Abstract
ABSTRACT In March 2019, the first ever act of terrorist violence in New Zealand was live-streamed on social media, making many social media users unwitting witnesses to the massacre on their devices. The Christchurch mosque attacks revealed a particular digital and emotional vulnerability embedded in the digital media infrastructure. The last words of the first victim soon transmorphed into #hellobrother that, as a digital artefact, participated in shaping the emotional landscape. Combining real-time digital media ethnography on Twitter with data science and computational tools, this multi-method study has two aims: first and foremost, to develop and apply new methodology for the study of unexpected, mediated events as they unfold in real time; second, to explore post-death digital artefacts through the concept of digital afterlife that we approach through two complementary perspectives, data afterlife (the technological) and data as afterlife (the emotional). Adopting a relational perspective, we further develop the concept, and highlight the constitutive role of data in the emotional dimension of digital afterlife arising from its capacity to enter affective arrangements. The methodological contributions include development of a conceptual and technological framework for conducting data science as ethnography and the introduction of Tweetboard, a novel artefact for investigating digital afterlife.
Highlights
In March 2019, New Zealand saw its first act of terrorist violence as two mosques in Christchurch were attacked
We propose a new approach that takes ‘data’ as the point of departure, and provide a more nuanced understanding of digital afterlife that, in addition to the socio-technical dimension, captures the emotional dimension through exploration of the affective potential of data and digital artefacts
We elaborated on the means to improve research readiness, a prerequisite for a successful study of unexpected events using computational methods, and we present considerations to support further research
Summary
In March 2019, New Zealand saw its first act of terrorist violence as two mosques in Christchurch were attacked. The Tweetboard functions as a facilitative boundary object (Fox, 2011; see Star & Griesemer, 1989) between team members, bridging the different disciplinary traditions by representing the dataset as ‘live’ retrieved from the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) The aim of this multi-method study is two-fold: first and foremost, to develop and illustrate new methodological tools for the study of mediated, unexpected events in real time as they unfold; and second, to further develop the notion of digital afterlife by exploring post-death data from two complementary perspectives, data afterlife and data as afterlife, translating into the technological and the emotional dimension constituting digital afterlife. It is crucial to recognise the political dimension in the design and use of technological artefacts (Lindgren, 2020) rather than treating these as merely neutral systems with only functional properties
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