Marcus Banks & David Zeitlyn 
Visual Methods in Social Research [EPUB ebook] 

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.

Table of Content

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

About the author

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 http://www.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 http://www.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.