Affective routes in interviews: Participants exploring a digital map as a live elicitation method

Abstract

How we elicit rich reflections from people about their feelings and experiences is a central consideration of qualitative research. Creative techniques of elicitation can open reflective dialogic spaces between participants and researchers, bridging memory and meaning. In this article we discuss participant-led explorations of a digital story-mapping platform as an elicitation technique in qualitative interviews. This platform is Queering the Map, a community-generated counter-mapping project that digitally archives queer moments in place. An atemporal cartographic representation of queer life, visitors to the site zoom, drag and click to reveal the anonymous contributions of others: micro-stories of experience, poems, messages and yearnings, claiming a global landscape of queer feeling. Here we offer reflections from our experience of asking participants to explore and guide us around the map within an interview. We chart how this method of live digital discovery was generative of elicitation and evocation, of insights on affective roots (where have I come from?) and affective routes (where can I take you?). This article contributes to scholarship on elicitation and live methods, including digital and spatial approaches, and to conceptualisations of orientation and mapping.

Introduction: on orientation

Opening her book Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed (2006a) questions what it means to be orientated. She takes a material approach to this question, highlighting the objects we turn towards to get our bearings, the things that help us find our way. Ahmed conceptualises these as anchoring points: orientating things which ‘gather on the ground’ and thereby ‘create a ground upon which we can gather’ (Ahmed, 2006a: 1). In this article we reflect on our study of a ground upon which people gather: Queering the Map, a digital crowdsourced storymap and counter-archive created in 2017 by Lucas LaRochelle, a Montreal based designer. A stylisation of the Google Maps application programming interface, Queering the Map offers a rendering of the world to which users can ‘pin’ their queer stories (see queeringthemap.com). Visitors make their away around the map, dragging, zooming, clicking; browsing the queer moments pinned in place by anonymous others.

Of interest to us is how visitors are orientated, how they reside on and with this cartographic platform, and the implications for how queer community is experienced. Concepts of orientation, place, and residence have animated our empirical research and ongoing analyses of this platform (see Kirby et al., 2021; Watson et al., 2024); so too are these methodologically generative. Approaching orientation in the way she does, Ahmed offers us a conceptual anchoring point to gather our thoughts and experiences with those of scholars working with resonant qualitative approaches. Here we reflect on conducting interviews via Zoom on Queering the Map, with people who have read others’ posts or contributed stories of their own, which involved a live participant-led exploration of the site.

Background: mapping queer life

The Queering the Map platform, and our discussion herein, lies at a complex nexus: of live and lively methods, material methods, digital methods, mobile methods, counter- and DIY archiving, visual methods, place-based storytelling, cartographic narratives and narrative cartographies. To orient ourselves and chart a trajectory within this diverse methodological literature towards a background (cf. Ahmed, 2006a: 38) on digitally mapping queer life, we apply Ahmed's framing; from orientation, we consider the idea of affect as contact, the notion of proximity, and of shared inhabitance. That is, we focus on methodological discussions that consider how ‘we are affected by “what” we come into contact with’ (2006a: 2–3), or the materials and modes of research; on the ‘different ways of registering the proximity of objects and others’ (2006a: 6), or the types of data we collect; and on ‘the work of inhabitance’ (2006a: 11) and embodied ways we inhabit space together, or our conversational-observational presence in qualitative interviews.

Material methods have developed from research on material culture as an effort to better understand and utilise materiality. This approach, concerning ‘observations of what people do with things’ (Woodward, 2016: 361), is a pillar of the ethnographic tradition – one that Woodward, a leader in the approach, observes particularly in projects employing visual techniques for data collection (e.g., photography, video-recording) and elicitation. Such methods, which often involve visual and/or digital elements (Bagnoli, 2009; Bravington and King, 2019; Kauffman, 2018), are becoming well-established techniques for generating participant-led insights. These elicitation techniques add significant value to qualitative encounters such as interviews, as mechanisms for highlighting and making (literally) visible issues that are of importance to participants themselves, and for surfacing memories and reflections on experience in ways that open opportunities for dialogic explanation and interpretation. We are drawn to these as they embrace principles of inclusivity and participatory approaches to research, disrupting notions of researcher-as-expert. They instead seek to privilege participants’ voices, particularly from less-visible or marginalised communities, and empower participants via methods that support their leadership (Chen, 2022). Notwithstanding critiques related to assumptions that such techniques automatically afford participation, empowerment and change (Milne and Muir, 2020), we see potential in methods that incorporate materials to stimulate participant-driven insights. Importantly, these approaches resonate with the political ethos and participatory design of Queering the Map. They are also not exclusive of digital technologies; while exemplary studies, including Woodward's own projects (e.g., 2011), focus on artefacts such as clothing, framed photographs and books, material methods span the non-binaric digital-material spectrum. We see parallels in explicitly ‘material’ methods and sociomaterial approaches to the digital.

Digital methods have developed in a similar vein to material ones: from work on digital cultures, to better understand and employ digital technologies in research. This includes observational studies about and done via online platforms (Dobson et al., 2018; Pink et al., 2015), using participants’ own technologies to help record and lead data collection on their personal technology use (Watson and Lupton, 2022), and using online platforms to facilitate research and thereby address issues of distance or access (Howlett, 2022). Related are mobile methods, which, in some cases, draw on the affordances of geo-spatial location technologies (e.g., internet-connected fitness wearables and smartphones) to record and explore the (possibilities of the) digitisation of social life across settings (Hall and Smith, 2014). In this intersection of material, digital and mobile approaches, spatial metaphors have become methodologically and popularly significant (Møller and Robards, 2019). Bodily and geographic mobilities, as well as navigational flows through and between platform infrastructures, generate digital traces (Møller and Robards, 2019: 97–98). Researchers have examined these traces in various ways, for instance, as wayfaring (Moores, 2015) and via scroll back methods (Robards and Lincoln, 2017). Traces are not only digital; scholars working within the broad mobilities paradigm have long conceived of traces (see e.g., Fincham et al., 2009): as a kind of muscle memory, a familiar path taken in everyday life, as the social pattern of a bio-geographic journey, and, most usefully for us here, as tracing and retracing, the labour of a spatially sensitive method. This includes various ways of ‘going along’ with participants, in cars and on foot (O’Neill and Robert, 2020; Ross et al., 2009), as well as mapping participants’ movements.

Spatial sensitivity is, we think, nowhere stronger demonstrated than in affective, critical and narrative cartographies – or, approaches that bring together emotions, stories and maps. These have an obvious value for our research, as they involve the locating of stories and other things in places along with conceptual considerations of representation (Dodge and Kitchin, 2013), visualisation (Caquard and Fiset, 2014), and the complexities of capturing the ‘sensory experience of place as lived’ (Powell, 2010; Roth, 2021; see also Back, 2012). Geographers have highlighted the potential for mapping emotions, including using maps to assist in the collection of data on emotions, how people feel in places and spaces (e.g., places that inspire, places to be avoided) (Griffin and McQuoid, 2012). Indeed there is a rich scholarship on the affective interactive potential of maps for eliciting knowledge, fostering community and belonging, and generating activism (e.g., Guitérrez, 2020; Roth, 2021). Moreover, the past two decades have seen a wave of public mapping projects, and of mapping within the broader umbrella of creative visual research methods, in part due to the increasing accessibility of novel technologies (satellite imagery, GPS-enabled devices, the Google Maps API) that enable the creation, adaptation and easy use of digitally interactive maps (see Kirby et al., 2021). While some examples of narrative cartography focus on, for instance, mapping the scenes of fictional stories so they may be physically toured (Caquard and Fiset, 2014; Piatti et al., 2009), we again are drawn to participatory approaches that seek to connect and make visible the multiple and diverse lived experiences of marginalised communities. Illustrative is Fileborn's (2021) incorporation of mapping as a pre-activity and elicitation prompt for her interviews on people's experiences of street-based harassment. Building on feminist and activist counter-mapping projects, Fileborn uses mapping to mark an experience (in her research context, a harm) ‘as worthy of recognition’ (Fileborn, 2021: 3).

The materials and modes, types of data, and researcher presence in these various approaches orients us towards some key considerations. We flag these here and pick up the threads more meaningfully in the discussion sections below. One consideration is that how we might observe what people do with things (cf. Woodward, 2016) necessarily includes, in approaches such as ours, the interface of the interview. As activities are taken up in qualitative interviews in ways that ‘shift our methods from things being an “object'” of study to also being part of the empirical “process of engagement”’ (Woodward, 2016: 362 citing Michael, 2012: 167), there is methodological value in reflecting on how these interactive engagements take place. Taking a process-oriented approach to studying objects is, as Michael (2012) outlines, one way to cultivate a methodological openness and an attunement to the multiple and nonsensical – it is a way of doing live methods (Back and Puwar, 2012). On data types, we consider the differences captured in, for example, a participant's ‘thing’ (a technology, a walking path, a map they have drawn) versus their verbal descriptions of that thing and their motivations – not (only) in order to triangulate or otherwise cross-check data, but to consider the differing sensitivities and delimitations (cf. Fileborn, 2021) of research materials. We also consider how and why we might ‘go along’ with participants in the research encounter, or what kind of presence we offer to our participants in our conversations and observations: as a listening ear to their voices, a companion in tracing paths, as a recognising witness. Guiding our practice is Back and Puwar's (2012) work on the significance and possibility of live methods, or simultaneity in research.

Methods: the Queering the Map story project

Lucas LaRochelle, the Queering the Map designer, states on their website,

The platform provides an interface to collaboratively archive the cartography of queer memory – from park benches to the middle of the ocean – in order to preserve our histories and unfolding realities, which continue to be invalidated, contested, and erased… By mapping out LGBTQ2IA + experience in its intersectional permutations, the project works to generate affinity across difference and beyond borders (lucaslarochelle.com, see also LaRochelle, 2020).

The site is now home to over 500,000 stories, charting a vibrant range of queer experiences, moments, memories, spaces and places of meaning. Visitors contribute to the platform by zooming and dragging themselves around a world map, clicking on a desired location and typing into a pop-up textbox (shown in Figure 1); posts are submitted by clicking ‘Add’. Submissions are moderated prior to appearing on the map. ¹

Figure 1.

Queeringthemap.com mainland Australia, and instructions for posting a pinned story. The colour version is available online.

Queering the Map is queer in and by design. Through aesthetic and technological affordances, the platform queers contemporary norms in social media and other comparable platforms. Visitors manually navigate their way across the pink and purple map to their chosen parts of the world (there is no search functionality), and posts are intentionally anonymous. While contributors may include partially identifying information (see Kirby et al., 2021; Watson et al., 2024), there is no capacity for individual user profiles, nor are posts time or data stamped, making connectivity and more traditional forms of online interaction (such as ‘liking’ or direct replies) almost impossible. As we have discussed elsewhere, there is no capacity within the platform to mark and distinguish one story from another, or a story read thousands of times from one never read, nor is there emphasis on ‘new’ content. What results, aesthetically (as shown in Figures 1 and 2), are concentrations of simple black pins, each representing a queer moment. To again draw directly from LaRochelle (2020: 139):

Queering the Map functions as a commons of uncommon senses. It hijacks the authoritative status of the map, vandalizing it with subjective spatial histories that make space for a queer commons of feeling. Its dis-organizational strategy resists the ability to obtain an easy read, or a collapse into the systems of legibility that would qualify for ‘common sense’. The single story is disrupted, making way for a promiscuously non-linear narrative, or perhaps anti-narrative.

This, we contend, makes Queering the Map a rich space for scholarly attention. We wanted to explore what using and engaging with the map means to people, and what kinds of stories/posts appeal or resonate with visitors and why. This includes those who have spent time on the platform reading others’ stories and those who have contributed their own posts. Following university ethics clearance, we collected and analysed the almost 2000 stories that, as of late 2019, were pinned to Australia on the map (see Kirby et al., 2021); we then conducted in-depth qualitative interviews throughout 2020 with fourteen people who had engaged with the map to gain greater insight into their experiences and how affective intimacies generate.

Figure 2.

Downtown Montreal, Canada, the opening page of queeringthemap.com. The colour version is available online.

We recruited participants via social media and through key local and national LGBTQIA + networks. Participants were all located within Australia at the time of interview, ranging in age from their early 20s to late 60s, with most in their 20s or 30s, and all identified their sexuality and/or gender in multiple diverse ways. Watson conducted the interviews online, using Zoom, the audio of which was recorded and transcribed verbatim. Following each interview, we debriefed in discussion, including reflections on method and process, topics or themes of interest, and considerations of how individual interviews resonated or diverged from others.

We structured the interview guide into sections. First, we asked participants about themselves, then about their experiences with Queering the Map, such as how they learned about the platform, what they looked for on it, how they felt when doing this, and what it meant to them. Then, we prompted a live exploration of the site with further questions and directions that were iteratively based on answers they had given. Within the first section, the interview guide was question-centric. We asked how queer friendly their local environments seemed, what social or otherwise interactive online media platforms they engage with, what kinds of stories or places they felt drawn to on Queering the Map, and whether they had talked about the platform with others in their lives. With these questions, we sought to gain insight into the socio-spatial and socio-technical dimensions of our participants’ lives and their platform practices. We also hoped to sensitise our participants to the digital and geographic dimensions of their identities and sense of community belonging, so that we could then use the platform as a dispersive prism, to separate the light of their queer experience into its hues and themes. That is, we worked to elicit data on these dimensions – to prompt participants to reflect on what they did and how they felt, and to get a demonstrated sense of what ‘rules of engagement’ they had learned about the platform.

While the participant-led exploration of the map was an attempt to move beyond the standard in-depth interview (Bagnoli, 2009), the inclusion of this was in part pragmatic. We designed this project pre-COVID as a Zoom-mediated study to help us easily reach a geographically disparate cohort beyond the urban queer concentrations of our city. When recruiting and conducting our interviews throughout 2020, our methods then had to comply with COVID-19 related restrictions in Australia, as did much research conducted in this period (Howlett, 2022; Watson and Lupton, 2022), where the majority of participants (and the researchers) were living under strict lockdown conditions. Conducting interviews online became a necessity.

When asking participants to look at Queering the Map, we expected to direct them in terms of places and spaces visited and topics covered, echoing the researcher-led prompt-and-response style of our semi-structured questioning. Yet, we were sensitive to the possibility that participants, like us, were likely experiencing forms of Zoom fatigue (Chen, 2022), overburdened with the ‘new normal’ of online work and social life. In response, we lent more on exploratory potential in this section of the interview. Having participants load and look around the site felt more collaborative and offered a kind of respite through doing something other than looking at each other (and our own webcam images), a mutual opportunity between interviewer and participant to interact around material of shared interest. While conducting the interviews, we felt the sessions become more conversational as participants began to explore the platform without meaningful prompting or being directed by the researcher.

We were mindful that these online interactions could be hampered by material restrictions, including in our own personal circumstances during the pandemic, such as limited access to private spaces and weak internet connectivity. As a backup option, in case of platform maintenance or difficulties in accessing the site, we prepared a selection of screenshotted stories from the platform to share with participants as prompts for discussion. However, even when the platform was slow to load or inaccessible, the interviewing researcher never drew on the pre-selected stories as prompts; it didn’t ‘feel right’ in the moment, or felt too removed from what exploring the platform in real-time was like. The feeling of these moments, of ‘real-time reflexivity’ (Perera, 2019) as a relational encounter (Walby, 2010), magnified when we turned and returned to our audio recordings (following Gallagher, 2020) and transcripts during analysis. Our experience of this method was more intimate, more affective, and more moulded by vulnerability than we anticipated. Taking a reflexive approach to the contexts of research encounters (Perera, 2019), which in this case included a sensitivity to degrees of familiarity with Queering the Map and to the vulnerabilities of participant-led exploration, was methodologically generative. In the following discussion sections, we reflect on this live method (cf. Back and Puwar, 2012) as a process for evocation. We consider Queering the Map as a lively interview interface, the temporal dynamics of our interviews, and what happened when our participants became our guide.

Discussion: finding, feeling, interface

We asked participants to look for stories on the platform that resonated for any given reason, and to share them with us (aloud, so it could be captured on the tape), and reflect. Participants’ discussion of chosen places or stories generated the bulk of the data we used in our empirical analyses. Getting to such places and stories, getting anywhere, was also interesting. We begin with the process of finding, rather than the arrival of something found, to chart our experience of researching with this interface: of transitioning from a more traditional in-depth online interview to asking participants to open the platform and guide us through their exploration.

Participants were asked to open the platform and screen-share via the built-in function on Zoom. Before commencing the formal part of the interview, participants had been (re)informed that what followed would be audio-recorded, and not video-recorded. This was a deliberate attempt to protect, retain rapport and establish comfort with participants as they disclosed intimate parts of their experiences and identities, and a means to emphasise the importance of their verbal reflections as they moved around the map. Approaches where researchers go along with participants, such as mobile methods where a participant walks or uses transportation to guide a researcher around their local geographies, offer insightful windows into places and spaces of significance, routines, and related geospatial affects, driven by research participants (Ross et al., 2009). In using participant-led exploration as a method, we were interested to see where participants would take us, given the scope of the global map. As Ahmed (2006b: 545) notes, ‘orientations are about how we begin, how we proceed from here’. As such, an initial question for us concerned the extent to which participants would move into, around, or away from the opening view of the map: zoomed in to Montreal, Canada (see Figure 2).

As well as the distinct pink skin of the site, this starting location offers an immediate distinction from Google Maps, which typically loads at the user's current location; while it looks like a Google Maps map, upon loading it become quickly clear that Queering the Map has not personalised or meshed to where the user is physically, and place names (many of which are French) are obscured by black pins. It is hard to discern the word Montreal at all anymore. This unsettles expectations and disorients from the outset. An initial curiosity thus lay in how participants would attempt to locate themselves, and, relatedly, how they might feel about Montreal as a place to start.

All participants began by zooming out, looking for recognisable place names or shapes that might offer topographical clues on their location, to ease the journey of dragging us around the world. As one participant reflected as they loaded and first moved about the map:

It just gets you to go exploring really, doesn’t it?… it started me on Montreal for some reason.

[Interviewer: Yeah]

It wasn’t localised. So, I was like, okay, and I started zooming out and zooming out and zooming out and eventually got to [Australian city] and then things started to get a little easier, but other than that, it's good. I can see why it makes you explore. You’re sort of start going, okay, what's this. [Participant #14]

None of the participants read any stories posted in Montreal aloud, revealing the imposed starting location as a reference point from which perhaps to re-discover more familiar territories. This initial orientation, for some participants, presented uncertainty within attempts to feel their way around the map:

Cool. Alright. We’re on. Where are we? Where do you want to go?

[Interviewer: Anywhere you like]

Alright. [#8]

Do you want me to go anywhere in particular?

[Interviewer: It's up to you.]

Let's go to [pause] I’ll take us to [Australian city] as that's what we’ve been talking about… Okay… You could get lost looking at these things for long periods of time.

[clicking on and reading posts] Oh, that's sweet. Some of them are sad as well… I’m just going to look at a few until I find one that I think is interesting for some reason. [#9]

Early attempts of orientation, or reorientation, of finding their way toward a logic that might guide their movement were common across the interviews. This presented an early opportunity to share in and unpack the way the platform is accessed and navigated, including comfort and discomfort in the research encounter related to what might be described as coherent or proficient map recognition and navigation:

Right. Where are we? I can’t even tell where we are?

[Interviewer: No. Neither can I. I’m trying to look for a name that I recognise and I do not recognise any of those]

Oh, I’ve made it worse now. Okay. Somewhere near Poland there… possibly. Oh, I’ve made this real complicated for us now, haven’t I?

[Interviewer: No, not at all. It's fine]

[Laughs] Let me squizz over here for something we might recognise [#7]

As with other forms of mobile methods (e.g., walking methods, guided walks), the navigation and direction or intention of the participant as ‘guide’ is negotiated, mediated in practice, as a co-generated research encounter (Ross et al., 2009), where participants become co-analysts (Robards and Lincoln, 2017). This checking, clarifying and confirming between participant and interviewer – for something ‘we’ might recognise – underlines our attempt to cultivate a sense of togetherness in this observed exploration, and to think about place and space as experienced in relation. This is, to draw on Massey (2005: 59), an effort to think about the digital map as a space that is ‘open, multiple and relational, unfinished and always in becoming.’ We observed distractions to this process, where the circumstances of the interview or affordances of the platform undermined the ‘smoothness’ of the experience. The scheduling of one interview, for example, happened to coincide with platform maintenance, resulting in the map losing its pink colour, affecting the visual and sensory experience. Within moments like these we saw participants’ feelings of being exposed or made vulnerable emerge. One participant eloquently described this feeling, of the process of revealing within the research encounter:

… like even if the map is slow to load, it's sort of like something, I don’t know. It's like, ‘What am I about to - what am I going to reveal?’ And then you kind of get a chance to like, you know, hover over some things and look at what they have to say. [#3]

The manual click-and-drag way that visitors must move around the map was similarly revealing in a spatial, rather than in a narrative or personal, sense. While participants may have a particular place in mind, they could not get to it without revealing other areas of the world, oceans and countries along the way. This could be a generative distraction, as it was for one participant while dragging their way from their country of birth to Australia, offering a surprise fork in the road of our ongoing discussion:

I’m moving back to Australia now. I’m zooming out and zooming out… Yeah. I’ve actually changed my mind. I’m going to go to somewhere [else] I’ve been. [#14]

As participants moved around the map, clicking on, digesting, and reading aloud stories that piqued their interest, they flagged the affordances of the platform in terms of the affective implications for (queer) visitors to the site:

…it's interesting because there's no instructions or indication that we should think about using it in these ways, that we should think back to our kind of more formative experiences, but that's how people – not everyone, but how a lot of people look like they’re using it. Another, “Where I first told my friend that I wasn’t entirely straight.” Aw! …we’ve all kind of had like a version of this, which is another reason why it's, I guess, so interesting to all of us, like, you know, the process of coming out is like we don’t just come out, it's not this thing that you just do, at the very least you do it hundreds of times with people, but you do so first in the most kind of tentative of ways and this comment gets at that by saying that I wasn’t entirely straight. It makes me feel happy reading these comments.

[Interviewer: Yeah?]

Happy for people finding their identities and sharing their identities with people. There's also, yeah, so I mean we spoke about some sadder posts, some confronting posts. So, there's a mixture of emotions, but these kinds of nostalgic sweet comments appear to be more common than others. I find all of them interesting, but, yeah. [#9]

Participants’ reflections on how they found affinities, resonances and relatable content (see Kirby et al., 2021; Watson et al., 2024) underscored the significance of the platform, as a map, for queer sense-making, place-making and world-building. Discovering stories that resonated, that were familiar queer rites or that made sense in place, prompted participants to reflect on how the site and the process of orientation affected by the map made them feel. It is the cultivation of space and time to feel, within the process of the research encounter, that we turn to in the following section.

Time, ellipses

An unanticipated aspect of the participant-led exploration lay in the occurrence of silence. Pauses, silences and ‘dead air’ on video conferencing platforms are typically unwelcome, indicative of forgetting to unmute, a momentary lapse in internet connection, or of the uncomfortable silence that follows a question that nobody wants to be first to answer (Chen, 2022). We built the exploration into our research design so to elicit conversation and lively discussion. What occurred, instead or in addition, were prolonged pauses, gaps in conversation. During these gaps, participants considered where to explore and what to click on, they read stories to themselves and considered whether such stories were significant or meaningful enough to read aloud ‘for the record’ – and indeed, as we touched upon above, what such decisions might reveal about themselves as a participant. Unlike ‘usual’ silences within video conferences, indicative of delay or inactivity, these silences were full of activity. They allowed space for movement, reflection, remembering, discovering, locating, realising and interpreting, unrecorded. We do not downplay the influence of our observing presence, but, as we did not video-record the interviews, it is notable that any action not verbally articulated was held outside the gaze of our data; our transcripts only mark these moments as ellipses. Thus, contrary to scholarship on elicitation that privileges talk, what we found were opportunities for generative silence. At times participants sought confirmation from the researcher that the (length of) silence was ‘ok.’ Some offered short utterances as a way of situating their quiet exploration around the map:

I guess I’m just following my instincts here. [#8]

Another participant verbalised how this slow exploration of the map seemed to deviate from their notion of a research interview:

I could be here for hours. It's very distracting [laughs] [#6]

Later, describing their reasoning and activity, the same participant expressed:

I’m zooming out so I can reflect on what it means. [#6]

While we observed such orientational moments as opportunities for building comfort and rapport, we were also cautious about assuming this live method would necessitate rapport and conviviality. Indeed, we encountered several moments, across the interviews, where liveliness was hampered. The pace and rhythmic flow of navigating around the map was contingent at times on the strength of internet connection or the device the participant was using. The map took a long time to load for some participants, creating a clunkiness to the flow of dragging and zooming:

This is very frustrating. Right. Yeah.

[Interviewer: It's okay if it's a bit slow, it's not entirely essential. We can just keep chatting anyway]

Yeah… Okay. Alright. I’ll talk and let that [website loading] happen. Sounds good. Yeah. [#3]

Waiting for the site to load offered ‘time to chat’, a lively stimulus for continuing conversation, in particular, about using the site. This was distinct from the more traditional semi-structured questioning, and followed the researcher's invitation: let's explore. One topic of our post-interview debriefs was how using Queering the Map as an interview interface generated an exploratory mode of engagement. As well as the clear significance of the platform being a map for navigation, it mattered that the platform was something that both researcher and participant had each separately found, as opposed to being a pre-crafted prompt or participant-made artefact (e.g., Lupton and Watson, 2021), and had come together to talk with genuine shared interest about; we were both witnesses to the queer intimacies of the platform, part of its queer intimate public (Kirby et al., 2021; cf. Berlant and Prosser 2011; Poletti, 2011), newly exploring the known but amorphous archive side by side (or digitally face to face). Loading time and lag were part of this exploration process.

Silences also helped to structure the tempo, slowing the pace of conversation and transforming the researcher's waiting within the encounter into a comfortable and quiet space (and time) for reflection. This was akin to what Quinn (2021) conceptualises as taking live methods slowly. It was within these quiet drags and zooms and clicks, around neighbourhoods and traversing continents and oceans, that the value of observing movements, of listening to and holding space for silence, was most palpable. In their analysis of walking methods, Ross and colleagues (2009: 614) similarly articulate the meaning and value in silences, where ‘conversation itself [is] only one contribution to the mass of other elements that comprised the journey.’ Unlike in the guided walks or car journeys discussed by Ross and colleagues, there is no pace or natural rhythm imposed on Queering the Map, there are no smells or sounds in the surrounds to divert attention, there is no level of difficulty to the terrain (apart from technical difficulties, the queer design of the platform, and the strength of internet connections). Nonetheless, the experience of sifting through stories and exploring the map quietly together fostered intimacy and connection between researcher and participant. Intimacy in shared exploration, in discovering stories as windows into the lives of other queer people, was described by several participants, including one who had previously used the platform as an activity for an online (COVID lockdown) date:

Yeah, so not that long ago actually, just in this quarantine sort of period. I was dating somebody on like – I met them on [dating app] and then we just had a – like we were just Skyping throughout the last couple of months, and doing that, we had like just different ideas of things that we could, I guess, do together because, you know, the distance. So, that's how we came across Queering the Map. I think they knew about it, so we just sort of spent the night going through it… [#8]

While silence (however comfortable or uncomfortable) offered space and time for participants to explore the map, it prompted us, during several post-interview debrief discussions, to think about live ethics. The slowed tempo afforded opportunities for participants to react to stories – often of heartbreak, or trauma, for example, that made real how place is related to embodied experiences. The potential for map exploration to trigger memories related to distress or harm was a key consideration in our research design. This slowed tempo, we found, made room for gestures of support, to remind participants that they could take a break, pause or stop the interview for any reason. Silences also prompted us to be more reflexive about the power dynamics of the encounter and the complexities of discerning whether participants share in the comfort felt by the interviewer or feel pressure to fill these silences. For several participants, long silences prompted reflection and self-deprecating, sharing gentle humour of psycho-analysis underpinning their chosen movements:

Okay. Yeah, so this is [city]. We’ve done a bit of a quick world tour. One place I want to go to and you’re kind of getting this almost virtual tour of ex-girlfriends [laughs] [#14]

The use of humour here and elsewhere can be read as resistance (Maclure et al., 2010: 497): as at once filling a (potentially uncomfortable) silence/space, ‘where something meaningful and serious should have been said’ given the context of the conversation (ibid), and as a gesture of intimacy – a form of queer solidarity so often used as a signifier of common ground, of shared resistance to heterosexism and homophobia.

In summary expositions such as this, of the participant's flânerie (see Aroles and Küpers, 2022) as a virtual tour of exes, where they are both part of the sites of their relationships and past selves and detached from them through this act of touring observation, we see the various connections that map movements bring about. While such connections were palpable for participants outside the interview setting, as a number reflected on, we nonetheless see the significance of a research encounter which ‘allows people to be heard’ (Back, 2012: 28). As another participant reflected:

I like looking at different countries like that because I’ve spent a little bit of time in [country] and I, um. [pause] I did a lot of study, I suppose, about, um, like the [region], so I really like – I feel like it's cool to bring these two different identities and parts of myself together because I spent quite a long time – now I’m just turning this into a therapy session [laughs] [#8]

We hope that in making space for time and silence, we cultivated something akin to the ‘sociological sociability’ that Back (2012: 28) discusses, that does not just remember but holds attention on the fact that ‘what remains unspoken can be of even greater significance’ (Back, 2012: 28). While silence is often not part of the presentation of research findings, it can offer valuable insight into the research encounter (Maclure et al., 2010: 495). In such moments, we can observe how emplaced anchor points figure in participants’ explorations as they – and so they may – guide us through emotional journeys.

Affective routes

In each interview, we moved from interviewer as guide (literally following an interview guide document) to participant as guide. Participants guided us around a variety of places, familiar and unknown, such as houses of queer friendships, countries to which they had never been, to thickly pinned and sparser regions awaiting inscription. How participants navigated and narrated the aggregations of pins on the map moves us to consider process as data and insight. For Ahmed (2006a: 6), thinking about space requires thinking about directions taken, ‘which not only allow things to appear but also enable us to find our way through the world by situating ourselves in relation to such things’. How participants made ‘turns’ as they traversed the map became an interesting area of focus, both in our analysis and for participants in making sense of such directions. Through this process, participants guided us across planes of meaning. By setting aside our own interview guide, the research encounter became driven by participants and we observed as they made sense in and of place, interpreting the field.

Routes and roots were significant. We saw the digital traces of desire, paths taken across the map to get from one point to another. We also saw the pull of familiar places, from where someone grew up to other places they have spent time, and we witnessed how and why participants moved towards and between these. This process charged an affective connectivity between participants’ own queer experiences and those nearby, those storying something similar, or simply also present on the map. On this point, we see considerable utility in Gorman-Murray's (2009) work on queer migrations, and Gieseking's concept of constellations, as a way of ‘tracing the production of virtual, physical, and imagined places and the lines and networks between them’ (2020: 942). It was the process and practice of exploring constellations of pins that revealed insights into participant's affective ties – to places, to stories and themes, to community/ies, to solidarity and activism – in ways that complemented and extended their preceding accounts (see also Powell, 2010). Most participants zoomed and dragged across the map toward childhood places, slowly moving in search of familiarity and the familial, getting lost in memories in place. These lively reactions, in real time, were palpable:

Oh man! [regional town]! I remember once going there on a date. [#9]

[long pause] This is kind of weird because, you know, I grew up here in ‘80 and ‘90s… My grandparents, yeah, here. My grandparents ran a little post office for a lot of the ‘80 s and then moved off down this way… Yeah. That was that one, this is the beach after this one [pause, reading posts] Awww. See, that's just, yeah, places related to, places that they’ve been. It's a beautiful bubble. [laughs] Sorry. Yeah. What was the question again?

[Interviewer: [laughs] I don’t think I had a question. I’m just enjoying looking, I’m enjoying looking at these stories with you]

It's fun, isn’t it? [#14]

This participant then explored a few areas and read several more stories in silence, before clicking on a pin that revealed a longer story, which they read aloud and responded:

…That's adorable!

[Interviewer: Isn’t it]

It's full of these little moments of awakenings, you know, these little epiphanies… I’ve got a little bit of a tear in my eye, I’m not lying [laughs]. It's fun… it makes you smile. A little bit of heartache, you know, that kind of stuff. [#14]

Other participants explored in similar ways:

And then, so I’m just going to scan out to where I used to live [pause] and go to school, and there's like for, you know, out in like in suburban sprawl, there's hardly any comments at all, and I mean that's not because, you know, queer moments haven’t happened here, they have, probably not in the same, as often or as frequently as other parts of [city] like inner-city, but for whatever reason, yeah [#9]

As the excerpt above points to, there was much to feel in returning to old haunts, familiar towns and streets, the places of participants’ memories. For other participants, returning to meaningful places was driven by hope, most commonly hoping to discover queer experiences and representation in a place where they had felt alone, alienated, or felt the lack of queer local community. We observed several moments of realisation, of joy and celebration, or disappointment at the point of destination, in the discovery of other queer stories, or of none.

Drawing parallels with the dead ends that can be encountered in walking methods (Ross et al., 2009), a participant's discovery of an absence of pinned stories in a desired place could be felt. Rather than dead ends feeling like a disruption to the process or method of walking, a point at which one must turn around and retrace their steps, these digital dead ends revealed affective attunements, disappointments shared between participant and researcher. Such disappointments cannot be shown as data; stories that do not (yet) exist in place on the map of course cannot be read aloud; nor did participants narrate their disappointment. Their journey towards those places, however, the movement in search of queer presence and their quiet responses to queer absence revealed to us rich insights on the affective geographies and geometries (cf. Brice, 2019; Massey, 1994: 4) of queer experience. One participant responded to the absence of pins by posting two stories while dragging and zooming around the map, ‘filling a gap’ rather than turning back. When asked to reflect on why they posted what and where they did, they responded:

It's ‘okay, I’ve been there and there isn’t anything, so I’m going to leave something behind’, you know. It's like writing on a wall on holiday or something, like ‘[name] was here’ or something [laughs] It's that indelible human trait to leave a mark, a record of your existence. [#14]

Records of existence emerged as a powerful concept across the explorations. It took seeing and moving around the map for participants to comment on areas of saturation and sparseness within pin constellations. Affective responses to queer presence acted as a stimulus for talk of community, solidarity, and activism. Seeing the presence of pins as evidencing the presence of queerness was affirming for participants, including (and especially) in territories assumed to be dangerous or risky, where queer people face persecution. The live process of exploration worked to evoke feeling:

… well, look how dense Europe is [with pins], yeah. I think, yeah, as I said before, I’ve definitely been interested in places that are less like queer friendly in the stories that come up here, and the fact that they’re in English itself is quite interesting because, as a global platform, I mean English is probably the most globally spoken language. If these people want their stories to be read by other people, they’re going to have to write them in English. And I mean, yeah, they’re just nice kind of small moments and I think I like that too, like here, [opening a pin in central Russia] “Watched Call Me By Your Name and fell asleep when your parents were out of town,” like, those kind of things resonate with me from my own experiences… Yeah… Like here, “Queer people live in Russia too”… to see that that's been written by somebody is kind of comforting, or like here, “Realized I was transgender, thought my life is over, thought I was the only one, but my friend is too, and then met an old man who was too. Things are good now”… reading that story, like, it makes me feel good because it's like they’ve said things are good now and like seeing that kind of queer solidarity happen is just like our community [#1]

As with this participant, discovering and live narrating their interpretations shows how platform visitors not only observe but feel solidarity and global queer community. This witnessing is affective and cultivates belonging; stories across space resonate and bring comfort; stories about good lives make people who read these fragmentary stories feel good too; and platform visitors, or perhaps platform inhabitants, share in these feelings because of their place in this queer intimate public, through their shared inhabitance of the queer world. Another participant, as they dragged and zoomed, also reflected on how they feel part of the map:

It's made me feel really connected to my community, and my community on like an ‘in this place, at this moment’ level but also ‘in this place, in a broader historical sense’ level, that has felt very welcoming… and very nourishing… mostly I just feel really comforted by the map, I think, and it's something that I suppose I return to looking at in moments when I need some kind of affirmation, in a way that I might, I dunno, re-read a book that once was really comforting or important to me or watch a film that I’m really attached to, so, I will return to the map because it affirms some sort of experience that I’m having. It just makes me feel like I’m part of something bigger than myself, but at the same time that my presence within that bigger thing is significant. Yeah. [#10]

To use a cliche, these affects illuminate the journey, rather than the destination. We reflect this in our intentional use of orientation as a concept throughout, to emphasise the lively and unfolding capacity of Queering the Map and our participant-led explorations.

Conclusion: mapping and eliciting affects

In this article we discuss how we researched people's engagements with Queering the Map (queeringthemap.com) using an elicitation technique of participant-led exploration of this platform within qualitative interviews. As well as the generative digital, archival and narrative properties of the platform, key for Queering the Map is its cartographic design. By centring a live exploration within the research encounter, we were able to experience how people mark and are marked by the map; we perceived in real time the anchoring points of place and memory with which participants orientate themselves and gather a queer sense of the world by (and so to be) navigating their places of significance.

The participatory interface of Queering the Map allowed and required a sense of closeness, an intimacy between interviewer and participant and with the queer world represented, through a shared and vulnerable engagement with this environment – our shared inhabitance in the map. As Ahmed (2006a: 1) articulates, ‘if orientation is a matter of how we reside in space, then sexual orientation might also be a matter of residence; of how we inhabit spaces as well as “who” or “what” we inhabit spaces with.’ A patently rich notion for our empirical analysis, Ahmed's point also has methodological value for how we consider our presence as researchers and what elicitation techniques may evoke. We experienced this method as a live witnessing, a mutual reading and feeling of stories which often resonated with the lives of researcher and participant, both part of the platform's queer intimate public. By making space for wayfinding, for feeling (and) the interface, for time and silence – including distraction and disturbance – and for the field interpretations of our participant-guides, this method became attuned to and reflective of affective spatial relations, our participants’ queer geometries.

We see strong connection between the pins that mark stories on Queering the Map and Gieseking's (2020) evocative use of the metaphor of the star as ‘a space that holds meaning… a sociotemporal iteration’ of life. Applying this metaphor here, we can see each pin as a star, to and through which Queering the Map visitors navigate, stargazing. Gieseking reflects that the stories of their participants ‘read like star charts’ (2020: 947). Our participants’ explorations of the world map, including how they noted geographic or memory-based points of reference and shared stories that affect them, similarly revealed to us not only the beauty of locating individual stars but, more importantly, the beauty of constellation (see also Chisholm, 2004). The aggregation of black pins across the map has the power to affect without clicking on a single story. These many thousands of digital traces create a constellation of queerness, unearthing community through a queering of the world map.

Accompanying participants as they traversed the queer landscape offered much insight into their affective responses and engagements with the presence (and absence) of pins in place. Their relief, celebration and disappointment were palpable as they dragged towards an intended location, to discover the queer moments of others, or indeed find absence of queerness in places where they had hoped for change. This method was critical in our analysis of how pinned stories come to constitute queer success or failure in the geo-spatial achievements of visibility, presence, and solidarity, and for a reconceptualising of platform visitors as inhabitants of a queer world. Rather than watching as participants identified constellations, or doing that connective work ourselves in analysis, with this method we observed them constellate.

The interview-based reflections of our participants were enriched through their lively synchronous reactions and interpretations of the research(ed) material. During these moments of platform exploration, which took up time and were often filled with silence, we privileged the research encounter rather than our emergent transcripts. It is through the movement and accompanying silences within this method, in the space and time of dragging, zooming, clicking, reading and thinking, that participants feel. While the map exploration was designed as an elicitive prompt, a trigger to elicit further and deeper reflections on the user experience, we became privy to an affective process; we experienced what it means and how it feels to inhabit the map, to move around queered space, to share vulnerabilities in place (familiar or otherwise). These subjectivities – how it feels to be queer – offer much potential for articulating difference and diversity (i.e., non normative/knowable queer identities), and for revealing forms of interpretation in experiences that are not well-understood in design or conventional cartographic theorising. We find that it is within these interactive processes that spatial, temporal and affective logics of belonging emerge.