At the start of semester 1, I was worried that I wouldn’t find a strong enough organizing principle for my interdisciplinary interests to guide my work and research moving forward, including the Futures Project. It was so easy for me to relocate my ideas between disciplines–the way I described Narrative Futures to friends and family varied widely depending on their interests in art, data, technology, and social issues, and even though none of those descriptions felt untrue or far-fetched, I worried that the ease with which I adapted my own work to various contexts suggested that I didn’t have a single stable or consistent rationale for my studies.
However, over the course of the semester, I slowly learned that I do have a very targeted sense of the work I want to be doing: I’m drawn to the work we *don’t* have shared language for yet. So of course I’m going to describe it differently to someone in software development than I would to an artist or writer; it lives so perfectly in between them that it takes multiple descriptions, from multiple angles, to put together a holistic understanding of the work. When I told one writerly mentor last summer that I was going to be telling stories “with and about data,” then told a techier connection the inverse–that I’d be looking at stories and social issues through a data lens–I wasn’t misleading either of them. I’m not interested in limiting myself to one approach or the other. This course and my conversations within and about it have shown me that I’m good at viewing and talking about issues from both sides–quantitative and qualitative, data-driven and human-centric. It’s also shown me that this is somewhat unusual, even within an interdisciplinary context. Almost everyone else I’ve spoken with engages in both kinds of thinking, yes, but considers one their primary approach and feels most comfortable working within one discipline or framework, using it as a starting point from which to understand and interact with the others. I have no such strong identifications; instead I’ve found myself taking on the perspective least common to the group–I act and speak more like a programmer around the writers and artists in the cohort, more like an artist and writer when interacting with data science students. It’s taken me awhile to stop being afraid that this shows a lack of focus and to start viewing it as a focus in and of itself.
These experiences have made me feel much more centered in the theoretical questions motivating my Futures Project. I’ve studied within frameworks which view digital identities in at least two ways: first as representative data which is directly tied to ourselves, second as objects of their own, associated but not inherently linked to our personal identity. The former asks questions about the extent, accuracy, and usefulness of those representations, and the latter asks questions about their nature, and whether they should be considered representations at all. I’ve found value in both approaches: only the former allows for personal data as a tool for self-knowledge, and only the latter fully appreciates it as something with unique capabilities beyond our own. Coming up with a project which holds the two in tension rather than flattening digital identities down to one or the other feels like the only direction suitable to a background and interests like mine–it lets me pull everything I’ve learned into the conversation, wrestle with a variety of perspectives, and hopefully form a much fuller understanding of my research area.
