Watching them reminded me of another slideshow, made by Trond Waage, a visual anthropologist at the University of Tromso, called Struggle for a Living – you can see it here.  This slideshow pushes more at what a slideshow can do.  It has a soundtrack – a voice-over and some ambient sound – as well as a few simple zooms into still images.  It also has a very powerful sense of rhythm, as the duration of the still images lengthens or shortens and the pace of the slideshow slows down or speeds up.  This is very effective in conveying a sense of urban everyday spaces – in this case, the town of Ngaoundéré in Cameroon – and Trond says that the process of working with images was also an effective way to negotiate understanding between himself and the protagonist of the slideshow, Bakary.

As well as its visual content, then, it seems that its rhythm, its ability to incorporate text that can be read, and its soundtrack, are the distinctive features of a slideshow – a medium that’s worth more attention than it’s so far received, particularly for those of us who don’t have the time to hone our filmmaking skills but still want something more than the photo-essay format.

I’ve been reading (on my Kindle, natch) John Naughton‘s lovely new book on the internet, called From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet.  It includes a very funny (in retrospect) account of how record companies did all they could to make money from cds without thinking at all about what the other consequences of digitised music might be.  A similar story might be told about Kodak, who invented the first digital camera but didn’t quite know what to do with it.

these icons come from http://iconfactory.com/freeware/preview/stkr1

There is also a (slightly) interesting aspect of this, though, in relation to visual culture.  Why can these fifty sets of icons be neatly categorised into just three visual types by the Appstorm website: ‘Metallic and Professional’, ‘Photorealistic’ and ‘Sketch and Cartoon’?  What counts as good visual style in the world of mac users is really very limited.  And they all do share an aura of ‘good design’, hard to describe but pretty recognisable and powerful in maintaining the Apple brand, I think.   Second question: interesting that this website deploys a standard qualitative method – thematic coding, in effect – to group their icons.  Would a researcher do it differently?  Better?  Third question – is any of this really very important?

It seems that men are very much centre stage in the bits of visual culture I’ve got to see over the past few weeks.  Some television, a couple more movies, a couple of art exhibitions.  All focussed on men – men as artist, men as genius, men as spectacle (the first two Twilight films, for example, as well as The Artist) – a point made by this piece in The Guardian, about two very popular UK tv shows with male heroes, Dr Who and Sherlock Holmes.  Hmmph.

Eclecticism is in the nature of edited collections, I guess.  However, I am beginning to think that eclecticism is so entrenched in visual research methods that it might be worth thinking a bit more about its consequences.  It’s entrenched in terms of the extent of the variety of visual research methods, and also in terms of how unproblematic that variety seems to be to commentators on visual research methods.  There’s a sort of ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’ approach to research methods using visual materials, which is great, of course, particularly as it seems to allow lots of experimentation with new sorts of methods (or at least with variations of old ones).

However, there are also some disadvantages, one of which is that there’s very little sense of established practice developing as researchers learn from each other; reinventing wheels of slightly different designs seems to be preferred to building (dare I say it) a better wheel by learning from other people’s handiwork.  Where are the paper reflecting on, say, photo-elicitation as a method, as opposed to reporting the results of a study using photo-elicitation?  (Please let me know by responding with a comment!)

And the experimentation is also rather less wild than it sometimes seems when luxuriating in field of a thousand flowers (or wheels – sorry, metaphors going a bit awry here): an awful lot of methods depend on talk with photographs, for example; video gets a look in, too, but quantitative visual methods are rarely acknowledged as part of visual research methods; and participatory and elicitatory methods are hegemonic.

The field is surely now big enough to engage in some critical self-reflection, and I’m looking forward to seeing it emerge.

Oh, ok, I’m kidding.  But it has definitely arrived: the third edition of Visual Methdologies is now available.  The opening chapter’s discussion of theorisations of visual culture has been thoroughly reworked and now discusses things digital and affective; there’s lots of new examples throughout the book, plus much more discussion of using visual images as part of your research method; and it’s also now in colour.  I hope it’s as useful as the previous one seems to have been.

And not only is there a book, this time there’s a website too, which you can find at www.sagepub.co.uk/rose.  The website has lots of resources both for finding images and for working with them, and I’m going to refresh it every so often – so if you know of a good resource it should list, please let me know.

I’m in the process of starting a new research project with Monica Degen and Clare Melhuish, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council.  We’re looking at how architects are using digital visualising technologies when they design buildings, but also in their pitches to clients and in the branding of their studios; we’re particularly interested to find out if these new technologies are integral to the affective feel of architectural practices.  You can find out more information about the project here.