Internet based methods of communication are becoming increasingly important and influencing researchers' options. VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technologies (such as Skype and FaceTime) provide us with the ability to interview research participants using voice and video across the internet via a synchronous (real-time) connection. This paper highlights the advantages of using Skype to conduct qualitative interviews and weighs these advantages against any limitations and issues that using this tool may raise. This paper argues that Skype opens up new possibilities by allowing us to contact participants worldwide in a time efficient and financially affordable manner, thus increasing the variety of our samples. At the same time, the use of Skype affects the areas of rapport, non-verbal cues and ethics by creating limitations but also new opportunities. The observations in this paper stem from two different researches, carried out by the authors, on dance (as a form of trans/cultural heritage) and wayfinding (the experience of getting from A to B in various settings). These studies lent themselves to using Skype for qualitative interviews, because of the need to reach an international, varied and purposeful sample. The researchers' experiences, combined with feedback from participants in Skype interviews, are used in this paper. The conclusion is that, although VoIP mediated interviews cannot completely replace face to face interaction, they work well as a viable alternative or complimentary data collection tool for qualitative researchers. This paper argues that VoIP based interviews offer new opportunities for researchers and should be embraced with confidence. KeywordsQualitative interviews, Skype, VoIP, internet research methods, intangible heritage research, wayfinding research, dance research. 2 IntroductionThe Office of National Statistics (2015: 1) VoIP is a system which provides users with a way to send voice and video across the internet via a synchronous (real-time) connection. Currently, the most popular services that use VoIP are Skype and FaceTime. The system that we have used for our qualitative interviews on the topics of dance and wayfinding is Skype, not only because of the researchers' familiarity with it, but also because we were able to employ the EVAER® software, which is recommended by Skype. This software allows the interviewer to record the video conversation, with both parties captured in the recording. Our observations on using Skype/EVAER® for qualitative interviews, stem from the two main authors' different researches. The first research topic is Egyptian raqs sharqi (a dance genre commonly grouped with other Middle Eastern, fusion and Northern African dance genres under the term belly dance) as a form of cultural heritage. The second is on wayfinding 'the cognitive and corporeal process and experience of locating, following or discovering a route through and to a given space' (the definition used by author Paul Symonds in his work to define wayfinding).In the discussi...
Wayfinding has often been seen as being about the quickest or shortest possible route between two points ( Hölscher et al 2011;Tam 2011;Haque et al 2006). Moreover, this process has very often been seen as a cognitive one, with the experiential nature of wayfinding and with the embodied, emotional and sociocultural aspects of this experience conspicuously absent. We argue that wayfinding is rarely a purely cognitive process that involves an individual person, who is entirely instrumental in navigating a direct and precise route, but instead that this is a process almost always directed according to embodied and sociocultural needs. We propose a reassessment of present wayfinding definitions and suggest an alternative understanding that includes sociocultural elements, embodied individuals and experience through their embodied senses, as crucial elements of the concept. Seeing wayfinding from this different sociocultural ontological viewpoint, opens up new ways of understanding and planning wayfinding systems.
UNESCO's effort to include many different types of human expression on its lists is commendable and an important attempt to safeguard aspects of the world's cultural heritage.However, we agree with Naguib (2008) that the use and interpretation of the term intangible is problematic to describe the complexity of human practices, because of the polarities implied by the notions of tangible/intangible, which insert a false distinction, in the form of a binary opposition, between the material and immaterial elements of culture. Instead, building on insights from Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2004) and Ruggles and Silverman (2009), we argue that practices and the artefacts that surround them are embodied heritage, internal to all human beings and affecting us at physical and emotional levels. Therefore, the intangible and 3 tangible are indissolubly linked and a preferred definition might be developed around the idea of "living cultural heritage."The label of intangible is particularly problematic when considering dance as heritage, given the central role that the human body has in the practice of dance, and because the phenomenon of dance is simultaneously emergent from, and constitutive of culture and society. Buckland (2001, 1) confirms the increased social science interest in the body and performance has 'helped to raise the profile of dance as a significant academic site for cultural investigation'. This development has opened up channels for dialogue with other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. In recent years, embodiment has been explored sociologically through dance in a range of ways including: cultural theory and everyday life (Thomas 2003(Thomas , 2013 bodylore and bodily knowledge (Sklar, 1994(Sklar, , 2001, bodywork (BraceGovan, 2002), embodied identity (Dyck & Archetti, 2003) and ageing, injury and identity (Wainwright & Turner, 2006). There are some notable early exceptions, Novak (1988) for example, incorporated dance as a key exemplar in her work on culture. One reason for this, Buckland argues, drawing on Connerton's (1989) distinction between incorporated and inscribed practices, is that dance 'has a particular propensity to foreground cultural memory as embodied practice by virtue of its predominantly somatic modes of transmission', thus making dance strongly relevant to discussions of cultural heritage through the incorporation of specific cultural elements (such as artefacts and movement vocabularies) into its practice.Dance is also an inscribed practice as Blacking (1983, 97) illustrates, 'the bodily experience of performance can also stimulate the imagination and help to bring new coherence to the sensuous life, which in turn could affect motivation, commitment and decision-making in other spheres of social life.' Therefore, while culture is incorporated within dance, such dances are also inscribed with layers of shared meanings (which may be symbolic, narrative, 4 emotional, aesthetic depending on the genre) making it not only a site of cultural reception but also a site of cultura...
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