Watching, talking, writing diaries and counting: exploring technologies and travel

A presentation given by Juliet Jain at the Methods in Dialogue workshop: Researching Mobilities which took place at the University of Manchester, on the 9th March 2011.

The focus of this presentation will be around researching the intersection of mobile technologies and everyday travel, reviewing innovative methodologies deployed in the research projects ‘Travel Time Use in the Information Age’ (www.traveltimeuse.org) and ‘Ideas in Transit’ (www.ideasintransit.org). Looking specifically at Travel Time Use I will demonstrate how watching people on the move produces different types of narratives to counting, and the relative ‘value’ of such methods, and then will introduce how and why a creative diary-interview approach was used in the ‘Ideas in Transit’ research. I will indicate the benefits and challenges of such methodological approaches in the transport arena, and consider how the debates of epistemology and ontology in knowledge production need to be given greater importance in transport research.