Exemplar 4

Listen first of all to the following audio-only recording here of an interview and then contrast it with the video recording (click on time stamp 00:10:27:22). Think about what kind of extra information is made available with the video track, and consider how significant is this information for understanding what is being said and how?

In deciding to use a visual recording medium in original fieldwork, it is clearly important to ensure that the resulting data record succeeds in portraying what it is intended to portray. Visual images fail to convey many aspects of the social world (see Hastrup 1992). Cameras cannot capture all aspects of reality, and should not be presumed to offer a fuller or more accurate representation of the field than written text alone.

However, there may be a potential conflict in choice of recording medium between the priorities of the originators and the potential priorities of re-users:

1. For the demands of the original research project, visual images that work best will be those that have captured data that are primarily visual: i.e. ones in which visual information conveys something significant about the research topic. In other words, they are visually significant within the parameters of the research questions at hand. It follows that ensuring that the images generated do indeed communicate clearly for the needs of the study at hand should be a key concern of the originator. There is no point using a video or stills camera just because the equipment is available.

2. For the demands of re-use, however, where future research questions and priorities are as yet unknown, the extra information provided by a visual record (such as gesture and facial expression, the spatial semiotics of the research setting or the visual documentation of environmental changes) may indeed be highly valued.

For the demands of re-use, there is therefore an argument in favour of using visual recording media as extensively as possible in original fieldwork in order that subsequent re-users may have access to the greatest variety of informational modes possible (without actually being able to have participated in the original fieldwork setting). In this sense, a video-recorded setting displays and preserves a multiplicity and diversity of signs that arguably allow a more flexible and historically-richer re-use by later researchers.

However, against this, it is clearly neither feasible nor desirable to direct originators to make recordings of data they would not otherwise wish to make, simply for the demands of creating a full historical record for the future. This dilemma returns us to one of the key questions underlying data-archiving for re-use: how far if at all should the demands of later re-use influence how projects are conducted? This is not a question that this Guide can resolve, but it is one that is important to bear in mind.

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