Naturing With Big Data: How Writing Creation Myths Can Matter

Abstract

This article draws on Barad’s posthumanist ethics of mattering as an alternative methodology to qualitative research with big data while foregrounding writing as mattering. Big data is outlined as linguistic matter to be understood in relational materiality and subjectivity. I then discuss writing in light of mattering from multiple angles. To illustrate, I present an example of a course in which students wrote their own creation myths in an affirmative manner by navigating a corpus of 80 existing ones. The final section sketches what an ethics of naturing with big data might be about.