VISUAL METHODOLOGIES

This bestselling guide offers students and researchers the key skills they need to complete a visual methods research project, with a clear step-by-step approach and examples to demonstrate how methods can be applied in practice.

Have you found some exciting images that you want to explore but don t know how to start your research or what methods to choose? Do you have a question about an aspect of visual culture that you want to answer?

Whatever level of experience you have, this classic text will provide you with the key skills you need to complete a visual methods research project, understand the rationale behind each step, and engage with the contexts and power relations that shape our interpretation of visual images.

With a clear step-by-step approach that is easy to dip in and out of, the book features:

Key examples in every methods chapter to demonstrate how the methods work in practice and with different visual materials
Focus and Discussion features that help you practice your skills at specific parts of the methods and understand some of the method s complexities
Guidance on researching using digital visual media, such as Instagram and TikTok, integrated throughout the book This bestselling critical guide is the perfect companion to visual methods projects for undergraduates, graduates, researchers and academics across the social sciences and humanities.

Autorentext

My research interests lie broadly within the field of visual culture. Im interested in visuality as a kind of practice, done by human subjects in collaboration with different kinds of objects and technologies.

One long-term project, which resulted in a book from Ashgate Press in 2010, looked at family photos. I approached family snaps by thinking of them as objects embedded in a wide range of practices. I interviewed women with young children about their photos, and also looked at the politics and ethics of family snaps moving into more public arenas of display when the people they picture are the victims of violence. The book explores the different politics of sentiment in which family snaps participate in both their domestic spaces in the public space of the contemporary mass media.

Other work is extending my interest in subjectivities, space and visual practices by exploring experiences of designed urban spaces. I completed an ESRC-funded project on this theme with Dr Monica Degen at Brunel University in 2009, in which we compared how people experienced two rather different town centres: Milton Keynes and Bedford. Monica Degen, Clare Melhuish and I started a new ESRC-funded project in the autumn of 2011. Architectural atmospheres, branding and the social: the role of digital visualizing technologies in contemporary architectural practice was a two-year ethnographic study of how digital visualizing technologies are being used by architects in a number of architects studio in London.

Im also interested in more innovative ways to produce social science research, especially using visual materials. I was involved in organising the ESRC Seminar Series Visual Dialogues: New Agendas in Inequalities Research (2010-2012). Please visit the Visual Dialogues: New Agendas in Inequalities Research for more details. Im also a member of the OpenSpace Research Centre.

Inhalt

How to Use this Book
Contexts
Researching with Visual Materials: A Brief Survey of Conceptual Debates
A Critical Visual Methodology
Design
Understanding Visual Research Ethics
Designing a Visual Methods Research Project
How to Find, Format, Reference and Reproduce Images
Methods
Compositional Interpretation: Looking with a 'Good Eye'
Content Analysis and Cultural Analytics: Finding Patterns in What You See
Semiology: Making Sense of Signs
Discourse Analysis I: Text, Intertextuality and Context
Discourse Analysis II: Instituitions, Objects and Displays
Interviews and Ethnographies: Studying Audiences, Fans and Users
Making Images as Research Data: Documentation, Elicitation and Participation
Applying Digital Methods to Digital Images
Engagement
Using Images to Make Research Findings Engaging