Data Sprints

Abstract

Over the past two decades STS scholars have maintained a critical interest in, and displayed a practical engagement with, methods that has allowed us to work with wider publics and/or in broader interdisciplinary contexts. It is a research agenda that coincides with, but has so far not been particularly related to, the rise in digital STS scholarship. This is perhaps surprising considering that broad strands of the interest in digital methods has been driven by a desire to provide navigational aids to actors faced with the challenge of making sense of complicated techno-scientific problems. Natively digital media technologies have thus been re-appropriated by STS researchers specifically for the purpose of mapping controversies in a way that would deploy them and render them more accessible to their concerned parties. So far, however, very few concrete experiments have attempted to road test these cartographic ambitions in a way that would put them into direct conversation with our existing experiences with various forms of public engagement and participation. Through a re-appropriation of a method that is indeed native to the digital domain – namely the hack marathon, hackathon or simply the sprint – we show how digital methods can make a difference in participatory STS research. The data sprint format was tested in a series of four weeklong session where we invited issue experts from the climate change adaptation community to collaboratively map their matters of concern together with a team of STS researchers, digital methods experts, developers and data designers.