Affective routes in interviews: Participants exploring a digital map as a live elicitation method

Abstract

How we elicit rich reflections from people about their feelings and experiences is a central consideration of qualitative research. Creative techniques of elicitation can open reflective dialogic spaces between participants and researchers, bridging memory and meaning. In this article we discuss participant-led explorations of a digital story-mapping platform as an elicitation technique in qualitative interviews. This platform is Queering the Map, a community-generated counter-mapping project that digitally archives queer moments in place. An atemporal cartographic representation of queer life, visitors to the site zoom, drag and click to reveal the anonymous contributions of others: micro-stories of experience, poems, messages and yearnings, claiming a global landscape of queer feeling. Here we offer reflections from our experience of asking participants to explore and guide us around the map within an interview. We chart how this method of live digital discovery was generative of elicitation and evocation, of insights on affective roots (where have I come from?) and affective routes (where can I take you?). This article contributes to scholarship on elicitation and live methods, including digital and spatial approaches, and to conceptualisations of orientation and mapping.