Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials

Product Information

Intertextuality refers to the way that meanings of any one discursive image or text depend not only on that one text or image, but also on the meanings carried by other images and texts”. And also, lots of the digital scholarship I’ve been reading recently – in urban studies, media studies and so on – focuses on platforms and takes a strongly marxist and/or materialist analysis. I have completed the ESRC-funded project Urban aesthetics: a comparison of experiences in Milton Keynes and Bedford town centres (ESRC grant number RES-062-23-0223) with Dr Monica Degen at Brunel University, in which we compared how people experienced two rather different town centres: Milton Keynes and Bedford. Anthropological approach: not so concerned with interpretations of artifact’s meaning; more interesting in tracing effects of visual artifact.

Hoelzl and Marie work through a very productive definition of digital images as images that are co-constituted with software; Rubinstein and Sluis explore the networking of photos; Mackenzie and Munster coin the useful term ‘invisuality’ to refer to the algorithmic analysis of the vast banks of images collated by social media platforms; and Beller points to the political economy driving those same platforms. The systemic approach to the cultural and semiotic dynamics allows us to understand how patterns of signs, meanings and behaviours are constructed through the past historical process and in relation to the anticipated short-term and distant future. The long-term project Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, The Public and The Politics of Sentiment resulted in a book from Ashgate Press in 2010.Media Arts Specialists’ License Cultural Practitioner, Publisher, 2022 Preliminary Candidacy Status for the Doctor of Divinity, D. Then how all of these fit into the ‘code’ – “a set of conventionalised ways of making meaning that are specific to particular groups of people. The best of this method is that this ought to be made fairly explicit – the categories need to be literally explicit and that should alert the viewer to any problems. We do love to think we are the only people capable of bringing to the fore the ‘truth’ of what we see. The flow matters: which word follows which, how the sentences follow from each other, how points and paragraphs assemble into a large whole (even if hole-y).

This chapter also relates specific advice in regards to how to choose an image(s) for analysis by suggesting that images should be both “representative and significant”. I’ve recently been given an opportunity to introduce visual communication and design into the mix of behaviour change tools employed by a government department to facilitate change. There are certainly many analogies at work in these two books: the first especially is a great, challenging read.No references, no footnotes, not too much qualification and specification (which carries risks of course). For all their very different formats and styles and effects, I think these two books complement each other beautifully. It is important to remember that signs have multiple meanings (referred to here as polysemy) and the meaning you ‘get’ might be one that is of least interest. The construction of scientific knowledges about the world has become more and more based on images rather than on written texts. Content analysis: studies symbolic qualities of text; studies trends amongst collection of artifacts; looks for patterns; creates and analyzes coding system found is sample of artifacts.

If this social process does happen, it is possible in no small measure because of sustained visual exposure that helps turn a given local occurrence into a translocal event, or – to use Bruno Latour’s parlance – ‘a matter of fact‘ into ‘a matter of concern.While in theory all these meet at the interface of a screen that displays a photographic image, the implication is that the image doesn’t matter and indeed is a distraction from the real site of power, which is the algorithm ‘behind’ the screen. Chapter 2 focuses on how to use this text; meaning, that Rose provides suggestions for the intended use of this text as a methodological guide.