Paper short abstract:

The paper accounts for a research project aimed at studying children’s representations of supernatural agents. The project team is going through the set-up and analysis of thousands of drawings made by children from various regions of the world. Our study documents the process of equipping these data.

Paper long abstract:

Digitization of human products leads to data and databases that open new opportunities for researchers in the humanities and social sciences. However, the process is not straightforward. The path that leads from "raw" material to usable data is a tortuous and complex one. The shaping of digital data appears to be a key stage during which individuals and teams reconsider not only the objects under study and their research goals but also their competences, tools and relationships to other disciplines (e.g. IT experts).

The paper is based on a two-year participant-observation inside an interdisciplinary research project aimed at studying children's representations of supernatural agents. The project gathers scholars and practitioners from developmental and cultural psychology, social psychology, religious studies and computer science. Together, they are going through the set-up and analysis of thousands of drawings made by children from various regions of the world (Brazil, Iran, Japan, Romania, Russia, Switzerland, etc.). Our paper explores the emergence of the research collective and the way collaboration is achieved (or endangered) between team members. It documents the constitution of the data (digitized drawings and metadata), the database and the analytical tools. It shows the emergence of an e-research infrastructure and the way choices of various orders are progressively blackboxed into data, IT tools, research protocols, organization and skills. Central to our argument is the notion of data equipment, which we use to describe the process of adding various entities to data in order to enable their circulation and use.