Messy digital geographies: Studying urban tech communities' socio-digital practices

With the rise of Big Data and digital technologies, recurring calls for methodological renewal have been made within human geography, echoing the discipline's digital turn. These methodological debates concern not only what we study but also how we study it. This paper contributes to these discussions by probing how the relationship between digital technologies and urban tech communities can be studied in light of their composite, fragmented, and often messy nature. Drawing on more than a year of multi-sided ethnographic fieldwork, I home in on how socio-digital practices surrounding two smart urban digital technologies, smart lampposts and 3D models, are shaped through breakdowns, uncertainties and ongoing processes of reconfigurations. I show not only how moments of malfunctioning, friction and ambiguity take place but also how I, as a researcher, have actively become enmeshed in the messy, unstable, and uncertain knowledge production. These encounters highlight the importance of flexible, processual, situated and reflexive methodologies that attend to how the social and digital are co-constituted, and how such entanglements emerge when working from the ground. A methodological orientation attuned to messiness is foregrounded, as it is not simply an empirical observation of digital transformation processes but also a methodological state of studying it. This, in turn, paves the way for enhancing our understanding of the epistemological intricacies involved in this type of digital geographic inquiry—in the attempt to un-black box what urban tech communities continuously seem to re-black-box.