ABSTRACT
Sensory, digital and visual research methods are increasingly established across the social sciences and humanities. In this chapter we focus on their potential for researching experiences of physical activity. We first outline the contexts where we understand contemporary physical activities are played out. These involve people moving through, in and around environments that are at simultaneously digital and material. This has two key implications. First, researching physical activity now often means researching activity in a world that traverses the online and offline, the digital and material. Second, we ask how technologies that are implicated in physical activity cross over into our research; how can we engage digital and visual technologies that are part of the world of physical activity to serve our research processes, and how can we use these technologies actively as researchers. We then discuss visual, digital and sensory methods with regard to this specific context, through three examples: digital autoethnography; digital video; data visualization.
