Table Of Content‘In this essential new volume, Ellingson and Sotirin ask: What do data actually do? The
authors land on multiple pragmatic potentials for what data can mean, and they present
multiple possibilities for the utility of qualitative inquiry. I cannot wait to use this book in
my qualitative analysis seminar.’
Jimmie Manning, Ph.D., Chair and Professor, Communication Studies,
School of Social Justice & Research Studies, University of Nevada
‘Ellingson and Sotorin offer a conceptually rich and action-oriented model of data
engagement, a must-read for qualitative researchers in a wide variety of research areas.
The authors present a bold understanding of data as made and assembled illustrated with
engaging examples, practical advice, and useful strategies. Much more than a “how to”
methods text, Making Data in Qualitative Research is a reader-friendly resource that
advances qualitative research in creative and critical ways.’
Lynn M. Harter, Ph.D., Professor and Co-Director, Barbara Geralds
Institute for Storytelling and Social Impact
‘In this compelling and thought-provoking book, Ellingson and Sotirin invite us to stand
within and alongside data, recognizing its agency and power to become something new
every time we engage with it. Instead of asking “What are data?” the authors ask
“What do data do?” Unimagined configurations take shape when we discover that
fieldnotes have lively careers, recordings remain in flux, enlivened by new meanings across
time and space, transcripts are never innocent, alive with political, cultural, and reflexive
possibilities, and digital data circulates and transmutates through and across borders.
Every chapter offers vivid exemplars of published studies that reveal “data on the move”,
helping readers to engage with and imagine possibilities for their own research. By dis
rupting traditional representations of data, this book challenges each of us to become
entangled, embodied, and vulnerable in our engagement with data and the imagination
and playfulness it evokes.’
Dr. Patricia Geist-Martin, San Diego State University
Making Data in Qualitative Research
Making Data in Qualitative Research offers a generative alternative to outdated
approaches to data collection. By reimagining methods through a model of data
engagement, qualitative researchers consider what is at stake—ethically,
methodologically, and theoretically—when we co-create data and imagine
possibilities for doing data differently.
Ellingson and Sotirin draw on critical, intersectional perspectives, including
feminist, poststructuralist, new materialist, and postqualitative theorizing, to
refigure methodological practices of data collection for the contemporary
moment. Ellingson and Sotirin’s data engagement model offers a vibrant frame
work through which data are made rather than found; assembled rather than
collected or gathered; and becoming or dynamic rather than static. Further,
pragmatism, compassion, and joy form a compelling ethical foundation for
engaging with qualitative data reflecting the full range of critical, postpositivist,
interpretivist, and arts-based research methods. Chapters illuminate creative
possibilities for engaging fieldnotes, audio/video recordings and photographs,
transcription, digital/online data, participatory data, and self-as-data.
Making Data in Qualitative Research is a great resource for researchers who
want to move past simplistic approaches to qualitative data collection and
embrace provocative possibilities for engaging with data. Bridging abstract
theorizing and pragmatic strategies for making a wide variety of data, this book
will appeal to graduate (and advanced undergraduate) qualitative methods stu
dents and early career researchers, as well as to advanced scholars looking to
update and expand the scope of their methods.
Laura L. Ellingson is the Patrick A. Donohoe, S.J. Professor of Commu
nication and Women’s and Gender Studies at Santa Clara University, USA.
She is the author of Engaging Crystallization in Qualitative Research (2009, SAGE)
and Embodiment in Qualitative Research (2017, Routledge).
Patty Sotirin is Professor of Communication at Michigan Technological
University, USA. She is co-author (with Laura Ellingson) of Aunting: Cultural
Practices That Sustain Family and Community Life (2010, Baylor University Press)
and Where the Aunts Are: Family, Feminism, and Kinship in Popular Culture (2013,
Baylor University Press).
Making Data in Qualitative
Research
Engagements, Ethics, and Entanglements
Laura L. Ellingson and Patty Sotirin
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Laura L. Ellingson and Patty Sotirin to be identified as authors of
this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks and are used only for identification and explanation without
intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-17887-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-17888-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-05824-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
Laura, For Glenn
Patty, For my parents
Contents
List of figures x
Acknowledgments xi
1 Doing data engagement 1
2 Engaging fieldnotes 15
3 Engaging recordings 33
4 Engaging transcripts 53
5 Engaging digital data 72
6 Engaging participatory data 87
7 Engaging self-as-data 108
Postscript: Inviting data possibilities 124
References 126
Index 155
