Visual Data and Visual Methods in Social Sciences

Lecturers: K. Lobinger & J. Mengis

Modality: In presence

Week 2: 22 - 26 August, 2022

Workshop contents and objectives

The pervasiveness of visuals in everyday life (e.g., visual forms of communication in digital and social media, in advertising and corporate communication, in video games) not only makes it necessary for social scientists to be able to handle and analyze visual data adequately. The readily availability and the ease of use of visual technologies – e.g. of smartphones and thus of taking pictures and making videos (“ubiquitous photography” and “ubiquitous computing”) – also provides promising opportunities for using visual methods when conducting research on social phenomena. In other words, the visual approaches in the social sciences are not only concerned with the analysis of visual data and of visual material. Visuals can also be fruitfully used for research purposes. Both aspects will be covered in this workshop.

The workshop provides an introduction to visual data and visual methods and focuses on the use of different kinds of visuals in the whole research process, discussing: A) the collection and production of various forms of visual data, B) the analysis and interpretation of visual data and C) the use of visual methods in research designs. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches will be discussed and a particular emphasis is put on the combination and integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches. Further topical issues such as ethical challenges related to visual data and the effective use of visuals in the presentation of research results will also be discussed. Generally, the course aims to invite to a critical reflection on when to draw on what types of visual methods. It also aims to provide students the possibility to experiment with specific quantitative and qualitative visual methods first hand (e.g. visual or photo elicitation in interviews, video-ethnography and reflection, card sorting, quantitative image type analysis) and to enhance their skills in visual methods.

Topics

• Critical introduction to visual methods: Why is it useful to apply visual methods and to use visual data in the social sciences? What kind of knowledge regarding the visual mode is required to adequately analyze and interpret visual data?
• Overview of different kinds of visual data in research processes: What are the main differences between researcher-produced and participant-produced visual data? And what are the respective implications for the research process and the relationship between researcher and participant?
• Analyzing photographic material: How can we make sense of images and the visual mode? What can social scientific approaches learn from other analytical traditions (e.g. regarding methodological “imports” for example from iconology)? How can qualitative and quantitative approaches be combined successfully to tackle the large amounts of visual data we encounter in basically all spheres of social life?
• Producing visual data for research: What different video- and image- recording practices do we have at hand? How do the ways we conduct the recordings matter for how the object of study manifests itself?
• Analyzing video data: how can we transcribe video material and how can we make sense of it? What are the most important traditions in analyzing video (e.g., multimodal sequential analysis)?
• Participatory approaches and “creative” visual research techniques: How can “respondents” become active partners in visual research and be engaged in the production (e.g. network-carts, drawing-based exercises) and in the discussion or analysis of video (e.g. video reflection) and photographic material (e.g. visual or photo elicitation, crowd-based or participatory photo annotation, collaborative tagging)?

Prerequisites

Students should be familiar with general notions of qualitative and quantitative research and be aware of their different orientations. Students should be interested in research that involving, among others, visual data and visual methods. The indicated readings serve as further references but are not mandatory preparatory readings.

Background Reading

• Awan, F., & Gauntlett, D. (2011). Creative and visual methods in audience research. V. Nightingale (Ed.), The Handbook of Media Audiences (pp. 360-379). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Buckingham, D. (2009). “Creative” visual methods in media research: possibilities, problems and proposals. Media, Culture & Society, 31(4), 633-652. doi:10.1177/0163443709335280
• Heath, C., Hindmarsh, J. & Luff, P. (2010) Video in qualitative research. Analysing social interaction in everyday life. Sage.
• Lobinger K. (2017) Visual Research Methods (Online First). In J. Matthes (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods (pp.1-10). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Lobinger, K. (2016). “Creative” and participatory approaches in audience research. S. Kubitschko & A. Kaun (Eds.), Innovative Methods in Media and Communication Research (pp. 293-309). Palgrave McMillan.
• Knoblauch, H. (2006) Video analysis: Methodology and methods. Qualitative audiovisual data analysis in sociology, Lang
• Margolis, E. & Pauwels, L. (Eds.) (2011). The Sage handbook of visual research methods. Sage
• Mengis, J., Nicolini, D., & Gorli, M. (2018). The video production of space. How different recording practices matter. Organizational Research Methods, 21(2), 288-315
• Pink, S. (2013). Doing visual ethnography. Sage.
• Rose, G. (2012). Visual methodologies: An introduction to researching with visual materials. Sage.