In this talk I consider how data walking can be a productive method studies for the study of data and its infrastructures in media and communication studies. I examine how three affordances of walking (embodied, situated and generative) offer opportunities for different forms of knowledge production (experiential, spatio-temporal and performative). Subsequently, I reflect on data walks within a series of new methods for studying data (and its infrastructures) that all emphasize data as situated and offer a distinct form of criticality. To this end I explore “the walkthrough method” (Light, Burgess and Duguay 2018), “local readings” (Loukissas 2019) “situated data analysis” (Rettberg 2020) but also feminist data visualization (D’Ignazio and Klein 2020).          

 

Karin van Es (@kfvanes) is assistant professor in media and culture studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her research centers on questions of data, tool criticism in computational methods, and the datafication of public service media. She is co-editor of the open-access volume The Datafied Society (Amsterdam University Press, 2017) and the special issue “Big Data Histories” (2018) for TMG- Journal for Media History. She has published in outlets such as Social Media + Society, Television & New Media, Media, Culture & Society and First Monday.