Visual Methods in Social Research

Marcus Banks is Professor of Visual Anthropoloigy at the University of Oxford. Having completed a doctorate in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge, with a study of Jain people in England and India, he trained as an ethnographic documentary filmmaker at the National Film and Television School, Beaconsfield, UK.

 

He is the author Using Visual Data in Qualitative Research (2007) and co-editor of Rethinking Visual Anthropology (1997, with Howard Morphy), and Made to be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology (2011, with Jay Ruby), as well as publishing numerous papers on visual research.

 

He has published on documentary film forms and film practice in colonial India, and is currently conducting research on image production and use in forensic science practice.

David Zeitlyn is Professor is Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He has been working with Mambila people in Cameroon since 1985 on various research topics including traditional religion, sociolinguistics, kinship and history. In 2003/4 he was the Evans-Prichard Lecturer at All Souls College, Oxford presenting a series of lectures on the life-history of Diko Madeleine, the first wife of Chief Konaka of Somié village (see mambila.info/Diko_Web/). In recent years he started to work with Cameroonian photographers. In 2005 this led as part of Africa'05, to an exhibition of two Cameroonian studio photographers at the National Portrait Gallery, London in a display called 'Cameroon-London'. Some images from an earlier showing in Cameroon are online at mambila.info/Photography/Photo_Show/.  More recently he has worked with the British Library's 'Endangered Archives Programme' to create an archive of the contents of the studio of Toussele Jacques, a photographer from Mbouda in Cameroon.

 

He has long standing interests in multimedia and how internet technologies can be used to illuminate and access museum collections and archives. His work on Mambila spider divination as a 'technology of choice making' led to some pioneering observational work on how library users choose which books to read.

The Second Edition of this popular text confirms the book s status as an important forerunner in the field of visual methods.

Combining the theoretical, practical and technical the authors discuss changing technologies, the role of the internet and the impact of social media. Presenting an interdisciplinary guide to visual methods they explore both the creation and interpretation of visual images and their use within different methodological approaches.

This clear, articulate book is full of practical tips on publishing and presenting the results of visual research and how to use film and photographic archives.

This book will be an indispensable guide for anyone using or creating visual images in their research.

An interdisciplinary guide to the field, this book fuses advanced theory with practical advice and examples to provide all readers with the ultimate resource on visual methods 

 

READING PICTURES
The trouble with pictures
An introductory example
Unnatural vision
Reading narratives
Formal readings
Planning a research project with visual methods
ENCOUNTERING THE VISUAL
On Television
Visual forms produced I: representations of society
Interpreting Forest of Bliss
Still and moving images
Visual forms produced II: representations of knowledge
Visualisation
Networks
Diagrams of Nuer lineages
Visual forms encountered
Encountering 'indigenous' media
The image as evidence
'Us' and 'them'?
MATERIAL VISION
Object and representation
The materiality of visual forms
Displaying family photographs
Exchanged goods
Market exchange
Size matters
Transformations: digitisation and computer-based media
Digital manipulation
Digital pornography: constraining the virtual
Digital pornography: exchange and circulation
RESEARCH STRATEGIES
Silk thread to plastic bags
Researching image use and production in social contexts
Watching television
Soap opera in India and Egypt
Television as social presence
Doing things with photographs and films
Photo-elicitation with archival images
Photo-elicitation with contemporary images
Learning from photo-elicitation
Film-elicitation
Working with archival material
Photographic archives and picture libraries
Film archives
MAKING IMAGES
Observing
Creating images for research
Documentation
A ladder climbed then discarded
Documentary exploration
Documentary control
Collaborative projects
Indigenous media collaborations
Collaborative after effects
Ethics and visual research
Ethical review
Permissions
Returning images
PRESENTING RESEARCH RESULTS
Audiences
Presenting photographs
The photographic essay
Presenting ethnographic and other films
Study guides and other contextualisation
Databases and digital images
Can computer see?
Multimedia projects
Interacting with Yanomamo
Copyright
PERSPECTIVES ON VISUAL RESEARCH
The state of visual research
The place of visual research
The nature of visual research