Visualizing lived experience: mapping the soundscape of an after-school Minecraft club

Abstract

This article demonstrates the power of employing alternative, interpretative analysis techniques in ethnographic work. The author argues for the role of sensory interpretation as a valid and necessary method of analytical enquiry, particularly to challenge existing dominant, primarily written discourses that often strive for unrealistic empirical objectivity. In order to make this argument, he demonstrates a combined sonic/visual, interpretative approach to analysis, developed to explore the lived experience of a group of children in an after-school club that took place in and around the world-building videogame Minecraft. Here, inspired by research which takes artistic and exploratory approaches towards knowing, the author employs interpretative drawing as an analytical move. Underpinned by the work of Deleuze and Guattari (see A Thousand Plateaus, 1987: 12), the author produces a visual ‘map’ of soundscape data as a means of exploring potentially side-lined aspects of lived experience, through a process of resemiotization. Developing this sonic/visual approach in context – a process that had an impact on both the analyst and the analysis – helped to shed new light on the site under investigation. As such, this article builds on other analyses of sound in children’s social and educational experience by proposing that interpretative, visual responses to soundscape data can add value to otherwise purely written, or purely sonic, accounts.

Dreams of time and space: exploring digital literacies through playful transmedia storying in school

“…This was particularly apparent in stage three of the game (extracts 3a and 3b) when children moved around the room tinkering with and influencing each other's projects. Reflecting on how the song about the continents became integrated into two of the animations he explained that the child who started singing was new to the school and “brought it in from outside […] that's the first time they've done that song in this class.” Bailey (2016, 2020) argues that such soundscapes are an important part of shaping spaces for media production and are an integral part of the social and material fabric of the classroom. In this project, as the children shaped their ‘digital dreams’ the noises within the room were integral to the playful ways that ideas were shared and taken up by children.…”