The social life of time and methods: Studying London’s temporal architectures

Abstract

This paper contributes to work on the social life of time. It focuses on how time is doubled; produced by, and productive of, the relations and processes it operates through. In particular, it explores the methodological implications of this conception of time for how social scientists may study the doubledness of time. It draws on an allied move within the social sciences to see methods as themselves doubled, as both emerging from and constitutive of the social worlds that they seek to understand. We detail our own very different methodological experiments with studying the social life of time in London, engaging interactive documentary to elucidate nonlinear imaginaries of space-time in London’s pop-up culture (Ella Harris) and encountering time on a series of walks along a particular stretch of road in south east London (Beckie Coleman). While clearly different projects in terms of their content, ambition and scope, in bringing these projects together, we show the ability of our methods to grasp and perform from multiple angles and scales what Sharma (2014) calls ‘temporal architectures’. Temporal architectures, composed of elements including the built environment, commodities, services, technologies and labour, are infrastructures that enable social rhythms and temporal logics and that can entail a politicized valuing of the time of certain groups over others. We aim to contribute to an expanded and enriched conceptualisation of methods for exploring time, considering what our studies might offer to work on the doubled social life of time and methods, and highlighting in particular their implications for an engagement with a politics of time and temporality.

Taking Live Methods slowly: inhabiting the social world through dwelling, doodling and describing

“…In keeping with the word ‘live’ and with the preoccupations this loose grouping of research has with textured temporalities, ‘lived time’ (Wajcman, 2008), rhythm (Lyon, 2019) and ‘temporal architectures’ (Harris and Coleman, 2020), live methods has a mobile focus, with an eye on sociology’s past and its – and society’s – potential future. On the one hand, the turn to ‘live’ can be read as a disciplining move, seeking ‘re’s – a re/newal, re/turn to experimentation, to complexity, to ethics, to provocation and art in sociology.…”

“…The complexity of the times we live in needs new methods to capture, understand, and represent them (Fitzgerald, 2019; Uprichard, 2012). These have included the use of big data (Marres, 2012), documentary software (Harris and Coleman, 2020), go-pro video cameras (Bates and Moles, 2020), and more. Beyond a simple(r) desire to match methods with milieu, the use of – mainly digital – technologies here is often more creative than straightforwardly representational.…”

“…First, it is attentive: live methods engage the senses and the emotional attentiveness of the researcher in their vivid interaction the social (Gafijczuk, 2017). Second, the theoretical disposition of ‘liveness’ often moves into methods which are mobile (Lyon and Crow, 2012; O’Neill and Robert, 2020) collaborative (Tarr et al, 2018) and reflective of their own partiality and constitution (Harris and Coleman, 2020; Sheller, 2014). Third, the standard research process is considered ‘simultaneous’ and iterative (Back and Puwar, 2012: 7; Revsbæk and Tanggaard, 2015), with its communication in publications playing a key part in evoking the attentiveness obtained by the researcher in the mind of those reading.…”

“…Time, tempo and rhythm are among the central concerns of live methods. ‘Encountering time’ (Harris and Coleman, 2020: 605) and engaging with it through live sociological research recognises that time and space are constituted together and are productive, rather than providing a neutral backdrop. Temporality as ‘lived time’ (Ingold, 2011: 46; Sharma, 2014) calls to mind the myriad textures, rhythms and atmospheres that construct social life.…”

A Novel Broad Echo State Network for Time Series Prediction: Cascade of Mapping Nodes and Optimization of Enhancement Layer

“…Time series data are generated in various fields such as social sciences [1], meteorological industry [2,3], financial market [4], modern agriculture [5,6], electric power field [7], etc. Especially in the Big Data and IoT industry [8], it is essential to analyze the regular patterns of time series data and predict the trends for system management and control.…”