Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials

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Most recently I’ve focussed on how digital visualising technologies of many kinds – from smartphone apps to digital animation software – is changing how we experience cities especially. These two chapters are directly related because, chapter 9 attempts to understand the observer and chapter 10 provides a method to analyze observers from the focal point created by chapter 9. Chapter 5 takes up the “prejudices” that exist within visuals by using a method named “semiology” which deals with how images make meaning.

Depth of focus is also a current fascination of mine – an image’s ability to tell you what to look at, what to focus on, really is interesting. Firstly, there is the problem she highlights in the very first line of this book, “There’s an awful lot of hype around ‘the visual’ these days. I’m not sure yet how to reconcile these two accounts but given that, as Gaboury points out, computer generated-graphic images are in many situations now visually indistinguishable from photographs, it does seem to me that both arguments and image types need to be considered carefully, in all their diversity, in discussions of contemporary digital visual culture. But I also think that this account underestimates the variety of productive power dynamics in the many different situations of contemporary digital visual culture.Wheel of Time, not quite so much – but the VFX there are still things you have to look at, monsters and magic and such. Splits include those between illegible computational processes and the legible image; or the invisual and the visual; or the representational and the not; or the network and the everyday.

And finally, not all audiences are willing to be co-opted into the world of the image – sometimes images are ‘a site of resistance and recalcitrance’. I think all of these notions are fundamental to how people experience their lives in specific locations and times. Anthropological approach: not so concerned with interpretations of artifact’s meaning; more interesting in tracing effects of visual artifact. I'm interested in visuality as a kind of practice, done by human subjects in collaboration with different kinds of objects and technologies.I’m going to try to be more active on this blog this year (I know I said that last year…) and reviews are one way to do that. Particular understandings of place, landscape and place can be implicit or explicit; they can be encoded in cultural texts like paintings or films or songs; they can be articulated through argument or dreams or feelings. This session focuses on the multiplicity of the everyday experiencing of digitally mediated cities, exploring the deepening relationships between diverse digital technologies and different forms of urban life and living. Furthermore, lots of good citations here that make referencing the more applicable methods a lot faster.