Possession: Research Practice in the Shadow of the Archive

Rachel Thomson

Chapter 2 in The Craft of Knowledge, 2014, pp 39-55 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The idea of possession is at the heart of both the ethics and practices of research, as well as being part of the researcher’s personal relationship to their work. These issues have been made more complex by digitisation and public access to data which at one time the researcher imagined was their own (almost private) possession. In this chapter, I explore what it means both to possess data (in terms of accepting and relinquishing responsibility for the generation of documents through empirical research) and what it means to be possessed by this data in the creative process of analysis, interpretation and writing. In order to tell the story of what it means to possess and be possessed by data I first need to explore the ways in which digitisation has reframed the politics of social research. I will suggest that digitisation has its own affordances – giving rise to a logic of replicability and instantaneity that incite us to show, archive and reuse.

Keywords: Social Research; Digital Method; Social Research Council; Digital Revolution; Digital Practice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-28734-2_3

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137287342_3

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