A Conversation About Spectral Data

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

Abstract

Objective
Spectral data are a Deleuzoguattarian (1987) territorial assemblage, or multidimensional space, composed of a variety of kinds of data (e.g., St. Pierre’s (1997) emotional and dream data, embodied data, and writing), generated by a relationship between a living researcher and a deceased person. To describe and enact spectral data, I use iMovie to present a conversation between my grandmother and me as we work together to define spectral data.

Theoretical Framework
I draw on Derrida’s (1994) deconstruction of the living/deceased binary. Derrida suggested that the dead are always already amongst the living: “The one who has disappeared appears still to be there, and his apparition is not nothing. It does not do nothing” (1994:120). Spectral data result from those instances when the dead do something in a study. That something fashions a Deleuzoguattarian territorial assemblage, a continually shifting space. This provides a way to think about data while occupying a space that is not bound by humanist notions of space and time or binaries such as living/deceased.

Methods
I experienced spectral data throughout my post-qualitative study about 11 family history genealogists and the objects (photographs, documents, artifacts) they use to construct their ancestors. The ancestors occupied the objects associated with their lives and the participants’ words used to describe those objects during object-interviews, in which the living, nonliving and objects folded together to produce knowledge. As I came to know the ancestors through those objects and words, we joined together and created a variety of spectral data territories. Through my own genealogical work, my deceased ancestors also became part of the study as they haunted the objects that once belonged to them. However, the spectral data generated between my grandmother and me remains closest to my heart and most important to my work.

Data Sources
This iMovie is a correspondence between my grandmother and me as we create a territorial assemblage of writing data, dream data, emotional data and embodied data.

Results
The iMovie seeks to textually and visually manifest a reversal of the living/deceased binary and the middle space of spectral data. The fragmentary conversation and spectral photographs of my grandmother are open to a variety of interpretations and responses. This iMovie, then, becomes a passageway to think about how the living and dead work together to generate data in qualitative research.

Significance
While other scholars have included ghosts in their research, they uphold the presence/absence binary. Spectral data work in the middle of presence and absence, creating a different ontological space. Spectral data are an innovative way of thinking about how the living and deceased generate data in qualitative research.
References
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international. (P. Kamuf, Trans.) NY: Routledge.
St.Pierre, E. A. (1997). Methodology in the fold and the irrup¬tion of transgressive data. Qualitative Studies in Education, 10, 175-189.

Author

• Susan Naomi Nordstrom, The University of Memphis