Chapter 1: Introduction: Digital Data, Research Ethos and Haunting

What do we do with the excess data from our research? ‘Excess’ – particularly in digital media research – is inevitable. It emerges in the research process as the ‘debris’ and ‘leftovers’ from planning, fieldwork and writing; the words cut from drafts and copied to untouched and forgotten files; and the data archived but never analysed or published. From our conversations with colleagues, to our call for contributors, we repeatedly heard researchers’ stories of digital data overflow, as they shared a collective sense of excess data as something more than that which is simply left out of formal research outputs. Digital excess, in particular, holds discursive flexibility: it points to abundance and possibility but also to our failure to control or contain information. Excess data matter, but how and why they do is somewhat opaque and largely underexplored.

This book, Data Excess in Digital Media Research, is a dedicated collection that pays attention to excess data. We position ‘excess’ as a conceptual, methodological, ethical and pragmatic challenge and opportunity for digital media research – we examine what happens when media researchers return to their surplus archives and explore the labour and affects surrounding data overflow and excess. We suggest that data excess is – or should be – a central concern for digital media scholars because of the methodological characteristics of digital media research, the ‘research ethos’ around data excess and the unexpected affects and ‘hauntings’ of excess data. This introduction provides an overview of these concerns and outlines each chapter.