Messy Digital Geographies:Methodological Reflections on Urban Tech Communities’ Socio-digital Practices

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, methodological discussions in human geography focused on re-materialising the discipline and expanding its methodological toolkit. The cultural turn’s reliance on textual analysis and qualitative interviews had, as Philo (2000, p. 33) noted, become “less attentive to the ‘thingy’, bump-into-able, stubbornly there-in-the-world kinds of ‘matter’.” More recently, the rise of Big Data and digital technologies has led to calls for methodological renewal, echoing the discipline’s ‘digital turn’ (Ash et al., 2019). Both debates concern not only what we study but also how we study it. This paper contributes to these discussions by probing how the relationship between digital technologies and urban tech communities in Denmark and Sweden can be studied in light of their composite, fragmented, and often messy nature. Drawing on more than a year of multi-sided ethnographic fieldwork, I show not only how I have gone about studying their socio-digital practices but also how I, as a researcher, have actively become enmeshed in messy, unstable, and uncertain knowledge production. These encounters highlight the importance of flexible, processual, situated and reflexive methodologies that attend to how the social and digital are co-constituted, and how such entanglements are made visible when working from the ground. A methodological sensibility attuned to messiness is advanced to increase our understanding of the epistemological intricacies involved in this type of digital geographic inquiry—in the attempt to un-black box what urban tech communities continuously seem to re-black-box.