Social Life under the Microscope?

Abstract

Video is an important new instrument for sociological research, sometimes welcomed as the ‘microscope’ of social science. It provides access to important and otherwise difficult to examine aspects of human interaction. Moreover, because video captures practice in its lived production as ‘another next first time’ (Garfinkel 2002), it makes it possible to study practical creativity - the way in which people invent new practices. In this paper, I probe the microscope metaphor through concrete examples from my work with landscape architects and computer scientists in participatory technology research and design projects.

Visual grammar in practice: Negotiating the arrangement of speech bubbles in storyboards

“…For example, both Büscher (2005) and Murphy (2005) studied design meetings of architects, which allowed them, first, to investigate how the architects themselves interpreted their architectural drawings, and, secondly to study the design rationale behind the finished plans. Similarly, Ivarsson (2010) investigated design-ininteraction by observing the interactions of architecture students using a variety of software packages.…”

Recent Methodological Opportunities in Online Hypermedia – a Case Study of Photojournalism in Singapore

“…It would not be difficult then, to encourage submissions from practitioners keen on investigating social forms of life using multimedia methods. Also, as I mentioned previously, some scholars have experimented with embedding their videos into webpages as part of their analysis (Büscher 2005).…”

“…Online sociological journals are comparatively fewer in number than their print counterparts, and articles published in such journals tend to remain textually-centric (Pink 2007:198), oftentimes not leveraging on the benefits afforded by web technologies like streaming videos, graphics or audio, with some exceptions (Brown, Dilley and Marshal 2008, Büscher 2005, Gibson et al 2005.…”

Ways of grounding imagination

“…1). Here, it leaves a mark (Büscher 2004). Using video tags to bridge between physical and digital environments: How to place and discuss various configurations of landscape design elements with video tags in the physical environment, stability of video tags, and overlaying real world with digital information were issues explored here.…”

“…But by changing the means for the accomplishment of collabo-ration around visualisations, we change the 'ecology' of interaction and expression. For example, the balance between leaving a mark or not may change (Büscher 2004 Remote collaboration between 'offices', mixing interactive digital shared workspaces with live video of the others: Pointing, the emergence of 'gestraws', shared manipulation of materials, common foci, etc. were investigated.…”