Digital qualitative methods

I attending an internal departmental seminar yesterday, in which the speaker, a post-doctoral fellow from the UK, presented "A sense of things". The point of his presentation was to use performativity and audio/visual methods to attempt to answer the questions:

• How do we become conscious of time (i.e. make time explicit)?
• How do we access the imagination?

In the Heideggerian sense, he suggested that the point of his research was not to arrive at an answer, but rather to find a new way to explore the original questions. I found his questions intriguing and I like the idea of using such methods to alter people's perceptions of their everyday mundane reality, by making their life "strange to them", in his words. I had issues though with the sparse way he fleshed it out for us and I question whether or not such performativity can actually allow any authentic access to the imagination in the sense of self.

His phenomenological bent aside, the idea of using visual methods to get beyond textual realities got me thinking of ways to do this when presenting digital experience. This seems to be a theme in my research these days -- I'm supposed to be doing a photographic assignment for my senior field research course.

Rather than only using photos of corporeal places, though, for this project, I think I might use screen snaps from a day in my life on the net and juxtapose them against past travel shots I've taken in Bermuda, Alaska, England and Norway to suggest the concept of travel as more than a corporeal activity. The underlying point, of course, is to show the net geist, the "there" that is there when on the net, the sense of place/space and environment that comes from being in the net 24/7. I expect this to juxtapose nicely with my other research project arguing against statistical data's notion and measurement of the Internet as a tool to be used.

And if I'm going to experiment with stuff like this, now is the time. I've only got four more weeks of undergrad study before I move on to the semi-big leagues...grad school, that is.....