Capturing Christmas: The Sensory Potential of Data from Participant Produced Video

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss our use of participant-produced digital footage of family Christmases, collected as part of a larger project exploring family backgrounds and family traditions. The audio-visual recording (and subsequent dissemination) of these otherwise difficult-to-access domestic celebrations provides important insights into the multi-dimensional, multisensory, physical and situational nature of such family traditions. With their blend of genre styles - from narrated documentary to home-movie style wobbly camera work - the ‘Christmas videos’ show both conscious ‘displays’ of family life and practice (performed for the camera, for the participants and for posterity) and largely unscripted, and sometimes noisily chaotic, interactions. Although videos cannot provide unmediated access into what such traditions are ‘really like’, in combination with our other data sources the footage has helped to push our thinking about family traditions as being at once intellectualised productions and a series of bodily engagements with a host of practices, understandings, knowledges, family histories, things and people. This form of ‘backstage’ analytical usage of the video data has been very productive for us. However, we argue that there are ethical issues in publicly presenting such data alongside other forms of data, eg interview data, in a deep sociological analysis of people's personal lives. There is the potential not only for the production of incisive knowledge and insight, but also for a prying and distinctively sociological intrusiveness, and sociologists need to think carefully about how to proceed.

Video diaries: audio-visual research methods and the elusive body

“…Together with several other articles and books on video-based methods (Lorimer 2010;Muir and Mason 2012;Myrvang Brown, Dilley, and Marshall 2008;Pink 2009;Pink and Leder Mackley 2012;Spinney 2009) this article has highlighted the potential that video has to make bodies audibly and visibly present in accounts of embodiment. As an audio-visual medium that resonates with multiple registers of feeling, video is an ideal device with which to bring living, feeling, breathing bodies to the screen and to the page.…”

“…Several articles incorporating video clips with text have recently been published online (Myrvang Brown, Dilley, and Marshall 2008;Muir and Mason 2012;Pink and Leder Mackley 2012). Here, video footage has been presented through thick descriptions, quotations and still images in order to illustrate how video opens opportunities to make and work with evocative data in a range of different ways that can inform and enliven textual accounts, while short clips of the films from which the still images are taken can be viewed online (see http://vimeo.com/videodiaries/videos).…”

The Utility of Video Diaries for Organizational Research

“…Second, it may be possible to expand the utility of video diaries for practice research by providing more focused instructions, for example by asking participants to document their work surroundings or organizational processes. Examples include projects of digital story-telling in the area of public health (Gubrium et al, 2014) or participant-produced digital footage of family Christmases (Muir & Mason, 2012), whereby research subjects are given the space both in front of and behind the camera, directing, narrating and broadcasting their videos. Such approaches follow, more generally, the work of visual anthropologists such as Ginsburg (1991) whose 'indigenous media' include examples of indigenous people being asked to film themselves in order to self-present their culture; or the provision of video technology to an indigenous community with the largely political aim of providing and broadcasting voice to these peoples (Turner, 1992).…”

Who’s Behind the Lens?

“…We piloted various models but settled on the Toshiba Camileo S40 for the main study. Given that participants can be deterred from taking part in visual studies if the equipment looks cheap (Bloustien & Baker, 2003), it was important that the videocam reflected latest technology and did not look of inferior quality (Muir & Mason, 2012). 2.…”