We are now nearly 5 months into Patterns in Practice, and are almost ready to get out in the field.

We’ve spent the last few months laying some foundations for the project. Itzelle has been working on three literature reviews focusing on each of our three case studies: drug discovery, learning analytics and arts practice. You can check out her blog post based on the drug discovery review at this link . While Itzelle was busy with that, Helen and I have been reviewing the underlying theoretical work on values, beliefs and emotions, and Erinma on introducing an arts practice angle to our work.

This has been a good excuse for me to spend time reading some great new work in the field, including Alison Powell’s recent book on tech ethics, Shakir Mohamed and colleagues’ paper on how scientific values are imagined by different actors and might be re-imagined through a decolonial lens, and Paul James’ work on the concept of imaginaries.

Alongside that we’ve been busy getting this website up and running with the wonderful Prisca at Eyedea Studio, appointing a fantastic Advisory Group , working with our project partners to lay the ground for our empirical work, getting our ethical approval in place, and doing some of our own training in data mining techniques so we better understand the work our collaborators are engaged in.

We are now kicking off the new year with a focus on methods. Interview questions, diary and observation templates are all on the to do list for the next month. Then if all goes smoothly we’ll be in the field – or at least the digital field – by the end of February.

We hope to be able to share some of our early findings at summer conferences, so watch this space!