Digital Life-Story Narratives as Data for Policy Makers and Practitioners: Thinking Through Methodologies for Large-Scale Multimedia Qualitative Datasets

Abstract

Digital life stories have been solicited, archived, and Web-cast by organizations and individuals as a way of amplifying marginalized voices in the public domain. Despite the now large collections of digital stories that are available, researchers and policy makers have rarely discussed these stories as qualitative data and powerful evidence for decision making. We analyze the political, ethical and methodological tensions that have limited the use of digital life-story archives to date. In conclusion, we begin to set out future directions for analyzing and applying on-line archives of digital life stories research, drawing on debates within existing research that uses large-scale qualitative datasets.

Notes

This article has emerged from ongoing collaborative research work by the 1,000 Voices research team, particularly Professor Lesley Chenoweth and Professor Elizabeth Kendall, Griffith University; Professor Greg Marston, Queensland University of Technology; and Dr. Sally Robinson, Southern Cross University.