Interviewing Objects as Co-researchers

We employ our heuristics to interrogate the networked, digital landscape of contemporary qualitative research practices. We interview NVivo (a qualitative data analysis software package) and an iPod that were recruited at different stages of research projects. We suggest that these digital entities or “coded materialities” participate as co-researchers that not only transform, extend, and support but also deform, disrupt, and circumscribe research practice and knowledge construction, and inevitably introduce new tensions and contradictions. We take a brief foray into the doings of digital data in research practices, using visualization software as an example.

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