Students are frequently rendered into digitized and datafied formats. When students use and engage with digital technologies like digital learning materials and digital tests, a plethora of information in the form of digital data is generated about them. Such data are often described as static and rational matters of fact, neutral and objective in comparison to ‘subjective’ human judgment (Williamson & Piattoeva, 2019). While this description is not entirely wrong, it somehow limits our possibilities to see data as dynamic becomings, materializing in a variety of ways, as well as to analyze how data participate in the configuration of for example humans in other ways than merely describing their properties in quantitative terms. It seems that we somehow lack the vocabulary to describe data as more-than-digital phenomena.

In this article, we aim to take a few steps towards producing such a vocabulary. We explore the vibrant and vital qualities generated when for example schoolteachers engage student data, such as those displayed in colorful data visualizations. We illustrate five different data becomings in a single ethnographic case.

In order to explore possible vocabularies, this article takes up more-than-human theoretical perspectives found in feminist new materialist scholarship as well as in non-Western cosmologies. Specifically, we build on Donna Haraway’s more-than-human theorization of becoming as becoming with (Haraway, 2008), which challenges ideas of the human as being separated from its surroundings, as well as Deborah Lupton’s more-than-human theoretical work on human-data assemblages and her attention to vitalities (Lupton, 2020; Lupton et al., 2022). We illustrate our conceptual points with an ethnographic case study exploring what happens to students and teachers when engaging with digital testing in Danish primary and lower secondary education. Teaching, for the oldest students in Danish primary and lower secondary schools (‘folkeskole’), is almost exclusively done through digital platforms and digital learning materials. These digital learning materials automate part of the assessments and testing of student work by visualizing the results through graphs, bar charts, and other forms of data visualizations.

We understand data visualizations as one of several becomings of data. While both educational scholars and data practitioners like teachers often refer to ‘data’ as one-and-the-same phenomenon, we propose viewing data as multiple interwoven becomings. In other words, we do not understand visualization as a process of reconfiguring ‘actual’ or ‘raw’ data into a visual format, but rather as one of the many ways data materialize. Data only ever emerge in some sort of specific material form, as for example digital data made up of binary digits, as ‘raw’ data made up of survey responses or registered values in rows and columns, or as visuals made up of colors, shapes, and numerical values. Even though the category of ‘data visualizations’ indicates a particular state of being of data, most data materializations are visual in some way – also ‘raw’ data. Thus, we do not use the term data visualizations to refer only to system-generated data visualizations with their colorful dashboard aesthetics, but also to homemade tables or notes displaying data in a different and more mundane, yet visual format. Our article includes empirical examples of several types of data visualizations used and produced by teachers. It also includes empirical examples of ‘data’ simply materializing as an idea or concept in talk, without emerging in any visual form. As the analysis will show, these various becomings of data are important and constitute students and teachers in different ways – as they are becoming with data. We therefore view sensitivities to different materializations of data in different situations as analytically fruitful for our understanding of data practices.

To help us demonstrate the different becomings of the data, we deploy metaphors and figures drawn from other-worldly, or at least more-than-digital, phenomena, including vitalities found in fantasy lore, folklore, zoology, and physics. These alternative ‘worlds’ involve figures and phenomena that behave differently than what ‘things’ like data can behave like in our everyday language and in our rational social science language. The affordances of metaphors and figures are thus their ability to help us see things in new ways and to increase our understanding of complex phenomena (Stuart & Wilkenfeld, 2022), much like Donna Haraway, for example, uses the metaphors and figures of the ‘cyborg’ (Haraway, 1991), a figure which couples the technological and the biological, as well as of ‘tentacular thinking’ (Haraway, 2016), a string figure emphasizing connections, in her work. We furthermore draw on Deborah Lupton’s (2020, 2018; Lupton et al., 2022) work on data vitalities and human-data assemblages and what she broadly labels vital materialism. Lupton conceptualizes human embodiment ‘as always already more-than-human: entangled and relational with things and places’ (Lupton et al., 2022 p. 361). The empirical material was generated through a year-long ethnographic fieldwork at two Danish primary and lower secondary schools, which the first author conducted from October, 2022 until October, 2023. The empirical material was generated through the ethnographic method of participant observation (Spradley, 1980). While we were specifically interested in teachers’ data practices and the ways they would interact with data visualizations in digital learning materials, we did not only observe and participate when my interlocutors engaged with data: rather we participated in all aspects of my teacher interlocutors’ everyday working lives, including their teaching, their preparation and evaluation of teaching, in a plethora of meetings like team meeting, department meetings, reading counselor meetings, and parent-teacher conferences. This all enabled a more holistic understanding of teachers’ lived experiences and practices. In this way, we got to follow the data, as they appeared through interfaces on laptop screens, but also how they travelled into notebooks and documents, as they appeared in conversations amongst teacher colleagues and between teachers and students.

The figurative analysis of the multiple becomings of data shows how data in the empirical case develop from a vague and vaporous vibrancy into more and more embodied (colorful, shapeful, and wordy) vibrancies. This process render the data more and more precise tools for the diagnostic purposes of the reading counsellors. Yet, along this process, the data also transform into more and more-than-human images of the students, transgressing beyond simple displays of performance into combinations of multiple snapshots of each student sutured together into an elaborate data double. The visualizations of data thus change characteristics from easily readable data visualizations into detailed reports combining present, past, and past present versions of student beings into patchworks amenable for biographical analysis of progress or deterioration. This analysis opposes the image of data as something ‘static’ and ‘dead’. The two reading counsellors in our material play an important role in the becoming of data. This conclusion speaks to contemporary discussions about agency and autonomy with/of data and digital platforms. The various materializations of data in our material display different kinds of agency – ranging from casting a shadow to diagnostic work. Data visualizations seem to play an important role in rendering data agentic. At the same time, any operations beyond those embedded in the dashboard relied heavily on human agency to take place. Thus, in our case, student data only exteriorize (Gulson et al., 2022) a part of the human work, namely the measurement of spelling performance, but not the analysis of learning progress and deterioration at a more detailed level. In other words, the becoming student-with-data is partly a result of automated processes, partly of the becoming data-with-humans.

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