Doing Real Time Research: Opportunities and Challenges

This paper emerges out of a programme of workshops on Real Time Research, funded by NCRM during 2011-12, which brought together a network of interdisciplinary scholars to discuss the possibilities and challenges of doing research in real time. As well as these discussions, we also engaged in various exercises designed to give us practical experience of doing research in real time. The past, present and future are always brought together in social science methods, contributing to temporally significant modalities of enquiry, such as the ethnographic present, prediction or genealogy. But the workshops were designed to address the implications of the ‘timeliness’ of research in the context of an increasingly digitised and informational culture that allows access to, and creates dependences on, quantities of data gathered from diverse sources, often as soon as they are produced. The main questions we sought to address were: How are the dynamics of an informational society and digital culture transforming the temporality of methods? What opportunities are offered for research by the ongoing expansion of the present? And how can social science make use of the availability of real-time (immediately and continuously accessible) information? This paper explores the opportunities and threats of doing research in real time.