COSPI Symposium: Digital Worlds and Tactile Practices: Exploring digitality through creative methods

Hosted by COSPI research centre – further details of the symposium can be found on the COSPI events page.

The relationship between digital phenomena and the methods we use to study them is far from settled. As datafication reshapes everyday life, researchers working at the intersection of digital studies and qualitative inquiry face a shared challenge: How do we research digital life when its textures, rhythms, and entanglements resist conventional methods?

This symposium invites PhD students and Early Career Researchers to think together about the methodological challenges and possibilities of researching the digital through arts-based and experimental approaches. The symposium focuses on demonstrating, interrogating, and pushing forward the possibilities of creative methodology in digital social research.

The aim is to foreground cross-disciplinary methods in practice, including how they are developed, adapted, and used within contemporary social research contexts. Emphasis is placed on creativity, reflexivity, and methodological innovation. We hope this symposium sparks inspiration for new methods and approaches to research, creates connections between the scholars, and builds capacity for a research group to arise out of it.

Keynote: “Playing with prompts: Creative interventions for digital culture”

Dr Taylor Annabell (Cardiff University) and Dr Nina Vindum Rasmussen

Our experiences of seeing our datafied self and taste as articulated by Spotify Wrapped or gaining ‘control’ over music recommendation through Prompted Playlists, are heavily mediated by interfaces, algorithmic systems and digital infrastructure. They are also a product of ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff, 2019): reliant on extracted user data and another source for generating further data about users.

As part of our ongoing collaborative research into what digital encounters and interactions mean to people and their sense-making practices, we embrace alternative research methodologies that deliberately resist these modalities.

Turning to ‘data feminism’ (D'Ignazio and Klein, 2020), material practices, embodied sensibilities and creative collaboration, we have developed workshops that generate rich data that contribute to our academic understanding of digital culture. These workshops also offer meaningful experiences for participants to critically reflect on their practices and our platform society.

In this talk, we discuss our use of ‘workshop as method’ in our ‘Spotify Wrapped’ project, which we developed iteratively over a period of two years, allowing us to engage with over 200 people.

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu7lg9YzGj4