Workshopping Troubles: Towards Feminist Digital Methods

Digital methods, taken up in the collection and analysis of data, raise
concerns around extraction, representation, care, consent, and
participation familiar to feminist methodologies. At a feminist STS
lab, specialising in digital methods, we convened some workshops
to support research design in ongoing projects situated in the
Lab’s community, with the aim to articulate feminist principles for
digital methods. These projects, working with methods including
digital ethnography, database implementation, and machine
learning design raise feminist questions around centring care in
data collection and participation, navigating hesitancies around
extracting data from vulnerable subjects, and working through
representational politics of data. These workshops, rather than
congealing a set of feminist principles, generated a proliferation of
disconcertments and troubles. We offer workshopping troubles as a
way to navigate and theorise tensions in designing digital
methods research. We account for how these workshops served as
a method to elicit troubles, surfacing them for further analysis, and
helped us shift from binding dichotomies to troubles that open
ongoing inquiry. We reflect on how digital methods return us to
troubles that, while well understood in feminist approaches to
data, require articulation in practice and research design.