Over the weekend I took part in a Marathon Hike along the South Downs for Macmillan Cancer Support. Walking alongside close friends and raising money for a charity who’ve supported our family was a gratifying experience, and the view along the Seven Sisters was beautiful.

The opportunity to step away from my research, of which I am three weeks through, provided me a moment of reflection and I noticed a parallel between walking and the process of research. When facing 26.2 miles it is natural to focus on completion, preparing yourself for the time and effort it will take to reach your end goal. But in thinking only of the destination, it is easy to forget about the landscape you pass through. Your thoughts concentrate internally on your lethargic limbs or your blistered feet, and you forget to notice the beautiful environment around you. While its very natural to treat a walk as a means to get from A to B, a walk can act as a place of mindful appreciation.

I believe that this translates into my research project. I break each week down into actionable tasks and daily to-do lists that will contribute to my final research outcomes; one of which is a guideline brief that can be shared between museums and heritage institutions, providing a practical action-set to minimise their digital environmental impact. This categorisation of tasks is productive and gets me towards my end goal, but it can consequentially make my research very transactional. As on a walk, I metaphorically forget to look around me.

Thus, as I took a pause this weekend to walk for charity, I also took a moment to reflect on my research, looking beyond my actionable goals. I remembered my responsibility as a researcher to remember the contributing perspectives and voices, the politics and the lived experiences that shape the field I am in. By stopping and looking around I remembered my duty to create space for the unheard voices, those suppressed by the power imbalances and the global inequalities within digitisation and the history of the heritage sector, giving them the opportunity to be heard.

My research is not a linear process, something to complete and move on from. It is a dynamic accumulation of lived experience, socio-political ideas, and tangible environmental consequences – stories that cannot be quantified but need to be told and listened to. My research will not simply end after 6 weeks but will continue to evolve, contributing resources to my field that will hopefully have a continuous impact, changing practices and ideas.

Just as I experienced each step during that marathon, I must experience and reflect on each step of my research. What I study is not in isolation but interconnected in perspectives, voices, and lived experiences.