The Appearance of Data

• In Event: Various Un/thinkable Possibilities of “Data”

Abstract

The objective of this theoretical and methodological paper is to use poststructural theories of language to explore conditions that allow data to appear, to come into being, to be thought in both conventional and more radical approaches in empirical social science research.

The presenter argues that “conventional humanist qualitative inquiry” that uses a positivist ontology treats qualitative data, words, as brute, existing independent of both an interpretive frame and a researcher—data out there somewhere waiting to be “collected” by a human. In this way, data functions in the humanist, Cartesian subject/object binary. However, a Deleuzo-Guattarian ontology as well as the ontology of the new feminist empiricisms in which the human and nonhuman are entangled force us to rethink what counts as data and then what counts as “data collection.” Can data be separated from the “collector” in an entangled world? Can data be “collected”? What are data anyway in this different ontology? The presenter questions the concept data, wondering whether it is still thinkable after the ontological turn.

The author resists recuperating data in the collapse of the old empiricism and is content to pause in the curious possibilities of a normative ontology that imagines a superior, affirmative, and experimental empiricism in which all concepts, including data, must be re-thought. Given that data is a foundational concept in social science inquiry, this paper that addresses the conditions of its existence is clearly of scientific and scholarly significance. This paper is based on several qualitative studies approved by an IRB.

References:
Glaser, Barney G. & Strauss, Anselm L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Jackson, Alecia Y. & Mazzei Lisa A. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research: Viewing data across multiple perspectives. London, UK: Routledge.
Kvale, Steiner & Brinkmann, Svend. (2009). Interviews: Learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing. (2nd ed.). Los Angeles: Sage.

Author

• Elizabeth A. St. Pierre, University of Georgia