The Materiality of Method: The Case of the Mass Observation Archive

Abstract

The Mass Observation Archive presents numerous methodological issues for social researchers. The data are idiosyncratic, difficult to analyze, and the sample design is nonsystematic. Such issues seriously challenge conventional social research protocols. This article highlights a further characteristic of the archive: its unwieldy materiality. Focusing on the sensory experiences of the archive and its particular type of data, the article shows how the experience of getting ‘dirty with data’ plays a real and dynamic part of conducting Mass Observation research. Building on these observations, and drawing on two recent projects that have used the Archive, we reflect on the extent to which these issues are genuinely methodologically problematic, and how far the materiality of method and the sensuousness of data play a part in other research sites and methodological approaches too. In doing so, we emphasize the physical and logistical practicalities involved in engaging with all kinds of data, and highlight the opportunities as well as the constraints that these pose. We draw attention to the sensuous ‘cues’ and ‘hints’ offered by the Archive's materiality, and explore different ways of responding to these and their likely implications for the type and status of outputs produced. Finally, we consider the implications of our discussion for possible future attempts to digitize the contents of the Archive.

Lend Me Your Ears: Mass Observing Contemporary Adult Reading Aloud Practices

“…MOP writing was of course never intended to be representative or objective, but rather to provide the 'illumination' and 'surprise' that an individual life and perspective can offer, potentially 'disrupting' established narratives (Sheridan 2017). Further, Moor & Uprichard (2014) write of the 'unwieldy materiality' of MOP data, referring to both the physical excess of the hundreds of pieces of paper (of different colours, shapes and smells, many written in different styles of handwriting and colours of ink), as well as to the methodological challenge presented by hundreds of separate pieces of writing, each providing an individual offering of personal narrative and analysis. In this way, the correspondents are less subjects of research and more writers and researchers themselves.…”

Rethinking the empirical in higher education: post-qualitative inquiry as a less comfortable social science

“…She urges the inclusion of buildings, books, spaces, and other animate and inanimate objects, as well as the more familiar policies, theories, practices within the orbit of ethnography, arguing that this shifts how we conceptualise what counts as the research object and how the researcher engages with it. Moor and Uprichard (2013) foreground a dense and unwieldy materiality, in their case of the Mass Observation Archive. In their view 'paying attention to the materiality of method has significant advantages when it comes to studying social change and continuity'…”

Using Narrative Sources from the Mass Observation Archive to Study Everyday Food and Families in Hard Times: Food Practices in England during 1950

“…The diaries from 1950 were not digitised at the time of our analysis so it was therefore necessary to use the original non-digitised data. Although this meant more time was needed to visit the Mass Observation Archive at Sussex University [2] , the process of accessing and reading the data in their original form leant a materiality to the research process in analysing the original documents and enriched the experience of doing ‘fieldwork in the archives’ (Brettell 1998; Moor and Uprichard 2014). The diaries varied considerably in their format: some were handwritten and while some were very easy to decipher, others were not, especially in cases where the ink had faded; others were typewritten and therefore easier and quicker to read; the paper used varied from small lined notebooks to very thin foolscap paper, commonly used during the Second World War.…”