Introduction
Multiplicities of Data Encounters
mirka koro-ljungberg, teija löytönen,
and marek tesar
This book is a part of a larger global conceptual and ontological movement within
qualitative inquiries and traditions to move away from persisting post-positivist
epistemological ruins, and humanistic, human centered, and neo-positivist practices
of research and scholarship. In this book the authors give their theoretical
and practically oriented attention to ‘data’. More specifically, we (the editors) hope
that the book will expand qualitative researchers’ notions of data and that it will
exemplify scholars’ diverse encounters and interactions with data. Rather than collecting
or even producing data, we focus on data encounters and diverse ways
in which scholars and data (in their multiple forms) can come together, interact,
intra-act, and. Different ways to encounter data are endless and as such are likely
to reflect a variety of ontological and epistemological stances.
Data are both possible and impossible in some ways. For example, data are
possible since scholars need them, funders hail them, journals ask for their sources,
and IRBs call for data procedures. Data have a place in research systems, discourses,
and practices. Data in some ways materialize research, and they generate
inter and intra-actions. Data produce. Data also make many of our scholarly
practices possible. At the same time these possibilities of data are impossible;
impossible to be known ahead of time, predictable, repeatable, neutral, or always
readily identifiable. Data could be seen especially impossible in post-qualitative
and post-human frameworks, which question the very fundamental concepts often
associated with data such as a knowing individual, stable knowledge, documentation,
and representation. Yet the impossibilities of data could keep scholars in
motion, critical, and careful. Alternatively, the impossibilities might slow scholars
down in productive ways or close down and terminate inquiry. Sometimes data
take time, seem distant and inaccessible, and they might not function as expected,
thus again appearing to be impossible.
At the same time, because of their putative simplicity, primitiveness, or intuitiveness,
data have also been considered to possess a kind of innocence or authenticity,
as-yet-uncontaminated by the interventions and the interest of human acts
of selection, interpretation and analysis. Data are not ethically neutral, but can
function as advocating, supporting or dirty, powerful and dangerous entities or
practices. Data have been assigned and dedicated to serve policy, indigenous communities,
participants, children, adults, learners, and teachers. Data are, moreover,
associated with a range of discourses and master narratives, many of which we
highlight in this book. For instance, the term data has been argued to carry an
odor of scientificity, lending a spurious scientific rigor to the critical and cultural
projects of qualitative research, alongside such concepts as validity and triangulation.
Data have also been recruited into neoliberal discourses of accountability, as
input to the assurances of ‘evidence-based’ policy and practice. And importantly,
data have served researchers, turning research into a legitimized business, a rigorous
enterprise, and a fundable set of propositions. Data have become part of the
economics of everyday life. This book critically reviews the production and ‘machinations
of data’ within various canons of qualitative research.
To work against existing machinations of data, we desire to make data a (methodological)
project (data broadly conceptualized and practiced) to encourage readers
to pay close attention to data and their numerous variations and manifestations. We
encourage readers to think data beyond anthropocentricism toward different human
and nonhuman forces creating, generating, and reproducing knowing, affect, and sensory
experiences. Data produce and can be produced in relational fields composed
of forces underlying a number of different experiential and materials connections
(see also Coole & Frost, 2010; Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010) rather than privileging
human (data) superiority over animals, plants, and other forms of organic
life. Ecological data, more-than-human data, eco-data, and multispecies symbiotic
assemblages (see Ivanova, 2016) highlight some potentialities and encounters discussed
in this edited book and elsewhere, as potentialities to disturb human (data)
dominance and human species’ (data) colonization of other species. Furthermore, the
expansion of bio, eco and technological spheres create continuously shifting challenges
to think data differently. Additionally, it is important to place data in relation
to ecosystems and within the context of biopolitics and global political economies
that extend beyond anthropocentricism and the isolation of human species (data).
What kinds of data-forms or life-forms shape inquiry and qualitative research? What
are the ethical consequences of our decisions related to ecological sustainability?
Throughout the text, the authors promote actions and activities that view data
as something to be continuously changing, interrogated, and critically examined.
introduction | 3
In addition, the authors create materials, texts, insights, and examples that repackage
and remake ‘old/known/familiar/visible data’ (e.g., interviews, observations,
artefacts, images), live ‘new/unknown/emerging/invisible data’ (e.g., snow, bags,
breath, remains, spectral data), or illustrate completely unexpected interactions
with unimaginable and unthinkable ‘data’ (e.g., data holes, anarchives, data mattering,
befriended data). In other words, data and descriptions of data encounters
are rethought as a conceptual, theoretical, philosophical, ethical, material, performative,
practical, ontological, and spatial projects and.
Multiplicity of data provides both challenges and novel insights. It is possible
that this book does not provide answers to the ‘data question’ that many
scholars may have come to expect. In this volume data might not necessarily be
‘readily available’ but data’s diverse functions must first be invented (see Deleuze
& Guattari, 1994). Ideas proposed in this book might not be immediately transformable
or uncritically usable but they may serve as provocateurs, seeds, and fluid
formations of ideas to be played with. In some ways this book simulates a fluid
methodological space (see Koro-Ljungberg, 2016; Koro-Ljungberg, Carlson,
Tesar, & Anderson, 2015; Mol, 2002) where data, theories, methods and research
approaches melt, transform, circumvent, infiltrate, appear, and disappear. There is
no “need for police action to safeguard the stability of [data] elements and their
linkages—for there is no network structure to be protected” (Mol & Law, 1994,
p. 662). Change, divergence, and difference might stimulate data and methodological
practices that are inseparable, coincidental but also disjunct (see also Massumi,
2002). Data may be actualized through movement from one set of data to another,
through foldings, redoubling and reductions, data pasts projecting ahead to the
data future. Fluid, dissolving, and multiple data could be a reprocess—actualized
by being differentiated and differentiating themselves.
Data’s methodological (im)possibilities and their role in post-qualitative and
artistic inquiry is also an onto-epistemological question; a question of truths,
knowledges, presences, absences, technologies, appearances, and power. As such
it is important to consider what data might do to us, to other data: without colonizing
or taming the other and unfamiliar in data. In addition, we question the
very ontology of data, and wonder if data are tainted by a persistent humanism
lodged deep inside qualitative research, even of a post-structural or post-humanist
orientation, perpetually reinstating the autonomous human subject behind its own
back, and relegating data once more to a subordinate role. Data as a creation of
humanist ‘man’ or privileged human species calls for questioning and troubling.
Dialectics of data/non-data, alive or dead data, truth or false data, valid or invalid
data seem insufficient. Instead, the monistic life of data enables various possibilities
beyond anthropocentrism and it supports more complex relationships between
data, human, and non-human others including animals, plants, and various forms
of technology. Or is there still some unforeseen future potential in the notion or
4 | mirka koro-ljungberg, teija löytönen, and marek tesar
‘doings’ of data as problem or on-going experiment? In some ways, this edited
collection examines the landscape of a post-data-turn in qualitative inquiry, of
research with data without data, or immanent data becomings.
Instead of providing simple definitional answers or unified representational signifiers
of what are data, what counts as data, or how data operate we hope that chapters
in this edited volume will leave the readers with the open prospect of productive
unsettlement, discomfort, and uncertainty. If data are seen as a concept or enactment
of diverse connections then some forms of data are necessarily ontologically fictional
and vitally illusive, and vibrant in their performances. At the same time, some chapters
illustrate how data provoke, call for action, change, or transformation, and for
becoming something unanticipated and other. It is also our intention to guide students
and researchers to reconsider or revision their actions, plans, and future direction
regarding data. We suggest that data may manifest itself as an event in which
data, theories, writing, thinking, artistic processes and practices, as well as inquiries,
researchers, participants, past, future, present, and body-mind-materia are entangled,
or connected, where data might perform their own subjectivities.
In addition, it is interesting to pay closer attention to data’s ‘pull’ or gravitational
forces. These forces might stem and initially originate from research traditions
and normative scholarly discourses. However, these gravitational forces
also have the potential to guide scholars beyond the ‘expected’ and pre-described
toward more open-ended experimentations with, alongside, and in conjunction
with data. For example, data might have multiple presences some of which can be
absent or still becoming. Data might not only function as a noun but also a verb,
adjective, proposition, pause, hole, and it can even function as a question mark or
maybe as a gendered pronoun, among other things. In some ways data have potential
everywhere but without scholars and participants’ interactions, directionality,
and intentionality data might remain, at least momentarily, mute, invisible, and
inaccessible. Furthermore, scholars’ desire to pin down data and their potential can
considerably limit data’s capability to surprise and provoke. In many ways data’s
double move (simultaneous and fluid notions of creation and elimination, past
and present, for and against) can generate continuously changing and unforeseen
possibilities to inform our thinking as scholars and qualitative researchers.
Data’s double move might also indicate that data are both decided and undecided.
By this connection we refer to the “presence” of data. Data are here, with
us, in some ways knowable and expressing, simulating, possible, repeating diverse
forms knowledge. However, at the same time data’s absence haunts scholars, and
absent-presence (e.g., Derrida, 1997) reproduces data again and again in their different
forms, at different sense times (e.g., Deleuze, 2001, 2003). Data’s epistemological
agency shapes us, data themselves, and our surroundings. Scholars might sense data
and knowledge, they might see something surprising or disturbing, or sounds or colors
in the classroom, for example, might produce various effects, events, and flows.
introduction | 5
Intra-active data might also guide qualitative researchers to think and talk in certain
ways in relation to the objects, material, and forces around them. At the same time
data’s epistemological agency might be in flux enough not to be recognizable. In
many contexts data are here and there, everywhere and nowhere, coming and going.
However, we are not ready to propose that qualitative researchers can do without
data. The linguistic problematics and discursive inaccuracies associated with
the label data do not stop data. Data continue. Data might turn into bits, pieces,
micro seconds, millimetres, fragments, partial utterances, diverse forces, ecological
initiatives, ethical responses or stuttering, and so on. Alternatively, data might stay
undecided, uncertain, or fearful and beyond the control of scholars. For some scholars,
this undecidedness and uncertainty could be troublesome and for some it might
be a resource and endless source of rethought, deconstruction, and conceptual/
theoretical inspiration.
This book also discusses some of the ways in which the very notion of data
has been challenged as a result of the major upheavals that have shaken qualitative
inquiry over the last 30 years, in the wake of the various “turns” that have
convulsed the humanities and social sciences: post-structuralist, postmodernist,
deconstructive, Deleuzian, performative, posthumanist, affective, artistic, material
feminist and so on. In contemporary qualitative research (or ‘post qualitative’), data
have become much more than containable and controllable objects of research,
acquiring a kind of agency. Furthermore, the current ‘post-truth’ intellectual and
political contexts of many Western countries question again the ontological connections
established through data. Fake-data, post-truth data, fabricated subjects
and knowers, obvious intentional inaccuracies of knowledge, change the way readers,
users of social media, and ultimately us, the scholars, view and respect data.
Post-truth data are here to stay but how should scholars react to that?
A part of our effort to work against containable and controllable objectifications
of data we also need to pay attention to text-writing. ‘Data-ideas’ expressed in these
chapters are not thematised, grouped, or categorized. Chapters are arranged in random
order. By doing this we desire to communicate wonder, randomness, surprise,
relatedness of unthought thought and more, in relation to data. Furthermore, some
chapters perform ideas and notions of being, writing with data, tainted and dirty
data, and challenge traditional ways of writing about and with data. The artistic
and performative aspect of these chapters thus allow a transformation of the reader-
subject-text—to challenge not only what data are, but what data do—to data
and to the subject alike. Data in post-human and post-qualitative contexts calls for
critique, challenges, and continuously changing ways to innovate and recreate data.
Data’s limits are similar to our limits as thinkers, researchers, and humans. Data are
(within, through, by, over, alongside, a part of) us: scholars, researchers, teachers,
mothers, fathers, friends, bodies, minds, particles, and different yet interacting and
intra-acting bodies and materia. We work with data in various ways, ‘data’r’us’.
6 | mirka koro-ljungberg, teija löytönen, and marek tesar
Rather than providing a separate chapter written by us (the editors) about our
recent interactions and puzzlements with data, we have written irruptions that aim
to disturb the flow and linearity of this text as a whole. Our irruptions focus on different
ways data could function as a hole, absence, or a type of perforation in the host
(host functioning as the texts written by others). Our irruptions also offer a sort of
escape from sometimes theoretically very dense chapters, providing readers a snack
between the meals, an intermission in the opera, an alternative plateau to stretch
one’s thoughts, or other types of fluid in-between spaces. Furthermore, Dataholes
prompt scholars to move beyond the expected and normative, data that are or have,
toward data that are not, have not, and potentially create or perform (more) less.
In the lieu of thematizing the randomly placed chapters, which in many ways
are beyond shared themes and as such resist linearity and structural organization,
we will offer some data potentialities and possible lines of reading. Each following
line offers diverse linguistic, material, textual, and collective traces but also some
invisible connections between the chapters to produce different and potentially
unexpected (data) affects in readers.
Possibilities with breath: Possibilities with data-breath-data- form a line
between the chapters of Duhn, Somerville, Rautio and Vladimirova, Rouhiainen,
Nordstrom, Van Cleave and Bridges-Rhoads, Arlander, and beyond. These chapters
draw attention to breath and its’ various functions and formations as data.
Data-breath-data- potentially functions as immaterial material, (im)possible
exchange, and potentially inexpressible language. Data-breath-data- might serve
as a substance-matter-embodiment that can be spaced, bypassed, lived, shared,
and heard but not ignored. It is also possible that data-breath-data- generates various
affects and diverse assemblages in itself and others. Authors making connections
to data-breath-data- encourage readers to hum and sing their breaths, to see
what might happen under breath or within spaces between the breaths. Breathing
becomes our world as we breathe the world molecules and inhale past, present, and
future data-breath-data- of ourselves and others.
Possibilities with performance: Performance could be considered as one platform
to reconceptualize and re-enact data. In this book the performative data lines are
illustrated in the chapters by Duhn, Rouhiainen, Denzin, Benozzo and Koro-
Ljungberg, Banerjee and Blaise, Ulmer, Arlander and beyond. Data-performance
or performance-data conceptualizations and practices take into account the
vibrancy of data, diverse ways for data to stay open to potentialities, resonances,
and theoretical practices and bodily orchestrations. Data-performance or performance-
data could be recognized through its different modes including the jester,
serious, and plastic modes. In addition, data could be formed through or within
plastic performances of political and ethical entanglements or through diverse
introduction | 7
processes of un-formation. Data-performance or performance-data have potential
to become a part of co-performance with machines and technology and as
such illustrating human-machine intra-actions. Ethnographical, rhetorical, and