ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights studies that scrutinize the data of our digital lives and environs as lively, material, contextual, and remediating lived realities in particular ways. While digital data might be reduced to bits, bytes, codes, and algorithms, in social usage these data are heterogeneous and multiform. Qualitative researchers map flows, links, and interfaces and digitally immerse themselves in the logics, practices, and fluid formations of online life, vigilant to the work of algorithmic data-making that often shapes what can be seen, known, and accessed. Alternative qualitative research techniques are emerging including lurking, scraping, following, mapping, and remixing. The ethics of digital data have rendered conventional guidelines inadequate and have become public concerns including privacy, ownership, anonymity, archiving, and social impact. Digital data are constantly on-the-make, self-assembling, and becoming otherwise. We do not intend to catalog the ever-expanding possibilities for “making” digital data; rather, we highlight practices that illuminate issues or portend critical directions. If digital data are changing the ways we think, the values we live, and our possibilities of be/coming, then it is qualitative researchers who are best positioned to engage with the lived implications and unanticipated consequences of these shifts.
