When the Field Moves Online Reflections on Virtual Data Collection during COVID-19

Chandni Singh, Sheetal Patil, Prathigna Poonacha, Maitreyi Koduganti, Swarnika Sharma | 2021

Abstract
The pandemic and the restrictions that came with it forced the project team, of the interdisciplinary research project titled “Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture as Green Infrastructure” (UPAGrI), to adjust to new ways of working and collaborating: they needed to completely reorient their approach to research and data collection. This field note describes the team’s experiences with online data collection in Pune and Bengaluru during the first year of the project, January 2020–2021. They reflect on their methodological approach to, and experiments in, online data collection; the benefits and drawbacks of this approach; and the lessons others exploring online fieldwork might take away from their experiences.