Feminist data analysis. Using digital methods for ethical, reflexive and situated socio-cultural research: Lessons learned from researching young Londoners’ digital identities

Abstract

What may responsible data-analysis in the social sciences and humanities look like? The current datalogical turn foregrounds the digital datafication of everyday life, increasing algorithmic processing and data as an emergent regime of power/knowledge. Scholars celebrate the politics of big data knowledge production for its omnipotent objectivity or dismiss it outright as data fundamentalism that may lead to methodological genocide. In this feminist and postcolonial intervention into gender-, race-, and geography-blind 'big data' ideologies I call for ethical, anti-oppressive digital data-driven research in the social sciences and humanities I argue that a more ethical, situated and reflexive data scholarship may emerge from the re-integration of feminist and postcolonial science studies and ethics of care ideals. Although it is no panacea for all ails of data mining, I offer a roadmap for an alternative data-analysis practice, which is more situated, reflexive and accountable. By incorporating a people-centric and context-aware perspective, that acknowledges relationships of dependency, reflects on temptations and scrutinizes benefits and harm an 'asymmetrically reciprocal' (Young, 1997) research encounter may be achieved. I bring this perspective to bear on experiences of a two-year research project with 84 young Londoners on digital identities and living in a highly diverse city. I align awareness of uneven relations of power and knowledge with the messy relation of dependency between human and non-human actors in data analysis. This framework is productive to recognise digital data cannot be expected to speak for itself, that data do not emerge from a vacuum and that isolated data patterns cannot be the end-goal of a situated and reflexive research endeavour. Data driven research, in turn, shows the urgency for renewed feminist ethical reflection on how digital mediation impacts upon responsibility, intersectional power relations, human subjectivity, and the autonomy of research participants over their own data.