This strand of MODE activity will develop multimodal methods that account for how digital technologies disrupt and reconfigure concepts of time, place and space and its effect on data collection and analysis. For example, methods that respond to differences in synchronous and asynchronous technologies, the transporting of data across screens and sites, and is sensitive to the temporal dimensions of how people interact in online spaces. It will provide critical evaluation of concepts of ‘mobility’ and ‘ubiquity’, as for instance in the form of convergent  ‘mobile devices’ which require precise methodologies.

Indicative topics: multimodal methods for tracking people’s movement across digital online spaces; methods for retrieving time, space and place from existing multimodal data; The possibilities for historical and comparative analysis of digital data and environments; frameworks for analyzing scales of time from the micro moment to the macro; tools for analyzing sequence in digital data; methods for understanding interaction across multimodal physical and geographical sites.

Indicative research questions: How can research methods effectively capture and analyze the flow of ‘materials’ in online social interactions and other digital environments? How do different digital technologies change understandings of time, place and space in multimodal interaction and what are the implications for methodological approaches? What methods can be used to analyze physically and geographically distributed interaction in digital environments?

Click here for an overview of research and training activity in this strand.