A B S T R AC T Ethnographers, like other researchers, currently have a broad range of media at their disposal for conducting fieldwork, for aiding analysis and, most challengingly, for representing their completed work. These include digital media such as photographs, video film, audio-recordings, graphics and others besides. Through the computer 'writing space', these media can be integrated together, alongside more conventional written interpretation, into hypermedia environments. However, integration poses a number of potential problems, which this article addresses through a discussion of the semiotics of multimedia. In particular, it argues that different media can be seen to 'afford' different kinds of meaning. The integration of different media, therefore, has potentially significant implications for ethnography. Rather than seeing these media forms as discrete, we suggest an approach to ethnographic work which sees meaning as emerging from the fusion of differently mediated forms into new, 'multi-semiotic' modes. We therefore recognize the need to go beyond the current interest in visual methods, and instead to develop ways of understanding what kinds of meanings are produced in multimodal ethnographic work. K E Y W O R D S : hypermedia, multimedia, multimodality, qualitative data analysis, qualitative research methods, representation A RT I C L E
This special issue of Qualitative Research was produced in the context of a comparatively recent surge in qualitative 'multimodal' research. A number of scholars from diverse disciplinary and theoretical traditions have turned to multimodality in their endeavours to understand everyday communication and interaction in contemporary social life, often foregrounding certain tensions with more established research traditions, such as ethnography. In this issue, we focus on the methodological and theoretical implications of bringing multimodality and ethnography into dialogue with each other -a development that, we think, throws up some provocative issues for qualitative research methodology. These include questions about the 'epistemological compatibility' of different approaches, when each carries particular theoretical and methodological histories and associations, and what might be gained and lost in endeavours to bring together their respective descriptive and analytic conventions.In many ways, these issues are not new; they pick up on older debates and controversies in qualitative methodology, in this case, about the status and locus of both 'meaning' and 'the social' in research. This latter tension can be brought out in questions such as: what is the provenance of the semiotic resources on which social actors draw in 'making meaning' in social situations? Is 'social context' constituted through social interaction or through language (verbal and non-verbal), or both (and if the latter, how do they work together)? Do we primarily look to social or semiotic explanations of how 'meaningfulness' is accomplished -and, crucially for the articles here, where can the boundaries between
This article discusses how emergent sensory and multimodal methodologies can work in interaction to produce innovative social enquiry. A juxtaposition of two research projects -an ethnography of corridors and a mixed methods study of multimodal authoring and 'reading' practices -opened up this encounter. Sensory ethnography within social research methods aims to create empathetic, experiential ways of knowing participants' and researchers' worlds. The linguistic field of multimodality offers a rather different framework for research attending to the visual, material and acoustic textures of participants' interactions. While both these approaches address the multidimensional character of social worlds, the 'sensory turn' centres the sensuous, bodied person -participant, researcher and audience/reader -as the 'place' for intimate, affective forms of knowing. In contrast, multimodal knowledge production is premised on multiple analytic gaps -between modes and media, participants and materials, recording and representation. Eliciting the tensions between sensorial closeness and modal distances offers a new space for reflexive research practice and multiple ways of knowing social worlds.
No abstract
Industrial heritage deals directly with working-class experience in a very public forum, but has not really been analysed in relation to class issues. This article discusses the case of ex-workers re-employed as heritage guides to tell the story of their own lives at a living history coalmining-museum, exploring the nature of the performances/representations of class that are produced. Heritage performance is caught up in a double bind that is familiar to other kinds of working-class representation: a continual equivocation between foregrounding dignity and autonomy on the one hand, and acknowledging subjugation and defeat on the other.This tension is played out, though differently, both in the guides' past occupations and their present ones.The article examines the public narratives they produce for visitors in the here and now as well as locating these in an understanding of their current positions as tour guide employees and their living through of their memories and identities as mineworkers.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.