As part of the build up to the Summer Institute in Qualitative Research we are asking speakers and participants to blog about their talk on the Museum of Qualitative Data site. This enables us to spot links, do reading and make sure you get to all of the talks you want to listen to. Click on the image below to visit the site and read the posts.
This far we’ve had submissions from the following:
Dr Geoff Bright (ESRI, MMU) Working with a Social Haunting
These photos and video were taken by me (with permission) at Hatfield, South Yorkshire, in March this year on the occasion of a local demonstration to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the end of the British Miners strike of 1984-85. Hatfield is the last working pit in the UK. Consider how these images and the piece of video work separately and when placed together in groups. The first shows a local woman holding a piece of paper. How does the image perform as data when we know that she is a former Women Against Pit Closures Activist who was arrested 17 times during the strike and, further, that the piece of paper written is a poem written by her daughter during the strike? At my SIQR session we’ll look at this photo alongside images of the daughter-writer and her daughters and consider how, taken together, new meaning and affective load is generated.
Richard Knight and Dr Stephanie Daza (ESRI, MMU) Qu/al/ant/ify
Throughout the duration of the SIQR, data will be gathered from various sources in context with the proceedings, possibly including sound recordings, texts, video recordings, presentation materials, existing digital resources and other relevant but diverse manifestations of information. The ingress of information will be managed in a ‘big data’ approach, following digitisation if necessary, and subject to a range of processes and classifications to prepare and abstract the collection into an event-specific catalogue designed for further interpretation through the application of aesthetics and analysis. Rendering of musical and sonic interpretations will be central to the presentation of the gathered information and led by data artist Richard Knight. Occurring as sound or music, the interpretations will play periodically at points between events, and during a programmed event, with output files and recordings online. A collection of tools and access to the resources gathered may be made available to contributing artists, allowing for disparate insights and the presentation of data in various forms. Curated by ESRI researcher Stephanie Daza, the project explores digital affective technologies (DAT), such as electro-acoustic data analysis, in/for/as social science. While sound method/ology may create “sonic avatars,” the result is not simply a post/humanist-driven (subject-centred, or even subject-produced) representation. Data art provokes the transhuman; thus, links to parts are extremely abstract, and like ends of binaries, nonsensical. To listen and hear information as (organized) sound, silence, music, and noise–which is different than seeing and reading information through eye/I hegemony (i.e., authors/readers, words, languages, speech, texts, visuals, and discourse)–provokes a new analyst and analysis. (To visit the site, click here.)