YouTube: fragments of a video‐tropic atlas

Abstract

In this article I make a plea for human geographers to make use of the rapidly growing collection of video materials that can be found on YouTube and other online collections. My tiny atlas of YouTube picks out three videos in order to exhibit the richness of audio-visual materials that can be found and to offer one potential form of video analysis. The three videos are common amateur genres on YouTube: home movies of family occasions, a video-blog and the counter-surveillance of the police. Against understanding these videos as 'personal' , I argue that they are open to their 'any-misation' for the purposes of studying shared practices. In turning toward video, human geography gains a source of data on the temporal, embodied, bodily, material and mobile aspects of spatial practices. Brief analyses of the three videos are provided in order to show how we can investigate video practices as both documenting and reflexively constituting practices of gift-giving, caring for others and surveilling the police. Finally, I present a case for selecting 'badly produced' videos for good analytic reasons.

Socializing children into pop culture: A visit to Santa

“…A number of researchers in the field of conversation analysis have examined interactions recorded and loaded onto YouTube (see Harris, 2006; Pihlaja, 2014; Reynolds, 2011). As Laurier (2016) suggests, YouTube provides a ‘reconfiguration of the private sphere’. This highlights how children’s everyday lives are displayed and monitored in public forums.…”

Membership categorisation, category-relevant spaces, and perception-in-action: The case of disputes between cyclists and drivers

“…The emergent analytic use of the lay production and curating of video materials (see, for example, Lloyd, 2015) raises a number of issues discussed in a nascent methodological literature (Laurier, 2016). Such videos provide a means in and through which relatively 'rare' social interactions -in terms of either occurrence and/or the possibility of capture -might be accessed (such as a study by Tim Smith (unpublished) of 'stop and search' interactions).…”

Choreographing the Performer–Audience Interaction

“…Using the YouTube concert videos as a member-produced ethnographic online resource (Hallett and Barber 2014; Wittel 2000) and ethnomethodologically observable data (ten Have 2002; Laurier 2015), I describe how participants in a live concert coordinate their actions and interactions moment to moment and movement by movement and how they constitute the choreography as a joint practical achievement (Clark 1996). By enacting the choreography, individual participants become a collective audience responsive to the particular performer and the performance witnessed.…”