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Short abstract:

Understanding methods as performative, it matters greatly how we obtain information about that which we study. This paper aims to be concise on the kind of engagement with the digital, proposing to see the collecting and analyzing of heterogeneous online material as a form of “digital excavation”.

Long abstract:

This paper takes a reflexive stance, pondering upon what it means to do digital fieldwork in a world where data can be found everywhere and all the time, meaning that all kinds of material are published online in a continuous stream, thus quite available to interested researchers – but in amounts often overwhelming to sort out and make use of.

In my research on the Canadian oil sands, engaging with the arguments of actors involved in (and the controversies surrounding) this difficult oil production, I worked with official, public sources only, accessing these exclusively through online engagement. Having assembled very diverse material – from corporate reports, governmental white papers, juridical documents, blogs and media articles to visual imagery and technical animations – I propose my way of working with material encountered online as a form of “digital excavation”. Rather than seeing this as a way of literally unearthing artifacts, I am interested in the way researchers can alternate between collecting material, (pre)analyze these and then go back online to investigate further and dig deeper into certain matters and concerns, inspired by the findings made in previous online encounters. What then stands out, is that this digital excavation might contribute to a kind of montaging of the data that is enabled and effectuated by the very fact that the material was found online in the first place.

Can this be understood as a kind of relevance-making researchers perform, a way of snowballing material that might expand our understanding of ‘the digital’?