Oral Presentation The Institute of Australian Geographers Conference 2023

Follow the digital: methodological thoughts on doing more-than-human geographies in the digital mundane (17952)

Chen Liu 1
  1. Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, GUANGDONG, China

Digital geographers must pay more attention to socio-spatial relations, realities and practices shaped by the digital, bring ‘small’ ethnographic data into conversations with big data, and involve innovative methods into research studies and praxes. Thus, it is important for human geographers to rethink our ways of doing research with the digital in contemporary society. The approach of ‘follow the thing’ can bridge production and consumption, allow researchers to reveal the social information and relations behind the veil of commodity fetishism, and provide empathy to nonhuman actors. In the digital context, many geographers have adopted this approach to investigate the global journey of digital objects, the connections between the daily use of digital devices/platforms and wider social, economic, political, and environmental debates, and also the blurred virtual/physical, private/public and production/consumption boundaries in various spaces, mostly from a material perspective. However, the digital has an immaterial dimension – such as data. Then, how can geographers follow the ‘unfollowable’ or immaterial/thingless dimension of the digital? Moreover, how people actually collaborate with the digital to accomplish their practices in the mundane has generally not been followed by geographers. Set against this background, my presentation aims to present a ‘follow the digital’ methodology – an original development of ‘follow the thing’, drawing on my experiences of doing the research project Curating Digital Lives. I hope to use this presentation to offer the audience some inspirations of doing more-than-human geographies in the digital mundane. I use the term ‘more-than-human’ here to acknowledge both humans’ and nonhumans’ (digital devices, platforms, and data) capabilities or competences in setting up, maintaining, and preventing specific practices and their equally important roles in connecting different practices. In so doing, this presentation can contribute to emerging studies on the relations and co-operations between human and digital technologies in framing the everyday spatiotemporalities.