The digital interfaces that are now a pervasive part of social worlds pose distinct methodological challenges for social scientists. How do we consider positionality in projects that involve us using digital interfaces ourselves? What methods enable us to explore how different groups use digital technologies across spaces and temporalities? How do we analyse the digital object, rather than our human experience of it? These are just a few of the questions that social scientists and STS scholars, including anthropologists, sociologists and human geographers, may face when investigating digital interfaces using qualitative and mixed methods approaches. New methodologies are being developed to try to address these challenges, such as the ‘walkthrough method’ (Light et al., 2016), ‘multi-situated app studies’ (Dieter et al., 2019), and post-phenomenological methods (Ash et al., 2018). In this workshop, we will discuss emerging approaches and methods, epistemological and conceptual considerations, and reflect on our experiences, to facilitate cross-disciplinary discussion of practices for researching digital interfaces.

Room: PEG 2.G202