After Visual Methods

Panel

Originally uploaded by Mediacciones Group

Looking back on the conference, we are both really pleased with the keynotes and papers we heard, the many new contacts we made, and with the exposure to the many versions of ‘visual methods’ that the conference afforded. Notably, much work involved ‘giving voice’ strategies (where researchers provide cameras to participants, and use the resulting images to empower or document). During our last visit to Leeds, when we visited an ethnography conference in March, we had heard an impressive presentation of research using similar approaches by Emanuela de Cecco.

We did find that our research was somewhat unusual at this conference in its combination of the visual as both method and object.  Interestingly, other work that focused on visual culture (i.e. Cox and Gomez Cruz) also addressed digital forms. Also came back thinking that one of the issues we need to pursue is how this category of ‘the visual’ is operating in our research.

What is the effect of this distinction between the visual as method and object? What could be gained by bringing them closer? One argument, which underlies our paper, is that more visual methods are likely to yield to better ethnographic work on visual culture. Our own paper from the conference,  on how to study a networked image, is now available here.

And in several research projects we heard about, it also seemed like more awareness of the visual ecology in which research was being done would have meant better use of digital methods and better insights. (What does it mean to give kids disposable cameras for a research project when they are in possession of camphones in their daily lives…) In other words, it would be valuable to consider the place of ‘researcher produced’ or ‘participant generated’ images  in relation to the visual culture of the research setting.

Presentations at Visual Methods and 4S

We will be presenting on the project at two conferences in the Fall.  The first will be a presentation on the methodological approach we are developing, in a session organised byElisenda Ardévol and Adolfo Estalella, and with contributions by Sarah Pink (Loughborough University, UK),  Francesco Lapenta (Roskilde University, Denmark) as well as by the organisers. The title of our paper is Mediated ethnography and the use of digital and networked images, or ‘How to study ‘network realism’ as visual knowing’, and here is the abstract:

• This paper conveys our methodological approach to the study of ‘network realism’. Network realism is investigated as a particular form of visual knowing around databases of images on the web. This approach was developed drawing on three bodies of work. With regards to visual knowledge, we use work in science and technology studies (Beaulieu, van Dijck,  de Rijcke, Daston & Galison, Hine); with regards to the study of visual material, we draw on visual anthropology (Pink, Banks, Edwards& Hart) ; and with regards to digital culture, we are inspired by scholarship on the cultural particularity of digital forms and of the internet (Elkins; Thurtle& Mitchell).
• The project includes four different sites: Funda, a database of real estate in the Netherlands; Flickr as used by scholars of street art; the database of the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam; and the database of the documentation center of the Rijksakademie for visual arts, Amsterdam.  We have developed an ethnographic practice in this project that embraces mediated interaction. This means that a range of forms of participant-observation is used in this project, including co-present and face to face interaction, observations of traces left by users in the various databases, and interaction with the various digital infrastructures.
• This diversity enables us to examine four important dimensions of visual knowing:how these databases and the web form a networked context for users and viewers of these images; how images have an active function besides being ‘viewed’, since these databases configure images as interfaces to other kinds of information or to other kinds of activities; how images in these databases become involved in textual and visual practices, through tagging, commenting and annotating; how the use of these images is supported by a particular kind of materiality, (including screens, image file standards, html code, etc) and how these images relate to the collections of material objects at all four sites.
• The presentation will contextualize and illustrate research on each of these four dimensions.

Our second Fall conference will be the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Sociat Study of Science, in a session organised by Catelijne Coopmans on “Data Riches: The Practices and Politics of Exploiting Digital Data Sets”.  We will speak on Network Realism as Engagement with Networked Databases of Images, and here are the main points from our abstract:

• In contexts where visual representations are taken as evidence, debates around observation, knowledge and empiricism have always been complex. The development of infrastructures that enable new kinds of manipulation, interaction and circulation of images seem to further challenge their documentary role. Our paper will take as a point of departure the intersection of digital images and computer networks at the point where they purport to convey the ‘real’. It explores the ways in which digital images in networked contexts are produced, treated and valued as sources of knowledge about physical objects. Increasingly, such activities involve a new form of visual knowing that we label network realism. As part of the label, ‘realism’ draws attention to the way these images are involved in practices that are factual, material and consequential. The term ‘network’ invokes the novel contexts and practices around these images. Our paper conceptualizes and investigates this widespread but underexamined use of images, at the intersection of digital and networked technologies. We will discuss preliminary results from field work at four sites where network realism is central: the Rijksakademie for the visual arts; the Tropenmuseum (an ethnographic museum); real estate database Funda; and Flickr as used by scholars who study street art. At each of the fieldsites, images are part of databases and circulate in complex electronic networks in ways that are not reducible to, but are intimately related to their digital format. The manipulation of digital images in networks enables other kinds of knowledge than those possible by physical co-presence with the objects represented. The ethnographic study of interactions with databases provides insight into the specific ways in which users and producers come to know through networked images, in contrast to other forms of visual knowing.

More details on the events page!