A baroque sensibility for Big Data visualisations

The sensibilities and varieties of expression gathered under what John Law describes as resources of the baroque do not suggest a method but an orientation to thinking and research that departs from dominant modes of knowing in the social sciences and humanities. This includes concerns with excess, non-coherence, the senses, Otherness, affect, embodiment, movement, and heterogeneity as explored in cultural, post-colonial, feminist and science and technology studies. As he notes, these concerns resonate with intellectual and political currents that implicitly or explicitly draw from Gilles Deleuze. Coleman and Ringrose’s (2013) edited collection, for example, point to recent Deleuzian inspired empirical research in the social sciences that is concerned with methods as messy, mobile, creative, open-ended, sensory, affective, performative and the entwinement of method with affect. These concerns also resonate with another area of research that attends to the developing field of sensory studies in the social sciences and humanities (Puwar and Sharma 2011). For example, sensory studies have been taken up to conceive of a ‘sensory ethnography’, which takes as its starting point ‘the multisensoriality of experience, perception, knowing and practice’ and how this is integral both to the lives of the researched and how ethnographers practice their craft (Pink 2009: 1). While ‘sensory experience and perception have “always” been central to the ethnographic encounter’ (10) a sensory ethnography involves the explicit inclusion of new forms of sensory experience in the practices of doing ethnography. A key point coming out of Pink’s approach, which focuses on perception, memory, embodiment and place, is the dual attunement to the sensory of both the researched and the researcher. There are many more examples of research that takes up the sensory as summarised by Puwar, Sharma and Pink. What I set out to do here is to understand the sensory as not confined to the senses but to a broader repertoire of ways to apprehend and know worlds. I elaborate this repertoire under the description of a ‘sensory sociology’ with a specific attention to digital mediums. This is not to