# Virtual Data: Research Data in the Postdigital Humanities > [!tip] Referenz > Preprint of an article submitted for publication in the *Conference Proceedings of the STS Conference Graz* (Verlag der Technischen Universität Graz, forthcoming). ## Abstract While research data and their management are widely regarded as essential to all kinds of research, their role and value in the humanities remain contested. This article examines how research data figure in what it terms the *postdigital humanities*: humanities research in which digital technology forms an infrastructural background and an object of study, but not a distinct register of methods. Drawing on five interviews embedded in a multi-year praxiography of a long-term research consortium at a German university, the article describes humanities research data practices as acts of fixing traces of meaning in a durable form. On this basis, the consortium proves rich in data practices. The interviews reveal programmes, the goals and values of research, and practices through which researchers handle their materials. Across these runs a meta-theme of *cultivating virtuality*: the exploration and care of what is possible by opening possibilities, holding them available, and fixing them step by step. The article argues that the ambivalence towards research data is a defence of virtuality against notions of data that address only the fixed results of reduction. It proposes the concept of *virtual data* to describe how traces of meaning can be fixed without losing access to the horizon from which they were drawn. This allows for a more adequate description of everyday data practices in the humanities and calls for closer attention to them in the design of research data infrastructures. ## 1 Introduction It seems to be generally accepted that research data and their management are essential for planning, conducting, and funding all kinds of research (European Commission 2016; German Research Foundation 2015). At the same time, disciplines handle their data very differently according to their phenomena and traditions (Borgman 2015; Leonelli and Tempini 2020). Especially in the humanities, there is no consensus on the role and value of research data (Krämer 2025; Poljak Bilić and Posavec 2024; Thoegersen 2018), and there are doubts as to whether accepted standards are consistent with data practices (Hellstrand et al. 2025; Tóth-Czifra 2019). At a time when new research data infrastructures are being established, research data become a political issue (NFDI 2024; Tóth-Czifra 2021). As I argue in this article, denying that the humanities work with data does not seem adequate, either empirically or strategically. It might therefore be more productive to consider where research data are found, how they are used, and how they differ from prevailing understandings of research data. That is why this article aims to contribute to a more in-depth understanding of contemporary research data practices in the humanities. To this end, I address the question of what role research data play in what I call the *postdigital humanities*. Given that there probably are *some* data around in any contemporary work environment, the interesting question becomes *how* data are involved in the processes of research. To get insights on this, this article draws from a series of five in-depth interviews embedded in a multi-year praxiography (Mol 2002) at a long-term research consortium at a German university, where roughly 70 people from different disciplines work in small teams on their own projects, connected by a shared theme. The article proceeds as follows: Section 2 introduces the field as part of the postdigital humanities, describes the praxiographic method and my embedded position as a researcher, and sets out the ontological framework on which this analysis rests. Section 3 introduces two basic concepts from my praxiography to establish the coordinates that frame the subsequent analysis. These coordinates outline what constitutes humanities research data, as well as the ontological realm with which humanities research is concerned. Section 4 unfolds the heterogeneity of the field by presenting a set of programmes and practices found in interviews with experienced researchers, asked about their values and what they do to achieve them. Section 5 argues that a meta-theme runs throughout many of the programmes and practices presented in Section 4, which I call *cultivating virtuality*: exploring and caring for what is possible. This meta-theme is key to understanding the ambiguous role of research data in the field: data practices are often at odds with cultivating virtuality, since they tend to restrict past or future possibilities. However, I also identify data practices I describe as virtual, because they align with the cultivation of virtuality by keeping possibilities open, or even expanding them. Section 6 concludes by summarising the argument and discussing the concept of *virtual data* while also reflecting on its limits. ## 2 Field, Method, and Ontology Insights from this article draw on praxiographic work in a specific field. My research is situated at a German university in what is called a Collaborative Research Centre (CRC), which is one of the larger funding formats of the German Research Foundation (DFG). This consortium has been running since 2022 and is ongoing. At the time of this research, it consisted of around 70 people, distributed across 19 sub-projects. The sub-projects come from different disciplines and work on their own, distinct topics, while the consortium shares a common theme. In contrast to the laboratory studies that shaped science studies (Knorr Cetina 1981; Latour and Woolgar 1987), this case is located not in the natural sciences but in the humanities and social sciences. Overall, the consortium is strongly influenced by German media studies. Topics include, for example, narrative strategies in eighteenth-century literature, the social life of Renaissance libraries, contemporary food practices on campus, the worldview of robots, the exhibition of virtual reality art, and the material conditions of data centres. There is a pronounced interest in digital culture and technology, and the everyday ways of working are likewise digitalised: emails, PDFs, Microsoft Office, files in folders. The research methods, however, are not explicitly digital in the sense of the digital humanities (Jannidis et al. 2017; Krämer 2025). This style of research is what I call *postdigital humanities*. I borrow the qualifier postdigital from Felix Stalder (2018), who argues that the digital is no longer new or separate, but has fused with culture and everyday practice. Postdigital, then, does not mean that culture has moved beyond the digital, but that the digital has become its infrastructural background, shaping practices even where no computers are present. Postdigital humanities are not only part of postdigital culture, but also interested in researching it. Here, digital and non-digital topics are equally relevant. Everyday work, as in many office jobs, is largely digitalised. In other words, in the postdigital humanities, digital technology is an infrastructural background, as well as a part of culture to be studied, but not a special register of methods, as in the digital humanities. Postdigital humanities scholars deploy computational methods much less than humanistic approaches, using everyday digital technologies. The methodological framework of my research is a praxiography – that is, an ethnography of practices drawing on Annemarie Mol (2002). The data-gathering methods I deploy include participant observation, interviews, surveys, workshops, and socio-technical design experiments. This article is informed by all of these sources but focuses on a series of five in-depth interviews with experienced researchers from the consortium, conducted in 2025. By that point, I had spent over a year carrying out participant observation at public events and internal meetings, and taking an active part in collaborative projects. This gave me an overview of the researchers’ practices, and the infrastructural ecology enacted through them (Pittroff and Sørensen 2025). Building on this, I designed and conducted a series of episodic interviews (Flick 2011), combining semantic and narrative questioning to capture programmatic knowledge, as well as accounts of what they do. The aim was to collect the multiple goals and values of the researchers (programmes), as well as what they do with their materials to achieve them (practices). Quotations from these interviews are marked I1 to I5. My research is embedded in the consortium as one of its sub-projects, with a twofold mandate: to study research practices and to intervene in the consortium’s infrastructural ecology. This distinguishes my position from that of a researcher who enters a field, stays for a while, and then leaves. I am sure my work has shaped the field in a few places. In fact, I hope so. My infrastructural role enables me to contribute more than just observation: I can initiate infrastructural experiments that create new situations and generate data under altered conditions (Pittroff 2024). This aligns with co-laborative approaches that treat joint epistemic work with field partners as a mode of inquiry (Bieler et al. 2021). Such embeddedness cuts both ways. On the one hand, working alongside my informants as a colleague, and in some cases as a friend, creates a closeness and trust that a visiting researcher can rarely establish. On the other hand, I am entangled in the institutional fabric of the field: I am allied with peers and depend on supervisors who are themselves part of what I study. Pre-understandings may keep the familiar from appearing strange, my dual role may create conflicting loyalties, and organisational politics shape what can be said, and about whom. I cannot resolve these tensions; instead, I treat my complicity with the field as part of the material, and account for it reflexively (Marcus 1997), making explicit where my interventions affected what I observed, and where my dependencies may have shaped what I report. The empirical findings presented here are highly situated (Haraway 1988). They draw on an inquiry into a research consortium with around 70 members, and this article focuses on five of the interviews conducted there. These numbers are small, and the consortium cannot be treated as representative of humanities research at large. Yet it is a field where experienced researchers actively debate and enact problems concerning research data, and try out solutions to them. This situatedness is beneficial for the kind of knowledge this article seeks to generate: rather than generalisable results, it develops empirically rich and theoretically grounded concepts that can be taken up and put to work in other fields. Conceptually, this study builds upon infrastructure research (Bowker and Star 2000) and critical data studies, especially research on small datasets (Borgman 2015; Kitchin and Lauriault 2015) and everyday data practices (Feinberg 2022; Hepp et al. 2022). This means I focus on the situated interplay of practices, techniques, and culture. Ontologically, the article draws on what Hans-Jörg Rheinberger describes as various attempts in science studies to circumvent the problem of representation (Derrida 1998; Latour 1990; Rheinberger 2007), as well as on concepts of multiplicity (Hoeyer 2023; Latour 2013; Mol 2002). These provide useful and flexible frameworks for documenting and understanding research data semantically and practically. For example, the notion of *data multiple* (Hoeyer 2023: 35) proposes that every datum is multiple in an ontological sense: not only are there multiple kinds of data practices, but also any given datum might be enacted, used, and held together in multiple different ways, and thereby exist in many versions, as more than one, but less than many (Strathern 2004). ## 3 Mapping through Data and Meaning Before turning to the interviews, I gather findings from other parts of my praxiography that frame them. In short, I observed a lot of data practices, but researchers hardly cared about them. It should not come as a surprise that I witnessed digital data practices in a field that is also a contemporary office environment. These include deliberation via email, video conferencing, and chats; coordination via shared calendars, date polls, and project management systems; information via mailing lists, internal and external websites, and social media. All of these involve the production or manipulation of data, but most of them serve the coordination of collaborative projects rather than research itself. The boundary is blurry, however: an email may well carry the sketch of an argument. Other data practices I encountered are more clearly part of research work as they serve an epistemic purpose. Researchers reported and practised data production such as recording speech and thought, processing texts, and creating analytical materials; data management such as collecting, annotating, and organising; data logistics such as transferring, storing, and publishing data. Not all of these are done digitally. This broad tableau shows that the field is rich with practices that create, manipulate, or move data in the course of research. One specific example is the practice of reference management, which I have examined in more detail elsewhere together with colleagues (Çelik et al. 2025). This is, as Hans-Jörg Rheinberger puts it, “the area that extends between the agents of knowledge and the objects of their interest \[…]: the underworld of research technologies” (2021: 17, my translation). At the same time, many of my informants did not describe their practices as data practices, and there was little discourse about the techniques or formats used to handle materials. This disinterest takes different forms. Some do not recognise data in their work at all: “I think I don’t recognise when I am in contact with data”. Others reject research data as a concept, as irrelevant or even dangerous, because of its positivist connotations. “I don’t work with data. I work with problems,” a colleague emphasised after I had presented data practices I observed. And where data practices do become visible – typically when they break down, as with unfamiliar formats – they cause frustration (Pittroff 2024): “That was my first source of frustration – the fact that I’m now being forced to create \[another] file I’ve never worked with before”.[^1] This left me with two questions. First, how can I attend to data practices regardless of whether actors name them as such? Second, if data are not what researchers care about, what is? I answer each with a concept: the first with a working definition of humanities research data, developed from my mapping of the infrastructural ecology outlined above; the second with a concept of meaning, which serves as a theoretical heuristic for the domain researchers are concerned with. In a praxiographic inquiry, data only exist in the course of practices (Mol 2002). What data practices have in common is that they materially fix traces of phenomena (Rheinberger 2021). In the natural sciences, these are traces of natural phenomena; in the humanities, the phenomenon is meaning – a concept I return to below – and data fix traces of it. These traces can be words, but also more diffuse qualities. For example, someone underlines a sentence in a text, or drags a PDF into a folder. These are data practices insofar as they materialise a meaningful distinction, such as marking a sentence as relevant or setting a PDF aside to read it later. The datum is the material version of the trace; the data practice is the operation that produces, moves, or transforms it. What makes these acts data practices is not the medium or the tool, but a material operation: a fleeting, meaningful distinction is given a durable yet revisable form that can be returned to, moved, and acted upon later. This separates data practices from processes such as interpretation: not every act of understanding leaves a fixed trace, but a data practice does. The breadth of this definition is deliberate, and it answers my first question: it performs an infrastructural inversion (Bowker and Star 2000: 34), attending to the boring, the everyday, and the many data practices necessary to do research, regardless of how actors name them or whether they meet the standards of research data management. Every such fixation is also a reduction (Dewey 1929: 99). I take this as a theoretical premise rather than a finding: selection and loss are not failures of the practice, but its very mode of operation. To underline one sentence is to not underline the others; sorted into one folder, a PDF might be hard to find in another. How researchers deal with this reduction remains an empirical question. But what exactly is being reduced? This brings me to my second question. My answer draws on Niklas Luhmann’s concept of meaning (*Sinn*). For Luhmann, meaning is a kind of super-medium that underlies all mental and communicative processes (Luhmann 1997: 173–175). It is a referential structure: whatever is actually experienced or communicated points beyond itself to other possibilities. “The function of meaning is to indicate and control access to other possibilities” (Luhmann 1971: 68, my translation). Meaning thus does two things at once: it opens up a horizon of what else could be thought or said, and it regulates which of these possibilities are accessible from where one stands. In Luhmann’s words, it is “the organising principle of human experience” (Luhmann 1971: 61, my translation). If every thought and every communication operates in the medium of meaning, then so does humanities research – but so does every other kind of research, and society as a whole. As a medium, meaning therefore cannot distinguish the humanities. My thesis is that what distinguishes them is that meaning is not only their medium but also their object (Pittroff 2026). I use the concept to name the domain that humanities scholars are concerned with: the ways in which the world becomes accessible through meaning, and how meaning, in actualising possibilities, indicates others and regulates access to them – or, as one informant puts it, “sounding out meaning” (I3). ## 4 Unfolding Programmes and Practices After mapping the field through insights from the praxiography, I present findings from a series of interviews. These aim to unfold the distinction between data and meaning I introduced above. Episodic interviews (Flick 2011) combine semantic and narrative questioning approaches to capture both accounts of knowledge and practices. This means I asked my informants to narrate their values and goals, as well as what materials they use and how they use them. After that, I also asked them directly about data, and about identifying as a humanities researcher. By coding the interviews, I identified multiple themes, which I present here separated into two major groups. *Programmes* assemble my informants’ accounts of the goals and values of their research. *Practices* collect the procedures that informants report doing to achieve their goals. The aim of this section is to show the heterogeneity present in my interview material. The following section provides a more focused interpretation of the material. Most of the quotations below have been translated from German by me. For the first group, I identified five programmes: *Openness*, *Humanities*, *Aesthetics*, *Relevance*, *Knowledge* (see Table 1). **Table 1.** Programmes: goals and values of humanities research | Theme | Description | |------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------| | Openness | Alterity, complexity, and imagination; unsettling rather than simplifying | | Humanities | To go beyond the humanities, but also employing hermeneutics | | Aesthetics | Scholarly writing, language, and texts valued as art forms | | Relevance | Being taken up by others; reflecting on technology and digitisation | | Knowledge | Reliable, documented, and systematic knowledge beyond the single case | The theme of *Openness* captures a programme towards the possibility that things could be otherwise: interviewees value alterity, imagination, counter-intuition, and they describe their goal not as reducing complexity but as unsettling established views and keeping problems open. Research, in this sense, is “something that has to do with things not being the way one believes they are” (I5), and it involves explicitly rejecting simplification: “I want to simplify \[and] abstract only a few things \[…] but rather complicate and problematise” (I4). Under the theme of *Humanities*, interviewees reflect on the identity and boundaries of the humanities as a style of research. On the one hand, participants describe their preferred kind of humanities as a discipline seeking to leave its own terrain through media studies materialism, cultural studies grounding, or different styles of speculation. “A humanities that wants to go somewhere humanities scholars actually are not” (I1). On the other hand, the humanities are defined by their core practice of working on texts, concepts, and meaning. “Humanities scholarship is conceptual work. And sounding out meaning, that is simply \[it]” (I3). There is both the wish to leave the humanities behind and a commitment to the tradition. The theme of *Aesthetics* gathers statements in which scholarly work is valued as an aesthetic practice: writing, language, texts, and even the act of citing are treated as art forms, and the pleasure of research is located in the beauty of its form. “What gives me joy \[is] writing or reading beautiful texts” (I3). The theme of *Relevance* concerns the relation of researchers’ work to others: the hope that it will be taken up and that others will continue working with it, that it makes complexity comprehensible, and that it contributes a necessary reflection on technology and digitisation. One researcher describes a project “in which I believe I can bring in my own interests in such a way that, somewhere, a point of connection arises for other people” (I5), while another emphasises societal urgency: “this massive amount of digitisation, and the way that digital technologies play a role in our lives, that requires reflection on all kinds of levels” (I2). The theme of *Knowledge* gathers programmes concerning research as the production of knowledge: that knowledge is reliable and attentive to hidden bias, that it is documented, preserved, and made available to others, that it reveals patterns beyond the single case, and that it is systematic and part of a learning process. The concern for the durability of knowledge is voiced in the remark that “documentation is then also part of making sure that the knowledge remains” (I1), and the aspiration to find patterns in the statement that “everything that is not casuistic is scientifically important to me” (I5). A second group of themes focuses on accounts of the materials participants work with and the practices through which they find, handle, produce, and modify them. I identified eleven themes here: *Materials*, *Research Data*, *Reading and Annotating*, *Writing and Arranging*, *Collecting and Selecting*, *Ordering*, *Conceptualisation*, *Documentation*, *Object Study*, *Qualitative Inquiry*, *Collaboration* (see Table 2). **Table 2.** Practices: finding, handling, ordering, and transforming materials | Theme | Description | |--------------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------| | Materials | What counts as material, from texts to everything tangible | | Research Data | What is considered research data; the concept itself contested | | Reading and Annotating | Close work with texts: reading, marking, note-taking | | Writing and Arranging | Writing as the core of research; arranging texts and quotations | | Collecting and Selecting | Searching, procuring, and selecting material; building corpora | | Ordering | Organising files and folders as an eroding routine | | Conceptualisation | Structuring arguments with notebooks, mind maps, and outlines | | Documentation | Fixing phenomena in lab notebooks, photos, and videos | | Object Study | Hands-on engagement with hardware and software | | Qualitative Inquiry | Interviews and recordings with developers and users | | Collaboration | Working with others, from reading groups to co-writing | The theme of *Materials* collects accounts of what the materials of research actually are. Most participants name texts ranging across a spectrum between literature and theory, but the notion of material varies considerably: for some it includes images, video, and audio, for others it is historical artefacts or digital files produced when working with software. One informant even states that “there is nothing that is not material” (I5). The theme of *Research Data* gathers what informants consider – or refuse to consider – research data. This includes written notes about thoughts and speech, interview recordings and transcripts, digital collation models, digitisations and secondary literature, and metadata on marked text passages, process documentation, digital sensor output. “I think one of the most important parts of research data is secondary literature” (I2). At the same time, the concept itself is questioned, whether by insisting that the meaning of a material is not a datum, or by rejecting the relevance of them altogether. “To this day I have not understood what \[research data] is” (I5). The theme of *Reading and Annotating* gathers the close work on texts. This includes reading several times with different degrees of openness, marking passages, writing into books and inserting slips of paper, running keyword searches across many open documents, and looking up concepts. “\[I] mark a lot, I also make notes in the books, stick slips of paper in them” (I4). The theme covers reading as a broad set of practices including many ways of handling materialisations of text. “I also spend a lot of time either searching for texts or printing them out and then putting them next to me and not reading them” (I3). The theme of *Writing and Arranging* gathers writing at the core of research. “The feeling of really doing research I have above all when I write” (I4). This includes the feedback between writing and re-reading, marked excerpts that migrate into one’s own text, arranging quotations instead of commenting on them, reducing material as a compromise for the sake of communicability, adapting to style sheets, narrating the search process and disclosing its detours and failures to readers, and daily word targets. “I don’t want to be a speaker myself, I want to arrange texts” (I5). The theme of *Collecting and Selecting* covers practices of finding, procuring, and selecting material: searching databases, journals, and bibliographies, browsing archives systematically, sending semantic queries through databases, locating an unfamiliar field of knowledge, assembling and revising corpora, and reading selectively in order to cope with quantity. “Not reading books, but reading bibliographies. Checking databases. And a feel for nodes” (I5). The theme of *Ordering* concerns the organisation of materials and files: digital folder structures that are numbered, sorted by year, or divided by format and chapter, deep file paths, several cloud services, keeping versions, sudden impulses to delete everything, desktops that fill up in stressful periods, reference management systems, note-taking software whose fast search makes tidiness less necessary, and the search for the lost reference. Ordering is described as a personal routine that tends to erode. “When things get hectic, everything ends up on the desktop and then isn’t in the right folder anymore” (I4). The theme of *Conceptualisation* concerns the structuring of thoughts and arguments before and during writing: notebooks, mind maps, tables and figures, outlines, and other attempts at sequencing or relating meaning. “The in-between step between the thoughts and the notes and the information and the literature is an outline” (I2). The materiality of this practice is explicitly present: “Loose thoughts are always on loose pieces of paper. The firmer the format becomes, the better ordered the thoughts are” (I3). The theme of *Documentation* refers to practices of recording or otherwise materially fixing phenomena: keeping a lab notebook, taking photos and short videos, and compiling error reports. “We had a lab notebook \[…] That’s where we just wrote all sorts of things down in really minute detail” (I1). The theme of *Object Study* describes a hands-on engagement with technical objects or software as a way of understanding them: building and assembling hardware, installing software and getting it to run, visualising computer output, manipulating a setup to see what happens and extracting raw data, as well as learning to use software, entering data into it, reconstructing a timeline of how it came into being, and trying out applications. The theme of *Qualitative Inquiry* gathers empirical methods of social research: interviews with the developers and users of a technology, video and screen recordings during interviews, and asking informants to share their own materials. The theme of *Collaboration* covers working with others: consulting people with different expertise, meeting regularly to build things together, reading groups, sending and recommending texts, intervening in each other’s writing, collaborative writing, publicly discussing drafts, and shared folders with minutes or other notes. ## 5 Cultivating Virtuality through Data The aim of the previous section was to present the spectrum of work in the humanities as shown in my interviews. In this section, I argue that a meta-theme runs through both programmes and practices, which I call cultivating virtuality. This is not an exhaustive summary of everything presented above, but rather a recurring theme in all five interviews that links multiple other themes and offers insight into the role of research data. To this end, I first connect the programmes and practices to meaning, as introduced in Section 3. Secondly, I introduce theories of virtuality to further specify the meta-theme. Thirdly, I explain what this means for the role of research data in the field. In Section 3, I proposed that humanities researchers make meaning their object, and that meaning does two things at once: it opens a horizon of other possibilities, and it regulates access to them. The concept that names the status of these possibilities is contingency. Something is contingent if it is neither necessary nor impossible (Luhmann 1984: 152). Contingency is, therefore, not an additional feature that some meanings have and others lack; it is constitutive of meaning. Insofar as humanities researchers are concerned with the reflexive reproduction of meaning, contingency is the condition that makes this work possible. It is not only what is meant, but also what else could be meant, and how the paths to these alternatives are opened or closed. My interviews show that researchers do more than merely observe this. They actively cultivate it, and both aspects of meaning are evident in their values and practices. On the side of the programmes, the opening aspect is the more explicit. Research is meant to unsettle what is taken for granted and to problematise rather than simplify (*Openness*). On the level of disciplinary identity, the humanities are described as an exploration of possibilities rather than an administration of certainties (*Humanities*), and working with texts – traditionally the prototypical way of engaging contingency through interpretation – is valued for its own sake (*Aesthetics*). The fixing aspect appears in the wish for one’s work to be taken up and in the aim of reliable, documented, and durable knowledge (*Relevance*, *Knowledge*). At first glance, this looks like a counterweight to the problematising impulse. Read together, however, the two complement each other: a problem is kept open so that others can take it up, and knowledge is documented so that it can be revisited and questioned later. Opening and fixing are two moments of a shared interest in keeping contingency accessible. The aim is not to maximise openness as such, but to cultivate forms in which the possible remains accessible. This cultivation becomes tangible in the practices, many of which work as techniques for handling possibilities by opening, holding available, or fixing step by step. Opening generates possibilities: research proceeds as a search set off by observations (*Collecting and Selecting*), and technical setups are manipulated by trial and error to see what happens (*Object Study*). Holding available keeps possibilities present: texts are printed and left unread, slips of paper and marginal notes mark places to return to (*Reading and Annotating*), file versions are kept, and fast search replaces a tidy order that never fully settles (*Ordering*). Fixing step by step reduces possibilities gradually and reversibly: the firmer the format, the more ordered the thought (*Conceptualisation*, *Documentation*, *Writing and Arranging*). Here, writing is a paradigmatic form of doing meaning, as it fixes meaning by selecting and combining certain words and not others. When the result is read, it is opened up again in the form of interpretation. Furthermore, the possibilities of interpretation can be increased during the fixing process by disclosing detours or by arranging quotations instead of commenting on them. The cultivation of contingency thus does not happen in the head alone, but in material practices, too. While contingency names a certain kind of possibility, it says less about the horizon from which selections are made, about how this horizon is affected by them, and about its relation to materiality. For this reason, I introduce the term virtuality by calling the meta-theme *cultivating virtuality*. Virtuality, as I use it here, connects three lines of thought: Niklas Luhmann’s concept of meaning, Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between the virtual and the actual, and Michel Serres’ account of “\[an]other world, abstract, virtual, possible” (Serres 2022: 4). Deleuze insists that the virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual: it is fully real without being actualised, and actualisation is not the realisation of a pre-given possibility but a creative differentiation (Deleuze 1988: 96–98). Annina Klappert (2020: 19–26) has related Deleuze’s virtuality to Luhmann’s concept of meaning: meaning, as the medium of all possibilities of experience and communication, is virtual to the highest degree. When I speak of possibilities, I therefore refer not to pre-given options but to this horizon of meaning. Read together, Deleuze and Luhmann suggest that virtuality is not a reservoir that precedes its actualisations and is used up by them. Every actualisation is a selection that closes off alternatives, yet in doing so it reproduces a new horizon of what else could be meant (Luhmann 1997: 199). Moments of closure are thus not the opposite of virtuality but part of how it is cultivated. Written in his uniquely poetic style, Serres’ concept of virtuality reads almost like a combination of Deleuze and Luhmann, with the addition of materiality. Like Deleuze, Serres insists on virtuality as something real: “Proofs that virtual worlds exist are to be found everywhere” (Serres 2022: 4); examples are “equations and algorithms, triangles and polyhedrons, language and music, musical notation and alphabets, images” (Serres 2022: 4). Serres’ description of virtuality comes close to Luhmann’s meaning: it is “devoid of meaning and, for this reason, capable of being given any meaning at all” (Serres 2022: 23, 146). At the same time, it needs to be short-circuited with the material world to become effective. Serres’ striking example is the sundial, which transforms the energy of the sun into a date in time (Serres 2022: 7). From here, the ambivalent status of research data becomes understandable. In Section 3, I described data practices as acts that give a fleeting, meaningful distinction a durable material form, and stressed that every such fixation is a reduction: to underline one sentence is to not underline the others. Data practices are instances where the virtuality of meaning touches a material carrier and is actualised. These selections are indispensable, but they also threaten to close down what research is meant to keep open. This is a reason why the notion of research data is contested. It is not a blind resistance to digitisation, but a consequence of cultivating virtuality. The concept of research data as it circulates in research data management, with its connotations of givenness, completeness, reusability, and standardisation, addresses the fixed result of a reduction. What it leaves out is precisely what humanities researchers cultivate: the horizon of possibilities from which the fixed distinction was selected and to which it should remain connected. Rejecting the term, then, is a way of defending virtuality against rigid actualisation. My material also shows, however, that the alternative to restrictive data practices is not humanities research without data. Holding available and fixing step by step also produce data: slips of paper, file versions, marks, outlines, lab books. These practices reduce, but in ways that keep reductions revisitable and alternatives addressable. This is why I propose the concept of *virtual data* to name a specific style of producing and handling research data, and the data that result from it. Virtual data fix traces of meaningful distinctions while keeping access to the horizon from which the distinctions were drawn. They do not oppose data as reduction; they are a particular way of reducing: reduction in the service of cultivating virtuality. A marked passage is a datum, but it points back to the text; an outline orders thoughts but can be reordered; a documented detour fixes a failure so that the paths not taken remain present. ## 6 Conclusion This article set out to ask what roles research data play in the humanities, at a time when research data infrastructures are being built and the question of humanities research data is as political as ever. Drawing on a series of interviews embedded in a praxiography in a long-term research consortium, I have argued that the field is rich with data practices, understood as acts that temporarily fix and materialise traces of meaning: underlining a sentence, filing a PDF, sketching an outline. Interview material reveals a heterogeneous set of programmes and practices, describing what humanities scholars value and what they do to achieve it. Through these programmes and practices runs a meta-theme that I call cultivating virtuality: the exploration and care of what is possible, by opening possibilities, holding them available, and fixing them step by step. With Luhmann, Deleuze, and Serres, virtuality names the real but not actualised horizon of possibilities, which is not used up but generated and reshaped in material actualisation. Cultivating virtuality is not just the multiplication of options, but a care for optionality itself. Against this background, the ambivalence towards research data appears as a defence of virtuality against data practices that address only fixed results but leave out the horizon from which they were drawn. Cultivating virtuality is a programmatic as well as practical mode of research that requires reduction and fixation. What distinguishes humanities data practices is not that they avoid data, but that they treat data as situated actualisations within a horizon of possibilities: as virtual data. The concept of virtual data thus offers an answer to the question of what roles research data play in the humanities. It does not resolve all tensions between the aims of humanities researchers and the processes of data collection and analysis. Rather, I hope it contributes to a better description of the situation – not only by pointing out these tensions, but by showing how humanities researchers already deal with the problem of cultivating virtuality in their daily work. Not every way of doing so is, or could become, a data practice. 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