Crossing methods: Exploring visuality in digital practices

In recent years, digital media technologies have facilitated participative forms of content creation and production that undertake different ways of involving social agents, including audiences, fans and amateurs, and other collaborations between artists and industries. Thus, merging visual and digital technologies have transformed everyday people practices as well as the circuit of cultural production. At the same time, social scientists, are using the very same visual and online devices for recording and studying people’s activities. Visual social scientists, as well as many virtual ethnographers, have faced this question of the two-fold dimensions of the use of technological aids: visual media and the Internet are, at the same time, the object of research and the method for gathering data, not to mention that both media are also used for knowledge production.

Drawing on our experience in ethnographic fieldwork in digital media production, circulation, domestication and consumption such as self-production videos, everyday digital photographic practices, collaborative creation and code creation in mapping art, we will explore different methodological challenges regarding to: a) visual code sharing (Benjamin, 2003); b) layers of visual data analysis (Pink, 2009); c) cross-methods (Ardévol, forthcoming); and d) ethics and digital agents (Markham, 2008).

Benjamin, W. (2003). Selected Writings, 1938-1940. Harvard University Press.

Pink, S. (2009). Sensory Ethnography. Sage Publication.

Ardèvol, E. (in press). Virtual/Visual Ethnography, in Advances in Visual Methodology. Sage Publications.

Markham, A. y Baym, N. (2008). Internet inquiry: conversations about method. Sage Publications.