devices and software served to support and enhance intimacy and sociality in this period of crisis and isolation. Digital communication technologies had an increased presence in people’s domestic lives during lockdown. For many people, video calling software had become especially important, allowing them to achieve greater closeness and connection with their friends and family in enacting both everyday routines and special events. These findings surface the digital and non-digital materialities of sociality and intimacy, and the capacities opened by people’s improvisation with the affordances of home-based communication technologies at a time of extended physical isolation.

As with all publications, please email us if you cannot access a copy via the link above.

On Monday September 9, a group of researchers joined us for a workshop on the topic of algorithmic micropolitics. The workshop was held by the Vitalities Lab, Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW, Sydney. Bringing together zine-making and digital data, we collaboratively made a zine to critically consider how we experience algorithms in everyday life. This workshop drew on and was a primer for some of the arts-based and co-design work we are doing in the ARC-funded project ‘Living with personal Data: Australians’ Understandings and Practices’.

To guide us in thinking about algorithmic micropolitics, we drew on excerpts from Taina Bucher’s 2018 book If… Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics and Deborah Lupton’s forthcoming book Data Selves: More-Than-Human Perspectives.

Chapter 5 of Bucher’s book focuses on ‘the barely perceived transitions in power that occur when algorithms and people meet’ (2018 p. 93). To start our discussions, before we dove into the cutting and pasting, we considered the question she poses at the start of this chapter: ‘When do people encounter algorithms, and what responses and imaginations do these encounters generate?’ (Bucher 2018 p. 93).

We also considered Lupton’s focus on ‘what personal data assemblages allow bodies to do, and how they come to matter in people’s lives’ (2019). We adopted a similar approach that she does, drawing on feminist new materialism, with our zine making practice: we aimed to ‘think more seriously and deeply about what is at stake when human-data assemblages are de-personalised and de-humanised’ (Lupton 2019).

Zines are an interesting creative form useful for considering things like micropolitics. They affectively and materially draw the personal and the political together on the page. Zines have a long history as a DIY, anti-establishment medium that poses an alternative to mainstream voices, representations, topics and issues. They resist the kinds of logics that can seep into academic workshops, like metrics and quantifiable ‘impact’, so are useful for trying to think (and do) in different ways than usual. Some recent social researchers have taken up zine-making as a participatory social research method (see resources below).

We made two kinds of zines at the workshop. The first was a collaborative endeavour – we made pages based on our discussions and reflections on what Bucher calls ‘the felt presence of algorithms in everyday life’ (2018 p. 99). The pages of this A5-sized zine sit in dialogue together, make use of quotes by Bucher and Lupton, and repurpose text and images from magazines and children’s books. You can download a print-ready version of this zine here (print double sided, flipped along the short edge).

We also made individual ones – small, 8-page zines made from single A4 pages. Some of the resources below have guidelines for making these.

Zine-making is a lively method for thinking with and against digital technologies. This zine engages with the affective encounters we have with data, digital tech and algorithms in everyday life.

More creative workshops from the Vitalities Lab are coming soon!