In December 2023, after delays and extensions, I finally sat down to confront a dataset from 2021. My avoidance of the dataset was less due to the content and more about my own state of mind. Focused on the hashtag campaign #tweet_like_it’s_free from the 2021 Unity Intifada, the dataset represented a spontaneous exercise in global digital civic imagination.Footnote 1 Each tweet consisted of a scenario participants wrote about what they are doing “now” that Palestine “is” free. The 2021 Intifada was awash with hope that can sometimes be felt glistening today.Footnote 2 However, from my standpoint, facing this dataset two months into Israel’s war of annihilation against the Gaza Strip, that hope seemed so far away. I was too overwhelmed by the devastating violence I was witnessing in the current moment to engage with the liberatory future–present of the dataset.
Still, I was committed to my deadline (especially after two generous extensions from reviewers). I began my discourse analysis with some categories to observe where participants were writing from and what they were doing in a liberated Palestine. Tweets came from Palestine, Algeria, the USA, Malaysia, and 28 other locations. What emerged was a global imagination that places a liberated Palestine in the present tense, pulling it out of the subjunctive. Participants envisioned road-trips across the region where they get to eat their favorite foods and spend time with their kin. Their plans included visiting areas that are currently separated by impervious borders, crossings, and checkpoints, like driving from Beirut to Jerusalem to Gaza and back.
Most striking to me was how mundane these scenarios were. Despite the infinity of options imagination offers, there were no flying cars, talking objects, or alien friends from other planets. Liberation was centered around connecting with friends and family over food, enjoying the tastes, smells, and topography of Palestine. As my work began to catch a groove, I sensed a new feeling emerge that I had never felt in my research: a sincere gratitude for the dataset. I was grateful for every person in 2021 who wrote a story in under 280 characters to remind me of hope in 2023. During a time of immense grief and destruction, this dataset provided long-term visions of liberation and possibility that we must commit to every day.
In this article, I outline my process of working creatively with the dataset and creating a poem with it (Table 1). I do not spend time or words defending the genre of poetry or arts-based research, as researchers in various fields have already established the scholarly value and the intellectual breadth of creative practices.Footnote 3 I also would not be the first to advocate for poetry as analysis. Nicole Corley uses poetic analysis to combine the art of poetry making with the principles of qualitative research, stating that “Writing poetry pulls you into the heart of the matter in ways writing standard prose does not.”Footnote 4 I focus here on the impetus to use poetry, the process of developing a digital data-based poem, what I conceptualize as “felt analysis,” and its relevance, particularly during this moment. My work is in conversation with other creative research practices, like critical fabulation and poetry, or “poemish,” a term Sparkes uses to liberate writers from the intimidation encountered when trying a new genre.Footnote 5 Through what she calls “critical fabulation,” Saidiya Hartman criticizes the archive through the imagination.Footnote 6 Hers is an interpretive practice that mobilizes data to construct a world that data alone could not represent. Working in the archive, Hartman found that it represented Blackness only in a context of death, and her imaginative writing constructed life and beauty that the archive was missing. As Chapman and Sawchuk write, “There is also an ontological dimension to the creation-as-research mode/category. ‘Creation-as-research’ is also ‘creation-through-research,’ in terms of expanding what ‘is’ in the world by revealing new layers, permutations of reality, or ‘experiences to be experienced.’”Footnote 7 Thus, poetry can reveal findings that might not be revealed through other scholarly and creative forms. Moreover, aligning with feminist scholarship, particularly Black and Indigenous feminisms, I argue that creative research is also a necessity for justice-oriented scholarship.
Pointing the Way to Freedom: The Poem
1. Form for the current moment
In December 2024, after the article was published, I was invited to present my work. I had an impulse to present the data as a poem. Be it the short form of tweets or the iterative themes, I felt that the dataset already had a poetic element to it. There was a rhythm and pace to the bustling activities of people gathering and living their freedom. Andrew Sparkes argues that form and content are inseparable and that form the data is presented in is based on the form in which the researcher understands it.Footnote 8 My desire to produce a poem was inspired by the data itself and my engagement with it. During a time of immense grief and heartache, it was asking to leave the data sheet and take on a different form.
I thought about the relationship (or difference) between conducting research during, about, and for a particular moment. Here we are, witnessing genocide livestreamed on our tech devices and seeing global solidarity rise up only to be silenced and suppressed at alarming scales. What does it mean to research digital culture in a moment like this? How can we engage in scholarship around technology and resistance that not only documents and understands social movements, but also creates opportunities to feel for the moment and help endure and survive it? Poetry based on real data that has been arranged into a configuration that allows readers to understand it as well as feel it serves as a powerful method for analyzing social worlds.Footnote 9
According to Audre Lorde, poetry is a keystone for survival and a vital necessity of existence, especially for women.Footnote 10 Lorde explains that this is because poetry teaches people to cherish feelings and honor ancient knowledge, which she sees as the source for lasting action. It is no wonder, then, that as a Palestinian woman who was gifted a window into liberation during an ongoing genocide, I felt drawn to poetry. I am not an experienced poet, though some have argued I may be experiencing a “poetic turn” over the last couple of years.Footnote 11 Poetry has a brevity and conciseness that can communicate both a feeling and a sharp message, be that a critique, an argument, or a dream. According to Lorde, “That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”Footnote 12 She argues that poetry is not a luxury but a basic and essential component of survival precisely because of how poetry can communicate dreams, and “it is our dreams that point the way to freedom.”Footnote 13
For me, poetry was one form I felt I could use to give life to tweet authors’ scenarios and attune to the intimate and affective registers of their imagination. Although my discourse analysis shows the various meanings of freedom represented in the data, poetry can portray the feel and rhythm, communicating these meanings in a different mode.
2. Felt analysis: Bringing the sensorium into digital culture research
Over a year into the genocide, the data sheet felt reductive, almost offensively so (See figure 1). Drawn to work with the data in a tactile way, I printed out the dataset. I felt I was holding people’s dreams in my hands, and that I ought to take them seriously. During this process, the data went from being in the form of a text file, to a digital sheet, to a printed table. I chopped it up into individual tweets and began arranging them by moving them around on the floor of my living room. I used a long piece of tape to assemble the poem, moving a tweet up or down to make room for another as needed (See figure 2). Some tweets made me feel anticipation, like I am about to embark on a long-awaited trip, other tweets felt like an arrival and sparked a contentment in me that held both the grief of the ongoing Nakba with the joy of liberation. Yet, other tweets felt active and fast-paced, especially ones that discussed rebuilding cities or reviving commerce. In this way, sections or categories began emerging, and I used a separate piece of tape for each as a way of grouping them together.
A sample of the data that was extracted from Twitter in 2021 in a .txt file. The sample has been edited to safeguard the anonymity of users.
The tweets weaved into a poem with painters’ tape.
I followed this process intuitively, working with the dataset as a conversation between the themes emerging from it and how the scenarios impacted me. I wanted to see what could emerge from the friction between the dreams of the Unity Intifada and the devastation of the ongoing genocide. I sought to explore modes of analysis that go beyond inclusion of communities experiencing colonialism and attempt to follow their lead. Moreover, I aimed to highlight the sensorial aspect—which was apparent in the tweets—as an analytical and methodological mode. What emerged was a tactile process of investigating the dataset vis à vis the current moment that involved creating something new that captures and reflects that analysis. I call this “felt analysis” based on scholar Dian Million’s concept of “felt theory” and Stephanie Springgay’s ideas around “feltness.”Footnote 14 Million critiques academia’s repetitive gatekeeping of Native women’s scholarship and ways of knowing. She argues that attending to the experiences as well as the emotional knowledge—that is, the way that history is lived and felt—leads to a deeper understanding of history. Million suggests that to uncover the multilayered facets of Indigenous history, we need to take into consideration “what pain and grief and hope meant or mean now in our pasts and futures.” In my use of the phrase felt analysis, I make a reference both to the emotional attunement to the tweets, and to the tactile process of engaging with them. Stephanie Springgay conceptualizes “feltness” drawing on the process of hand-felting to push for relational, transcorporeal, and affective pedagogical and research practices, which she argues can produce ruptures in the neoliberal and capitalist structures of education.Footnote 15
Curator Alejandro de Ávila B. reminds us that text and textile are interconnected as they both derive from the Latin term texere (to weave) and relate to words like “technique,” “to build,” or “to fashion.”Footnote 16 Thus, by weaving the tweets together into a poem (albeit using paper and painters’ tape), felt analysis as a practice connects writing to its roots in textile weaving, to the sensorium, and to building something new. My goal was, as Stringgay proposes, to “more-than-represent” what was written in the tweets, to “propel further thought and create something new” with them.Footnote 17 Arranging the tweets by hand and weaving them into a poem also facilitated the sensorial connection between my own proprioception and interoception and those expressed in the tweets themselves. Movement in or across space was a common theme in the tweets, and that ignited a sense in me that I could also engage through a form of movement.
The themes that emerged were different from the discourse analysis, affirming Sparkes argument about the relationship between form and the understanding of the data.Footnote 18 The discourse analysis yielded eight meanings of freedom: (1) Freedom to Move; (2) Freedom from All Oppression; (3) Freedom to Heal; (4) Freedom to Reconstruct; (5) Freedom With; (6) Freedom as Culturally Grounded; (7) Freedom as Everyday; and (8) Freedom as Already Present. On the other hand, the themes that emerged in the creative engagement with the data were:
Welcome/Everyone: The category of tweets announcing the liberation of Palestine and the beginning of a journey. Such as “Welcome, you are now travelling with Palestinian Airlines.”
I/Want: Tweets describing the intentions and plans of the authors. “I want to visit Jerusalem first, of course, but then Yafa, Gaza, and Nablus.”
Questions/You: Questions posed in tweets, which invite audience engagement. Such as “This weekend I am going from Beirut to Yafa. Who needs a ride?”
Together/We: A category of tweets with plans concerning the collective, such as rebuilding and (re)development. Like “After 70 years, the plants and workshops are up and running again, and you can finally order Majdalawi thobes in their various styles again.”
Maybe/We: Tweets describing possibility, or those with a particularly dream-like affect. Like, “On this day, I wish my grandma could be with us to open the door to her house with her own hands.”
I/Wish: This category captures the desires and wishes. In Arabic, I call this category nifsi (نِفسي), meaning I wish from the same root as soul (نفس), the term better captures the meaning of wishes as that which the soul or heart longs for.
Someday/We: Tweets containing a reflexive tone regarding the post-liberation moment. Like “I am going to tell my children about our heroism and how we freed it. I’ll tell them every small detail.”
Weaving together a poem from the tweets allowed me to glean interesting lessons about my broader work researching digital culture. Dominant paradigms in digital activism research methodologies center around single-platform hashtag studies, with Twitter being the dominant platform of such studies.Footnote 19 There is also a body of scholarship that engages with research on digital activism or marginalization in participatory and creative ways, like creating zines and comic, creating data through workshops, or writing social fiction.Footnote 20
Creating a poem invites us to ask: What does a tweet say and do? What world(s) does the dataset make present? How can we adequately represent the information from tweets, including feelings, dreams, and aspirations? This latter question can also be phrased as: How can we do the dataset justice? Emotional attunement is often disregarded in research, but emotions are one register at which data is communicating and can be understood. These questions are especially poignant during a time of genocidal attacks that aim to erase Palestinian existence. Thus, while examining this data from 2021 in 2023–2024, the ongoing Nakba compels me to find scholarly approaches that honor the life deserving of being on that land.
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Hartman describes the way that the senses are solicited in experiencing the slums, attuning to the smells, looks, and sounds that make up their beauty. “In the slum, everything is in short supply, except sensation,” she writes.Footnote 21 Inspired by Hartman’s attention to the sensorium, I pay attention to the senses in the future scenarios described in the tweets. Hartman centers the beauty of the ordinary life and so do the tweets. In the tweets, hopes for the future are expressed through the sensorium. They are felt in the mundane senses like rubbing Jaffa’s sand and beach water between their toes, smelling the air of Palestine and the scent of jasmine and oranges, hearing the announcements of revived transportation routes reconnecting the region, tasting Gaza’s fasikh and Jenin’s musakhan, and gathering with their kin.
Moreover, to unpack what a digital social movement campaign does requires a different kind of engagement with its data. When studying digital movements, we (researchers) often approach a campaign as a singular event of resistance. Treating #tweet_like_it’s_free as a poetic form allowed me to root the campaign within longstanding traditions of Palestinian resilience (in literature, art, academia, and other areas). Western-centric methodologies train to extract data and isolate it from the factors that tether it to a contextual past and present (or, in this case, future). Digital activism campaigns often build on historic and ongoing practices, and creative engagement offers forms or modalities that contextualize and reflect those practices.
This process also involved a rethinking of ethical considerations. Do I mention the authors of the tweets and keep the tweets in their original form and phrasing so that authors can receive credit? Do I rephrase and anonymize? If so, how? Given the age of the dataset and the difficulty of tracing the creators of the tweets (many accounts and/or tweets have been deleted since then), and the inability to get the tweeters’ consent, I opted for anonymizing the tweets in different ways. Firstly, by removing the twitter handle details of the authors. Secondly, by rephrasing and translating, without revealing which tweets are translated or edited. This particular decision makes tweets less searchable in the case that any parties were to try to look for an author of a tweet.
Using poetry as a felt analysis of the data yielded themes that are linked to the pace, feelings, and relationships present in the data. These themes still highlighted some of the meanings found in the discourse analysis, like the emphasis on relationality and the mundaneness of the scenarios. Assembled together, they also told a story of excitement, arrival, and hope. What poetry delivers more than the discourse analysis is the connection to the sensorium. Freedom of movement, for example, is not presented as a theoretical or legal right, but rather as a lived experience in all its vitality. The poem is centered around what people are doing, seeing, smelling, and tasting in a free Palestine, and who they are experiencing that with.
3. Scholarship towards liberation
The past two years of the Israeli genocide against Palestinians and the suppression of anti-war speech have revealed a new phase in global imperial politics, with Western universities at the center of these debates. Considering the ongoing violence on Palestinians and relentless clampdown on dissent, we continue to confront the limits and possibilities of academic freedom in our institutions. As scholars, we must continue to practice self-reflexivity, to reflect on our own part and the roles we want to play within these dynamics. This is a time for shifting our modes of engagement, be that by creating new efforts or joining longstanding local and global work promoting de-colonial and anti-imperial knowledge. It is a time to conduct our work in ways that are more closely aligned with our intellectual commitments to justice and liberation.
Dian Million argues that in the face of the rise of conservative, warlike, and right-wing nationalism in the United States and Canada, “[w]e need models for what can be achieved by felt action, actions informed by experience and analysis, by a felt theory.”Footnote 22 We need to know how colonialism is felt by those who experience is directly, and for our actions to be informed by that truth, which continues to be resisted, erased, and suppressed. I would argue, then, for acknowledging the sensorium and engaging it in our analyses and theorizations. If the sensorium, or what was once labeled as the “sensorial turn,” has allowed us to better understand experiences of exile and life at the borderland, migration and oppression, as well as media like film and digital technologies, perhaps it can also help us better understand digital activism campaigns.Footnote 23 Perhaps it can help us understand what the feeling is that people are mobilizing to arrive at.
While this corpus of tweets has its limitations because it is stemming from a particular hashtag trend in a particular moment, which might be seen as a bias, it nevertheless constitutes an illustrative example of a creative and imaginative connective online effort. Namely, this campaign helps demonstrate how freedom might be conceptualized, and what it might feel like. Pulling a liberated Palestine out of the subjunctive helps us step outside of hope as the feeling often linked with freedom, and instead dig deeper into excitement about meeting loved ones, anticipation for a trip, movement between towns, savoring foods and drinks, delighting in aromas, feeling certain textures like sand brushing our feet, and even holding on to grief and loss while celebrating liberation.
In this essay, using felt analysis served as a way to highlight Palestinian life and freedom in a moment when they are being violently attacked. The hashtag #tweet_like_it’s_free has a participatory quality stemming from its phrasing as a prompt that invites readers to place themselves in a time when Palestine is free. The poem celebrates vitality, movement, and kinship—a stark contrast from the majority of representations of Palestinians that we see on our screens in this time, be it through the news or through popular culture.
By turning the #tweet_like_it’s_free data into a poem, one of my aims is to document a feeling from one moment to another, to share the defiant dream scenarios from a liberated Palestinian future to confront the violence of the present, and create an opening toward liberation, one that I hope can serve our collective survival. At a moment when liberation may seem far from reality, #tweet_like_it’s_free invites us to remain committed to the dreams, ideals, and feelings of liberation.
I also write this essay hoping to contribute to creative scholarly practices. In particular, I invite digital media scholars to rethink the ways in which we work conduct our analyses of digital culture. I call on digital media scholars to engage—whether through felt analysis or other methods—to engage with the sensorium in digital media research, and to incorporate felt and tactile modes and interactive modalities for analyzing the digital. Rather than keeping our research in the representational realm, examining the portrayals or expressions of a digital activism campaign, I hope this essay tempts digital media scholars to immerse themselves, engage, and feel.Footnote 24
Author contribution
Conceptualization: S. Z.
Conflicts of interest
The author declares no competing interests.
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