Sensing data: Towards ethnographic methods for data positionality

Abstract

How can we develop an embodied sense of data in a world in which digital connectivity is distributed unevenly, yet increasingly taken for granted? This article introduces ‘sensing data’ as an ethnographic method for engaging with data not as abstract flows, but as material, situated and sensory phenomena. Extending the study of ‘mundane data’ towards infrastructure studies, this method invites careful attention to how kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes circulate in everyday entanglements with mobile phones, undersea cables and satellite connections. Sensing data is presented in two iterations: First, an autoethnographic account of fieldwork in North Greenland's so-called ‘satellite zone’ foregrounds data as objects of care, discipline and contestation. Second, a teaching exercise involving severe data restrictions draws attention to the infrastructural systems shaping everyday digital practices. Together, these experiments propose sensing data as a way to articulate ‘data positionality’– an embodied and situated awareness of the conditions under which data are made, moved and experienced. While ‘unlimited’ data plans render infrastructure seemingly frictionless, sensing data insists on the importance of cultivating felt knowledge of data as planetary and political.