Digital Field Methods

“We need, in other words, to invent an art of experiment which can up the methodological ante. I am looking, then, for a social science which promotes a rewoven empirics which, most particularly, generates the quality of provocative awareness. That means an experimentalist orientation must be in-built which can start and restart association.”

~Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory

Course Description

Emerging media technologies have fundamentally altered how we research, communicate, and share knowledge about our “objects” of scholarly study. In addition to offering more modes for discussing those objects–image, sound, video, data visualization, etc.—emerging media technologies also contribute new techniques of measurement that help open up fields of wider activity as available for study. For instance, rhetorical scholars, using new and emerging media, can expand the study of a traditional political protest beyond the words of speeches by also gathering and collecting ambient data from that object’s field that includes images, sounds, network usage, interviews, traffic patterns, architectural structures, and a great many more points of research. In short, the distinctions between object and field are themselves at question and, in part, invented by our research practices. What these revelations mean for today’s humanities researcher is that deploying emerging media technologies for academic research presents a number of ethical challenges (ethics in both practical and responsible senses) for doing quantitative research (such as numerical data & visualizations) as well as qualitative research (digital ethnography and/or ambient research collection). This course aims to inquire into those ethical challenges by practicing digitally-based field methods that will help students establish responsible, accessible, and sustainable research projects.

In this course, students will practice digital methods, first and foremost, as a mode of invention. To accomplish this, students will learn to use digital media for collecting research data, selecting data for making research claims, and re-collecting research for online, digital publication. Students taking this course will read and respond to a number of texts and be responsible for leading a class presentation, complete ongoing notes, compose field reports, and complete a semester-long multimedia research project.

Required Materials

text + FIELD: Innovations in Rhetorical Method, Sara L. McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard

Affective Methodologies: Developing Cultural Research Strategies for the Study of Affect, Eds. Britta Timm Knudsen & Carsten Stage.

Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research, Ed. Phillip Vannini

Participatory Critical Rhetoric: Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for Studying Rhetoric In Situ, Michael Middleton, Aaron Hess, Danielle Endres, Samantha Senda-Cook

Adobe Creative Cloud (One-year student subscription available for $75.00 at the Campus Computer Store).

Course Projects

These assignments are flexible and should be related to the student’s primary research project. Full assignment sheets will be given for each assignment as they are introduced in class.

[Field] Notes – 20%

In this ongoing assignment, students will gather, collect, and share reading notes and other audio, visual, and video data as it pertains to their chosen field of inquiry. This activity is designed for students to engage in ongoing practice with data collection and should take place over the course of the entire semester.

(Suggested Reading: Sarah Bridges-Rhoads, “Philosophical Fieldnotes”; Heather Love, “Close Reading and Thin Description”; Pamela Richardson-Ngwenya, “Performing a more-than-human material imagination during fieldwork”; Sam Smiley, “Field Recording or Field Observation?”; Frederik Bøhling, “The Field Note Assemblage”)

[Field] Reports (3) – 30%

In this assignment series, students will complete three short reports that elaborate and expand on one or more field notes that suggest a theme or a trajectory for building a concept. To provide focused practice in medium specific methods, these assignments are intended to be concentrate on (but not necessarily be exclusive to) one medium/sense (textual, visual, audio, video).

[Field] Guide – 50%

The final assignment asks students assemble multiple media that culminate from the notes and reports into a “guide” (much more on this term/genre in the assignments sheet) that traces broad contours of a field of concern and identifies one or more trajectories therein. Throughout the class, we will see examples of traditional field guides as well as more contemporary “field guides” reinventing the form.

(Suggested Reading: Shannon Mattern, “Cloud and Field: On the Resurgence of ‘Field Guides in a Networked Age’”; Ingrid Burrington, “Seeing Networks in New York City”; J.R. Carpenter, “The Gathering Cloud”; Natasha Myers, “Becoming Sensor”; Liam Young & Kate Davies, “The Unknown Fields Division”

Schedule (Highly Volatile/Subject to Multiple Revisions)

Unit One: Introduction & Situating

This unit of the course explores and examines the scholarly and conceptual stakes of field methods.

Week One (Jan 17) – Rhetorical Situations/Ecologies/Circulatons

Readings: Lloyd Bitzer, “Rhetorical Situation”; Richard Vatz, “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation”; Jenny Edbauer, “Unframing Models of Public Distribution”; Brian McNely, “Circulatory Intensities”

Suggested Reading: Sarah Bridges-Rhoads, “Philosophical Fieldnotes”; Heather Love, “Close Reading and Thin Description”; Pamela Richardson-Ngwenya, “Performing a more-than-human material imagination during fieldwork”; Sam Smiley, “Field Recording or Field Observation?”; Frederik Bøhling, “The Field Note Assemblage”

Week Two (Jan 24) – Rhetorical Field Methods

Readings: Michael Middleton,Samantha Senda-Cook, Danielle Endres, “Articulating Rhetorical Field Methods”; Sara McKinnon, et al., “Articulating Text and Field in the Nodes of Rhetorical Scholarship”; Phaedra Pezzullo & Catalina de Onis, “Rethinking Rhetorical Field Methods on a Precarious Planet”; Samantha Senda-Cook, et al., “Interrogating the ‘Field””; Michelle Kisliuk, (Un)doing Fieldwork”; Sarah Pink, Elisenda Ardèvol, and Débora Lanzeni, “Digital Materiality”

Suggested Reading: Middleton, et al, Participatory Critical Rhetoric (selections); Aaron Hess, “Rhetoric, Ethnography, and the Machine”; Derek P. McCormack, “Devices for Doing Atmospheric Things”; Brian McNely & Christa Teston, ““Tactical and Strategic: Qualitative Approaches to the Digital Humanities”

Week Three (Jan 31)- Against & After Method

John Law, After Method (excerpt); Erin Manning “Against Method”; Philip Vannini, “Non-Representational Research Methodologies”; Stephanie Springgay & Sarah Truman, “On the Need for Methods Beyond Proceduralism: Speculative Middles, (In) Tensions, and Response-Ability in Research”; Bruno Latour, “Sensitizing”; Nigel Thrift, “Practising Ethics”; Aaron Hess, “Embodied Judgement”

Suggested Reading: Sarah Whatmore, “Materialist Returns”; Nigel Thrift, “Life, but not as we know it” (selection from Non-Representational Theory); Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis; Yi Chen, Practising Rhythmanalysis (excerpts); Niamh Moore, “‘Humanist’ Methods in a ‘More-than-Human’ World?”;

Unit Two: Collection

In this unit, students will get introductions to and practice in collecting digital data. Using equipment from the Digital Writing & Research Lab, readings will complement students’ hands-on practice with audio, visual, video, and numerical data media.

Week Four (Feb 7)- Hearing Methods

Cathy Lane & Angus Carlyle, In The Field (selections); Marina Peterson, “Wind Matters”

DUE: Field Report #1

Week Five (Feb 14)- Seeing Methods

Brian McNely, et al., “Spaces and Surfaces of Invention”; Kevin Adonis Browne, “‘Till Now Was Never,’ and Other Impossible Things”; Pink, et al., “Digital-visual stakeholder ethnography”; Laurie Gries, “Iconographic Tracking”

Week Six (Feb 21)- Re-seeing Methods

Edgar Gomez Cruz, “Trajectories: digital/visual data on the move”; Kirsten M. Kinsley, et al. “GoPro as Ethnographic Tool: A Wayfinding Study in an Academic Library”; Natasha Myers, “Ungridable-Ecologies” & “Becoming Sensor in Sentient Worlds” & Becoming Sensor

Week Seven (Feb 28)- Social Methods

Readings: Richard Rogers, Digital Methods (excerpts); Anne Helmond, “Historical Website Ecology. Analyzing Past States of the Web Using Archived Source Code”; Lev Manovich, Instagram and the Contemporary Image (excerpts); Beaulieu, Anne. “Mediating Ethnography: Objectivity and the Making of Ethnographies of the Internet.”

Week Eight (Mar 7)- Computing Methods

Jennifer Gabrys, “Air Walk: Monitoring Pollution and Experimenting with Speculative Forms of Participation”; Malte Ziewitz, “A not quite random walk: Experimenting with the ethnomethods of the algorithm”; Nick Seaver, “Algorithms as culture: Some tactics for

the ethnography of algorithmic systems”

DUE: Field Report #2

Unit Three: Selection

For this unit, students will select from collected data to analyze and build projects through processing that data. These weeks will function as a series of “processing workshops” wherein data collected are selected and remade according to emerging trajectories of that data. Readings in these sessions will serve as provocations and loose guides for our workshops.

Week Nine (Mar 21)- Processing Sound

“Gabi Sobliyeu and Leil-Zahra Mortada, “Uneasy Listening”; Andrea Polli, “Sonifications of Global Environmental Data”; David Dunn, “A Philosophical Report from Work-in-Progress”

Week Ten (Mar 28)– Processing Sights

Fred Ritchin, After Photography (excerpt)

Week Eleven (Apr 4)– Processing Text

Matthew Jockers, Macroanalysis (excerpt)

Week Twelve (Apr 11)– Processing Machines

David Rieder, Suasive Iterations (excerpt); Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth (excerpt)

DUE: Field Report #3

Unit Four: Re/collection

For the final unit, students will investigate and identify suitable venues and media for circulating their work. Student projects will lead the activities needed for these workshops.

Week Thirteen (Apr 18)– Project Workshop One

Week Fourteen (Apr 25)– Project Workshop Two

Week Fifteen (May 2)– Project Presentations

Note: Many thanks to my department colleague Davida Charney for sharing the methods class she taught last semester and upon which this class builds (and without which could not get away with doing what it does), colleague Tanya Clement who shared with me a syllabus of a similar course (“Field Study In Humanities Work”) and to Shannon Mattern for sharing her course, Designing Methodologies. These syllabi provided many resources and concepts used here.