The Research Persona Method: Figuring and Reconfiguring Personalised Information Flows

This chapter explores the prospects of assembling “research personas” as a qualitative method that uses the positionality of the researcher situated amidst algorithmically suggested content for studying how digital personalisation is produced, encountered and experienced. Building on past and ongoing digital methods projects concerning the networked flow of misinformation, disinformation and authenticity, the research persona method looks not only inside but also across algorithms and digital methods approaches that repurpose the methods of the medium. As an immersive method that is both a product and mode of studying “figuration”, configuring research personas can show how personalisation is produced and accomplished by the interplay of various actors, devices, interfaces, infrastructures, user practices and data flows.