Exemplar 3

To illustrate this, let’s return to the Kugel Ball. The video data referred to in the previous section allowed us to understand that:

1) Two girls were turning the ball around, one distractedly, the other with obvious enjoyment. The second girl said she thought it was like ‘a big planet’;

2) On later elicitation in a focus group, we found out that what they remember about the Ball is not its planet-like quality, but their use of it as a ‘wishing ball’.

Both of these understandings give us an insight into how children are interacting with the exhibits. They don’t, however, tell us much about the exhibit itself. In particular, what is the point of this exhibit? Is it intended to demonstrate the principles of curvature? Revolvability? How water adheres to surfaces? The visual and aural information alone is not enough. This is because the important signifying element in the exhibit is weight; the ball cannot be understood unless one has actually noted its wetness, felt its extreme weight and contrasted this with its ability to move even when barely touched. Only then can one appreciate the didactic point of the exhibit as outlined in the accompanying label – to demonstrate the extreme forces generated by the bed of pressurised water upon which it is sitting.

Now look at an extract from the fieldnote that describes the Kugel ball:

Researcher: "By the side of each exhibit are written instructions, showing you how to activate the machine. When you do, things happen. For example, at the back of the hall is a huge granite ball, glistening with water, sitting on a plinth. It is obviously massively heavy. But, amazingly, when you touch it, it revolves around. You read the instructions, and find out that it is not sitting directly on the plinth at all, but on a thin bed of water under intense pressure. All around you are the sounds of children shouting, adults talking and there is movement everywhere."

The fieldnote does not mention many of the elements that a photograph or the video footage would effortlessly capture: the colour of the ball, for example, or its position in relation to other exhibits around it. Writing employs primarily one mode, verbal language (in fact, writing employs other modes too in its graphical dimensions – such as print colour, directionality, size, etc.), but this mode is a particularly communicatively rich one in that it allows other modes to be described in their absence. So, in using language:

1) the modes of weight, sound, shapes, textures as well as actions and movement can easily be conveyed through linguistic description.
2) subjects can be contextualised more fully – so the written fieldnotes describe the Kugel ball in relation to the field of action in which it is located. Visual images provide context, too (through representing the space within which subjects are located), but this context is restricted to one perspective – that provided by the camera’s position. Though the camera gaze appears to be neutral, it is obviously providing only one view: the one at which it is pointing. By contrast, the writing jumps back and forth between 'views', affording an impression of both movement and engaged interaction.
3) The subjective experience of the observer can arguably be conveyed less ambiguously: the fieldnote affords a particular perspective - the perspective of a narrator who is 'in' the scene being described selecting out particular elements for our attention (Of course, much depends on the camera style used: handheld cameras that get close to the action can also convey a sense of subjective positioning). It can also present the writer’s evaluation of the scene and description of emotional responses ('amazingly', 'excitedly').

For all these reasons, we suggest that image-based data cannot stand alone. They have to be carefully logged and supplemented with written records, which can capture meaningful elements not easily represented through audio-visual means.

Equally, however, there is no doubt that the provision of sound and image-based records enhances the available modes and allows all kinds of spatially and temporally organised data to be effortlessly depicted rather than having to be described in writing (or, more often, simply excluded from the records). The later re-user who has access to datasets that contain both written, sound and image-based records has a much more extensive and detailed informational resource than datasets comprising purely transcripts/fieldnotes provide.

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