ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we consider various ways that the self has become data. In autoethnographic and performative approaches, the researcher self becomes the data. Qualitative self-as-data can include whatever becomes significant in the researcher’s lived experience: thoughts, memories, perceptions, emotions, behaviors, relationships, identities, events, stories, discourses, and larger social, cultural, and historical contexts. We also consider research on self-digitalization and self-as-digital-data. We explore what the digital self-as-data might do without the burdens of humanist assumptions. Many conceptions of the self are present in contemporary research: social, dramaturgical, socially constructed, narrative, disciplined, fragmented postmodern, situated, performative, and datified. All trouble the idea of an authentic self and acknowledge the politics of self-representation. For example, there are multiple variations on autoethnography, among them postpositivist analytic, interpretive, critical, collaborative, co-constructed, and evocative. Across these variations, self-as-data appears centrally as processual, dynamic, often surprising, and irreverent. We find making, assembling, and becoming practices to be particularly creative, anguished, and under revision in regard to self-as-data. The centrality of ethical commitments to (self)compassion and the awe/fulness of joy are especially relevant to self-as-data.
