Performing digital ways of knowing: epistemic walks with methods-as-prototypes

Abstract

Based on our experience in the project ‘The Importance of Being Digital: Exploring Digital Academic Practices and Methods’, we narrate our different trajectories of engagement with digital methods and digital practices. Inspired by emerging scholarship that looks at prototypes as a cultural and epistemic form, we delve into an exploration of methods (both traditional and digital) as prototypes – open-ended, non-instrumental explorative devices – for our knowledge processes. By opening up the craft of our research we illustrate and discuss what ‘digital ways of knowing’ – ways of knowing inspired by digital practices – might look like, and which reconfigurations of knowledge practices and trajectories they could enable.