Bibliographical note

This article describes an ongoing effort to train citizens to become social researchers themselves, to explore and develop their own data literacy. It focuses on a specific series of experiments called the Museum of Random Memory. Alongside explanations of this effort as applied research or critical pedagogy, which are both apt, we can consider it as a series of meta level analysis of the methods we use for public oriented engagement and intervention. Over time, this reflexive focus on method, a hallmark of the interpretive sociological tradition, is helping us build better questions across multiple digital, conceptual, and material modalities. The ambition of practicing collective self-reflexive meta analysis is to build our ability to respond
rapidly to changing needs in the public sphere and create interventions that have
immediate impact on people’s abilities to critically analyze their own social lives and wellbeing in ever more powerful automated systems of control.