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Visualising Ethnography Web Site

This item was added to our web on 15/08/2003

Project leader(s): Dr Sarah Pink

Institution:

Dept of Social Sciences
Loughborough University


s.pink@lboro.ac.uk

Summary:

Activities:

The project has consisted of a series of activities:

i) The writing of introductory sections to the use of different media and methods and providing links to on-line resources and examples of these
This task has largely been completed and will be periodically updated as new links are found or submitted. The links used were searched for on-line in three ways: 1) through known websites specialising in visual anthropology and visual research; 2) using internet searches with key words; 3) putting out calls for links to relevant sites on subject-specific e-mail discussion groups. Authors of the sites were contacted to ask if they would like to be linked to the Visualising Ethnography site. This part of the work was time consuming. A section on Art and Drawing will be added as new resources become available.

In addition two other resource sections are included. One is to existing MA courses in visual anthropology. This was developed in response to the many enquiries about courses of this type that I receive. The other is to links to other relevant sites, again these have been sought by inviting members of relevant e-mail lists to contribute links. These will be periodically updated.

ii) Publications of invited and commissioned interviews and essays with established visual researchers
Two sections of the site publish interviews and essays that focus on the published work or fieldwork experiences of established visual researchers. These texts have been specially produced for the site and usually contain or are linked to visual images.

The ‘interviews’ section of the text now contains three interviews – with David MacDougall, David Zeitlyn and Glenn Bowman. Two interviewers, both with udnergaraduate degrees in social anthropolgoiy and an enthusiasm to learn more about visual anthropology were paid a toekn fee of £75 per interview to undertake and transcribe a tape-recorded interview. I designed the initial interview outline, allowing interviewers and interviewees to modify this themselves as apporiarite. The interview with Davdi MacDougall is the exception as this was a collaborative project I was involved with in 1996, the pubolication of which had been delayed. Two further interviews are in progress. I would recommend the interview is an excellent way to make important insights from key researchers in a field available. Although the interviews have suffered delays we have been able through them to include the insights of leading visual anthropologists. Interviews have actually proved a more effective way of producing texts for the site than has invited contributions for which the response rate has been much lower. This leads me to make two recommendations 1) we were able to pay the interviewers a nominal fee of £75 for their work in transcribing the interviews – I would recommend increasing this to a fee more realistic of the time and work they put into the whole interview process and to give postgraduates a more defined role in developing the content of the project, 2) no fees were offered for the ‘experiences’ essays that authors were invited to write for the site. I have received two good essays and am awaiting others, however again I would recommend that in future work fees are paid for commissioned essays of this kind – it is perfectly understandable that busy academics will not normally be able to prioritise such work above their other teaching and RAE commitments without some additional incentive.

One important issue that arose in this process was that of copyright and permission to publish images and written texts. With the help of the Loughborough University copyright lawyer a license agreement has been produced that allows me to publish the images and texts on the site but allows the author to retain copyright. This seemed the best way to protect the site, the university, myself, authors and interviewers and interviewees. Contributors were also allowed to alter the agreement as they wished according to their own circumstances and any limitation that there might be on the use and re-publication of their work.

Contributions to the site have also been refereed either by myself or by an independent referee before being accepted.

iii) Development of the site by an independent web designer (completed). A freelance web designer was contracted to design and develop the site initially. Again this took much longer than anticipated as both freelancers who agreed to take on the work were offered fulltime jobs during the period of the work and were thus unable to complete the work as soon as we had planned. However this strategy was in fact very successful and feedback on the design of the site to date has been very positive. We now have a site with a relatively sophisticated design that is being maintained and updated by technical staff in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough. Rather than paying for further external development the decision was made to use the remaining funding that had been allocated to development work to the purchase of software that would facilitate our further maintenance of the site in-house at Loughborough. This was considered to be the most sustainable use of the funds for two reasons: first the limited funding remaining could only have supported continued development for a short period of time whereas the department can continue maintenance on a long term basis; second the software provided by this project for the site’s maintenance can also be used for further similar projects to develop sites that will support new modules in the department.


iv) Transfer of the site to Loughborough University where it is now on-line, be maintained and further developed
Once developed the site was transferred to Loughborough and has both its own independent address and is connected to the Working Images visual anthropology web site. The transfer to Loughborough has been successful. Working with the in-house technician has allowed me to have much more contact and involvement in the development process. Purchase of the Dreamweaver and PhotoShop software has allowed us to both learn new IT skills and develop the site in a more sophisticated way.

v) Evaluation of the site by an appointed evaluator and by users
An appointed evaluator agreed to report on the project but did not respond to my requests to do so. I would recommend that for future projects a small honorarium of £100 similar to that paid for refereeing academic book proposals should be paid to evaluators to provide some incentive for busy academics to take some time out to perform the evaluation. Under these circumstances the site has been evaluated informally by external users. Feedback regarding the content, structure, navigation and visual design of the site has been positive. The negative feedback has concerned the small size of the pages when displayed on some screen resolutions. This cannot now be altered however it does not render the site unusable and is merely a design issue. The designer argued that this could not be helped and would depend on the screen resolution used by each user. However we have resolved to seek a more universally appropriate size and format for future projects.

vi) Integration of the site into teaching
The site has now been successfully used by students registered on Loughborough’s MA in Media and Cultural Analysis as part of a module in Visual Cultures. This module has two topics that are relevant to the site. The first, ‘researching visual cultures’ uses the wider resource and gateway aspect of the site. The second uses interview materials on the site that relate to a specific film and area of visual culture covered in one of the topics.


vii) SENDA issues
It was discovered after developing the site that it’s on-line layout does not confirm to SENDA regulations, which Loughborough University is committed to. We have considered developing an alternative version of the site that can be used alongside the current version. However for the time being we believe the issue to be resolved since the site provides a print–off facility for the interviews and essays that does conform to SENDA requirements so that the content of the site is accessible to all users.

viii) Copyright of photographs and emdedding digital codes
Some contributors were concerned about the copyright status of their images and on-line theft and asked to have their images digitally encoded as a means of avoiding this. We were unable to supply this service in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough since we do not have the appropriate software. In this instance David Zeitlyn of the University of Kent kindly encoded the images for us, however of course we would always be able to rely on the goodwill of colleagues and I would recommend software for such tasks be written into future project budgets so that this option can be available for all contributors.

Outcomes:

Implications:

Resources:

Project Website: www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ss/visualising_ethnography/

Full document in PDF format:

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