The starting point of the Tenerife international visual methods conference is certainly a proposal made in 2016 by Ghislaine Chabert and Jacques Ibanez Bueno of the University of Savoie-Mont-Blanc to Alain Lamboux-Durand of the University of Franche-Comté and Nadine Wanono, a researcher from the CNRS. The aim was to work collectively by opening up to several people the use of visual methods in the extension of visual anthropology.
In what way could socio-technological changes make methods evolve in a world that is also changing, notably through the upheavals of increasingly digitised social communication?
A call for papers was launched within the eighth international conference on social communication at the University of La Laguna on the island of Tenerife with a session "Visual methods and digital worlds" (https://issuu.com/revistalatinadecomunicacion/docs/cac136). In this session, open to all disciplines, visual methods are understood as the appropriation of methods through images in their development and integration of digital tools (Pink 2003; Bairon & Ribeiro 2007). The objects of methodological application are also visual and digital (fixed and mobile screens; video games; augmented reality; etc.).
The results of this work were particularly rich and were fertile pretexts for an extension of the reflection which, apart from the publication of proceedings, which gave rise in 2017 to the following multilingual publication : (Ibanez Bueno et al., 2017).
Various research fields associated with digital worlds such as museums or geolocated games are presented via the choice of methods that are evolving due to the miniaturisation of visual and audiovisual capture devices such as smartphones and the almost free nature of images in connection with the generalisation of digitisation. The notion of captation goes beyond the simple technical aspect of the inherent audiovisual devices, notably by considering captation as "the action of physically taking hold of something" (CNRTL, ND) "the action of gathering, of seizing various natural elements" or "the action of representing reality in a work" (lalanguefrancaise.com, ND). The way in which the capture is made, its preparation and subsequent processing have an impact on its result.
The interest in this publication stimulated the French laboratories LLSETI and ELLIADD to create an international research network on visual methods with the organisation of a first international colloquium in the same university (La Laguna) that previously hosted the work described above.
More than twenty research structures joined this network. They are spread over three continents (Africa, America, Europe) and five countries (Brazil, Spain, France, Morocco and Mexico), which explains the four working languages: English, Spanish, French and Portuguese.
The call for papers for this conference on "Visual Methods in Communication Research" held on 3 and 4 December 2018 begins as follows:
"Researchers in the humanities and social sciences who use visual methods usually rely on the contribution of visual anthropology or filmic sociology. Indeed, within the humanities, anthropology is among the first disciplines to integrate images into research protocols through ethnographic fieldwork - including the constitution of corpora of iconographic documents - and to mobilise successive generations of researchers".
After Robert Flaherty's film Nanook of the North, the primary filmic reference for the community of visual anthropologists, the written and iconic work of Evans-Pritchard with The Nuer (1940), the works of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson with Balinese Character (1942) form altogether the historical foundation of the anthropo-visual approach. Margaret Mead specified in epistemological terms The Principles of Visual Anthropology (1975), which to this day allows anthropologists and sociologists interested in visual methods to assert their singularity with less difficulty vis-à-vis sometimes hostile researchers in the academic research world.
The British researcher Sarah Pink (Pink, 2003), in her ambitious undertaking to present an international overview of visual anthropology, describes that academic recognition is being extended through influence in other disciplines such as psychology. The information and communication sciences, institutionally recognised in France in the 1970s, are no exception to this influence. Their contemporary approach of fertile and interdisciplinary crossing at the beginning of the 21st century (Ibanez Bueno, 2006) makes them integrate complementary approaches in art sciences or psychology, as in this research. In the disciplinary association mobilised here, the "use of visual traces for the description of present and past ways of life of specific communities" (Leeuwen, Jewitt, 2001, p. 2) is fully assumed and surpassed by the common search for a "deep reflexivity" (MacDougall, 1998) within an evolving visual methodology and its objectives, protocols and experiments.
Some contributors point out that sound and video recordings in research are not new since they have existed practically since the origin of audio and visual technologies, particularly in the practices of anthropologists (De Brigard, 1979) (De France, 1982). The interest is twofold, namely the constitution of scientific data and the exhibition of results via a documentary.
The recording of audio-visual traces is a decisive advantage over note-taking and allows the live capture of its identification and characterisation to be postponed. The ability to memorise is not limited to the cognitive possibilities of the researcher. Moreover, the passage through the verbalisation of the observable experience and its risks of distortion can be avoided. Obviously, the potential for illustration is multiplied. The recordings constitute experimental sources by themselves (Lamboux-Durand, 2016).
The methods that are developing in part of the scientific community either have an empirical character in their implementation or an advanced structuring to favour their scientific recognition."
So-called 'postmodern' anthropology accompanies this movement beyond 'the experience and interpretation of a circumscribed other reality' to a 'constructive negotiation involving at least two politically significant conscious subjects' (Clifford, cited in Copans, 2002, 101).
Systematic description is being reduced in anthropology in favour of a parallel description of experiences with recourse to images and the acceptance of a degree of assumed subjectivity and reflexivity on the part of the researchers in the service of the understanding of these same experiences described as sensorial (Pink, 2007).
Within the framework of the recordings of traces, the beginnings of evolutionary answers are formulated in the face of the following questions:
- To what extent should the protocol for making the recordings be framed so that they can be used?
- To what extent does the context of the experiment influence the recording and the results obtained? Are there generalizable methods, methodologies or tools?
- Can (should) a method or methodology be (systematically) defined that is specific to the context of the experiment?
- The dissemination of textual transcripts does not have the same status as that of photographs or videograms. In what framework can we exploit visual sources that have not systematically received the informed consent (implicit or explicit) of the subjects in the context of the research?
Within human and social sciences' history, visual methods are indebted to the decisive contribution of anthropology and sociology. This recognition by the research group involved in this work (in two volumes) also asserts the multidisciplinary nature of the contemporary appropriation of visual methods, outside of a specific discipline. Thus, the scientific field of La Laguna visual methods conference is open to many scientific disciplines, including, in 2021 for its second edition, the information and communication sciences, the art sciences, design, geography, etc.
The continuation of reflections on audio and visual methods in a multidisciplinary and multilingual context leads us to question design in audio-visual methods.
The notion of design carries with it a set of concepts whose ambiguity is well represented by John Heskett's (2005) famous phrase: "Design is to design a design to produce a design". Its approach and definition vary greatly from one discipline to another, whether it be in production engineering, attached to visual studies, or in aspects more related to culture or communication processes. Moreover, depending on the language, the term design does not have the same meaning (design as a noun implies both the result of the design process and the design process itself, depending on the meaning and the language considered). In the research activity itself, the researcher can be considered as a designer through the activity of conception and innovation in the methods deployed during the surveys as well as in the processing of his/her data. In this sense, action research approaches lend themselves particularly well to this researcher-designer posture.
In that respect, the design of design discussed here is part of a cross-disciplinary approach, an alternative to visual studies (which is more generally concerned with the analysis of visual corpora). As design impacts all domains and elements of objects and experiences, the visual documentation of the design process and situations provides insights into the experience of making artefacts.
In the context of this call, the notion of design is considered in terms of visual tools and research methods. In audiovisual or even interactive methods (GÓMEZ CRUZ, SUMARTOJO, PINK: 2017), it is also necessary to point out the approach as creation (in an artistic approach) of design as creativity (in a more managerial approach). This artistic part of creation as a method of visual investigation offers a look at the traces of the activity, which can be valued scientifically. It allows us to question the processes of creation. The research object can thus be taken as a research tool, placing art or cultural industries on two distinct planes that can nevertheless intersect. A more epistemological approach appears. The design of "datavisualisation", as a visual method favouring the analysis of experiences, also comes under the notion of design of this call. The researcher then becomes a designer by proposing new ways of presenting data.
The researcher can open the way to methodologies of experimentation or presentation and/or analysis of data that are more easily transferable, more popularizable, but also more transparent (because more open) and reproducible, which can open up fruitful interdisciplinary perspectives. This call for papers covers all these aspects.
This conference is open to all disciplines and participants are invited to present visual approaches using design or not as a research method. A more restricted selection is also possible around the creation of visual or audiovisual content as well as sensory and interactive performances or devices (Pink, 2009).
This conference is organised by the association Visual Modi - International Association for Research in Visual and Multimodal Methods, created following the two previous conferences (https://visualmodi.hypotheses.org/).
Types of proposals
- Long oral communication
- Poster
- Interactive session
- Exhibition
- Audiovisual project
- Screening
Calendar of the call
Submission of abstracts
22 September 2022
Deadline for submission of abstracts
23 February 2023
Response to authors
23 March 2023
Submission of full texts
23 June 2023
Form of proposals
PAGE 1
Title of the contribution
Signatory data (up to three people per presentation), names, home institution, email
Who will be present at the conference?
PAGE 2
Title of the contribution
A maximum of 6 keywords separated by «; »
Abstract: 3000-5000 signs (included spaces) and references
IN CASE OF ACCEPTATION
The full text (20000 30000 characters / included spaces)
online publication of the proceedings is planned
A project of work is planned from a selection of texts
Bibliography
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