Here’s Data Now,Happening

Abstract

In traditional qualitative research, data is conceived as an object on which the researcher acts. Whether that object fits into a traditional category—an interview transcript, field notes—or a transgressive category—a dream or memory—data are still nouns, things to be apprehended by the senses. In my postqualitative work, data are not entities, not nouns subject to process. Instead a process—writing—is the data. I write autoethnographic stories that are not based on discrete data sources. Rather, the data are the stories themselves. They come to be through the process of writing. In this article, I theorize data as a verb. What can data do when it is no longer tied to a material existence as object? When it is no longer a thing, but an action? To address these questions, as all of my questions, I write. In this case, my writing stems from a recent journey East during which I couldn’t stop doing data.