ABSTRACT
Early in this journey, while telling a colleague about my ideas for this study, I was asked the question “what counts as data in your study?” It seemed like a simple question. Why, of course, what counts as data is “records or descriptions or memories of events or objects” (Bateson, 1972, p. xviii) found in diary entries, letters, emails, cards, notebooks, photos, and any other visual record. Somehow, my colleague's silence suggested that I had answered too quickly. Had I missed something? Why was “data” questionable in my study? As I considered this issue more deeply, I came to see that the traditional notion of data as records of events was highly problematic, because in the kind of narrative work I am involved in, as one interrogates data, one is also creating new records of events. In autoethnography, data, analysis and interpretation are interlayered, overlaid, and, in many cases, happen simultaneously. In this chapter, I will take a closer look at how data operates in this study as a way of exploring what we can learn about data from autoethnographic ways of writing.
